Rhetoric has assumed a prominence unimaginable a generation ago. True, it is still mentioned pejoratively in everyday conversation and the media. But among theorists one now sometimes runs across the opposite extreme. Stanley Fish, for instance, in Doing What Comes Naturally, tells us that its basic message is that “we live in a rhetorical world.” Normally not part of the training of contemporary theorists, rhetoric is instead something encountered on the terrain of contemporary discourse, where it sometimes is and sometimes is not recognized by name. Samuel Ijsseling finds appeals to rhetoric – “direct or indirect” – in strategies used to bring traditional philosophy into question in “Nietzsche, Marx and Freud, and… in Heidegger and the various French authors who have been inspired by these thinkers, e.g. J. Derrida, R. Barthes, M. Foucault, J. Lacan and L. Althusser.”

Fish writes in “Rhetoric,” published for the first time in Doing, of some of the theorists responsible for the current rise of rhetoric, including “Kenneth Burke, whose ‘dramatism’ anticipates so much of what is considered avant-garde today.”