One development in recent scholarship centers upon what is often referred to as a rhetoric of silence. Not that we have just discovered such a rhetoric, for it is clear from even a cursory look at Richard Lanham’s Handlist of Rhetorical Terms that our predecessors long ago established a whole family of words to describe the power that silence could effect in situations that were clearly rhetorical. Indeed, within this family of ancient terms, we find not only the obvious, silence, used in a rather specialized way, but also the far less familiar obticentia, praecisio, reticentia, interpellatio—all of which...

In the closing chapter to Rhetoric in an Antifoundational World, contributor and co-editor Michael Bernard-Donals observes that in our times, “the debate between foundationalism and antifoundationalism is moot; foundational notions of the human and natural sciences have been so discredited as to force us to consider what kind of antifoundationalism gives us the most productive and perhaps emancipatory knowledge” (437). In fact, as one reviewer pointed out, this collection seems to be largely devoted to the very project of identifying the sorts of antifoundationalism we are finally free to embrace, now that we have divested ourselves of foundational worldviews (Davis)....

Over a decade has passed since the appearance of Peter Elbow’s essay, “Closing My Eyes As I Speak: A Plea for Ignoring Audience.” In the years since its first publication, Elbow’s article has been cited, praised, disparaged by some, but generally acknowledged as an important counter-statement to a good deal of then-current thinking about audience.

Elbow’s article proceeds from what he calls a “limited claim,” his view that “even though ignoring audience will usually lead to weak writing at first . . . this weak writing can help us in the end to better writing than we would have written...

When I look back on my exchange with Devlyn, what occurs to me now are the many Bakhtinian ways that our dialogue could have been understood. As readers of the previous chapter know, I originally tried to explain Devlyn’s writings through the frame of Aesopianism, through strategies for writing that managed to say something but, at the same time, evaded teacherly and institutional sanctions. After I received his closing response, however, I began to see that Devlyn’s struggles with Freire—and my teaching of Freire—had much to do with Devlyn’s attempt to negotiate what Bakhtin calls “internally persuasive” and...

Among present-day compositionists, there seems to be little doubt that imitation has all but disappeared from serious consideration as a viable practice in writing instruction. Edward Corbett’s claim that imitation has little chance of making a “comeback” seems as prescient now as it did when it was first made some thirty years ago (249). Indeed, it has been eloquently reiterated by Robert Connors, who, in a recent essay on the erasure of sentence rhetorics, sees imitation’s demise as the result of our discipline’s wholesale rejection of formalism, behaviorism, and empiricism in favor of attitudes toward texts more agreeable to English...

Of the many Bakhtinian ideas that have found currency among scholars and teachers in composition—voice, heteroglossia, carnival, dialogue, to name the most obvious—one idea that has not commanded much attention is Bakhtin’s notion of “outsidedness.” This is a bit surprising, since Bakhtin alludes to it in many of his major works, from his very early fragment, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, to his very late essay, “Response to a Question from Novy Mir.” Bakhtin continually emphasizes the importance of having, maintaining, and exercising an outside perspective—whether that perspective occurs in relationships between self and other, author...

In the excerpt above, Kathleen Dixon repeats what she obviously feels to be a crucial line from one of her student’s papers, a line that expresses the kind of epiphany that would be pleasing to any writing teacher, but perhaps especially gratifying to those writing teachers who employ a cultural studies perspective in their classrooms. This is so because insight for the cultural studies teacher is not simply a fortuitous, cursory moment in the process of rhetorical invention but is, indeed, the very heart of cultural critique.

I would like to suggest, further, that what Dixon reveals in this passage...