Twenty years ago, even ten years ago, one might have begun an essay about the intersection of pragmatism and rhetoric by lamenting the dearth of scholarship on the subject. Today, no such lamentations are needed. The past decade has seen an explosion of interest in the way pragmatism and rhetoric can profitably inform each other. Offering everything from formulations of pragmatist rhetorical theory (Mailloux 1998; Schollmeier 2002; Danisch 2007; Crick 2010) to explorations of pragmatist methodology in the study of rhetorical (...) texts (Stroud 2009a; Stroud 2010) to analyses of what individual pragmatists have contributed to the history of rhetoric (Asen and Brouwer 2003; Asen 2003; Finnegan 2003; Greene 2003; Stob .. (shrink)

But that which remains the poets have founded.In contemporary rhetorical theory, the relationship between rhetoric and art tends to be articulated in terms of aesthetics. This increasingly popular discourse on “aesthetic rhetoric,” however, is characterized by a remarkable diversity. The rhetoric of fiction, poetry, and other literary genres, for example, has been explored in these terms (e.g., Booth 1983), as has the rhetoric of film (Haskins 2003), photography (Hariman and Lucaites 2007), and even natural landscapes (Clark 2004). From a different (...) perspective, aesthetics has been distilled to a range of “features” or “elements” that a given text is said to possess. Nathan Crick and Jeremy Engels, for example .. (shrink)