Trust in Texts: A Different History of Rhetoric

In writing a poststructuralist history of rhetoric, Miller (Univ. of Utah) pursues several important goals. First, she

decenters understanding of rhetoric’s canonical roots, challenging the origins mythology that makes intellectual

context the inevitable descendant of Golden Age Athens. Second, she reimages categories of rhetoric to reclaim a

pre-Cartesian valuation of emotions as an important element (if not an alternative “center”) of a whole understanding

of what texts, oratorical or print, do and how they are received. The “trust” of her title is the “emotional consent” one

must accord any text for it to be persuasive. Miller demonstrates that this element has been de-emphasized in

traditional histories. Through close readings of specific examples from ancient Greece, 18th-century liminal spaces

between rhetoric as oratory and mass product, and current theory, she shows that emotional consent can, if

reconceived, offer a reintegration of mind, body, and spirit fragmented by Cartesian rationalism. Although the author

herself points out the poststructuralist “problematic” that she must provide close readings without “re-turning to

totalizing explanations,” her conclusion calls for exploration of the implications of a persuasive “energy” that unites

reason and emotion. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, and faculty. –M.F. McClure “CHOICE” (9/1/2008 12:00:00 AM)

“This book, and the research that supports it, has the potential to change the way we understand and study rhetoric.”–Gregory Clark, Brigham Young University

“This is Susan Miller’s magnum opus. It will greatly expand traditional notions of what it is that we look at when we say we’re looking at rhetoric.”–Patricia Harkin, University of Illinois at Chicago

Susan Miller, a professor of English and a faculty member in the University Writing Program at the University of Utah, teaches the history and theory of rhetoric and composition. She is the author of Writing: Process and Product, Rescuing the Subject: A Critical Introduction to Rhetoric and the Writer, Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition, and Assuming the Positions: Cultural Pedagogy and the Politics of Ordinary Writing.