Reception Histories: Rhetoric, Pragmatism and American Cultural History

In his earlier work, Rhetorical Power , Mailloux presented a challenging strategy for combining critical theory and cultural studies. His text provoked discussion and debate in diverse fields including American studies, speech communications, law and education, and especially literary theory and cultural criticism. This volume develops his critical project, as he demonstrates how rhetorical hermeneutics uses rhetoric to practice theory by doing history. The text works out in detail what rhetorical hermeneutics means in terms of post-structuralist theory (part one), 19th-century US cultural studies (part two), and the contemporary history of curricular reform within the so-called culture wars (part three). Mailloux situates, defends and elaborates the theory he first proposed in Rhetorical Power and exemplifies it with a series of reception histories. He also both critiques and reconceptualizes the version of reader response criticism he developed in his first book Interpretive Conventions . By tracing the rhetorical paths of thought, Mailloux seeks to offer a new way of reading the volatile debates over higher education and contributes his own proposal for shaping the future of the humanities.