Rebirth of Rhetoric: Essays in Language and Education

In the past 25 years, English has come under attack from various angles: from other subjects fighting for space on the school or college timetable, from critics who see it as too literary based; from those in cultural studies who see it as based on a narrow canon of texts, and from those who see it as unnecessarily excluding media or other oral texts. Rebirth of Rhetoric brings together contributions from several fields to provide a forum in which a unifying theory for language and literature studies can be debated. Rhetoric seems well equipped with the necessary breadth, history and versatility to fulfill that role. Rhetoric is used here in its widest sense of the arts of discourse. The book does not aim to resurrect classical or Renaissance rhetoric, but to remake it within a contemporary context. The context of texts (both spoken and written) is one of the main emphases of this collection, whether it is the ideology informing the text, or the way in which a text is transformed by its audience.