Fernheimer, Janice W.

English

University of Kentucky

University of KentuckyUKnowledgeWriting, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies FacultyPublications Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital StudiesSummer 2015[Review of ] The Promise of Reason: Studies in TheNew Rhetoric. Edited by John T. Gage.Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,2011; pp. 272. $60.00 cloth.Janice W. FernheimerUniversity of Kentucky, jfernheimer@uky.eduRight click to open a feedback form in a new tab to let us know how this document benefits you.Follow this and additional works at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/wrd_facpubPart of the Creative Writing Commons, and the Rhetoric and Composition CommonsThis Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at UKnowledge. It has been accepted forinclusion in Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of UKnowledge. For more information, pleasecontact UKnowledge@lsv.uky.edu.Repository CitationFernheimer, Janice W., "[Review of] The Promise of Reason: Studies in The New Rhetoric. Edited by John T. Gage. Carbondale:Southern Illinois University Press, 2011; pp. 272. $60.00 cloth." (2015). Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies Faculty Publications. 5.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/wrd_facpub/5[Review of] The Promise of Reason: Studies in The New Rhetoric. Edited by John T. Gage. Carbondale: SouthernIllinois University Press, 2011; pp. 272. $60.00 cloth.Notes/Citation InformationPublished in Rhetoric & Public Affairs, v. 18, no. 2, p. 402-406.The publisher has granted the permission for posting the article here.This book review is available at UKnowledge: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/wrd_facpub/5The Promise of Reason: Studies in The New Rhetoric. Edited by John T.Gage. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011; pp. 272.$60.00 cloth.My own exploration of The New Rhetoric began with some hopeand a modest promise of reason when I was a graduate studentat the University of Texas at Austin. Trish Roberts-Miller prom-ised the text would be dense, but likely useful for expanding how I thoughtabout reason. I hoped it would help me make sense of a particularlypersnickety and seemingly incommensurable series of events concerningJewish identity that took place in Israel and the United States in the late1960s and early 1970s. I remember being fascinated and confused, but mostof all excited, by the possibilities for rhetorical interpretation, criticism, andtheory that The New Rhetoric opened up for me. John T. Gage’s collection,The Promise of Reason: Studies in The New Rhetoric, so named for the 2008Conference held in Eugene, Oregon, where “more than 120 scholars from13 countries” presented their work and where many of the essays debuted(6) in somewhat shorter form, offers a fascinating and thankfully far lessconfusing entrée into the most salient issues, which The New Rhetoric helpsto ponder more deeply and reasonably. With its 16 essays representing avariety of approaches, the collection offers up many areas of inquiry for avariety of scholars, and does so eloquently.Gage’s excellent collection is notable for gathering international contri-butions from a range of disciplines into a single volume. It is one of the fewvolumes to feature scholars from the United States, Europe, and the MiddleEast side-by-side, demonstrating not only the international appeal but alsothe continuing intellectual pull of The New Rhetoric. As anyone who hasedited a special issue or collection knows well, one of the challenges ofputting various voices together is maintaining cohesion among diversity; inthis respect, John Gage has done magnifıcent work as an editor, not onlyculling some of the most important work from the conference but alsojuxtaposing the essays in such a way that they shed light on one another aswell as the concepts from The New Rhetoric that they explore in greater402 RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRSdetail. The headnotes to each of the four sections offer careful considerationof the essays within and provide a strong roadmap for readers looking tomake connections among the contributions. The sheer volume of essays—16—promises to provide something for everyone who is drawn to develop abetter understanding of one of the most important rhetorical texts of thetwentieth century. Unfortunately, my limited space here prevents me fromdiscussing each essay in detail; therefore, in what follows, I highlight somekey contributions from each of the sections.The volume opens with two introductions—one from John Gage himselfand a second from Perelman’s daughter, Noémi Perelman Mattis. Together,this pairing offers both scholarly and personal frames for considering theimportance and continuing relevance of Perelman’s life’s work to pursueand study justice, values, and argument. Gage hopes the volume will en-courage “scholars in different national and educational cultures to be indialogue rather than to work solely in their separate traditions of inquiry”(3), and the remarks of Perelman Matis extend this dialogue to includeconsideration of personal and political matters as well.Section 1, “Conceptual Understandings of the New Rhetoric,” highlightskey fundamental concepts that gird various pathways into the text. Re-sponding to critics who argue that The New Rhetoric “lacks a viable crite-rion . . . for establishing the validity of argumentative reasoning” (21),Barbara Warnick opens the section with her essay, “Empiricism, Secure-ment and The New Rhetoric,” in which she examines “the ways in which theepistemological viability of The New Rhetoric is secured, not by formalprinciples of logical consistency or decontextualized truth standards, butinstead by a confluence of empirical fındings based on its authors’ exami-nation of argument structures and practices” (22). Jeanne Fahnestock’sessay, “‘No Neutral Choices’: The Art of Style in The New Rhetoric,” offersanother impressive investigation by showing how The New Rhetoric’s atten-tion to style achieves yet another important accomplishment because itdemonstrates that “language choices encode selected objects of agreement”and, more than that, they also “constitute techniques of argument” (30).Fahnestock offers a comprehensive consideration of The New Rhetoric’sattention to style both as the “separate, inserted treatise on style in part 2,covering agreement,” and the way The New Rhetoric “deliberately breaks thepattern of isolation and disperses observations on language choicesthroughout the treatise, occasionally stopping . . . to concentrate on a givenBOOK REVIEWS 403device” (32). Although Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca suggest there are no“neutral choices” in language, Fahnestock reminds us “that there arechoices” and that The New Rhetoric’s “attitude toward language is positive”(44). If the fırst two pieces focus signifıcant attention on the importance ofaudience, Loïc Nicolas continues this trend by revisiting one of the mostuseful and controversial concepts introduced by The New Rhetoric, that ofthe “universal audience,” and examining “in what sense the moment ofdiscursive production can be analyzed as an interlocutive relationship” (49).Given Nicolas’s attention to relationship, it is perhaps not surprising thatthis section closes with an essay by David A. Frank and Michelle K. Bolducfocused specifıcally on the nature of the collaboration of Perelman andOlbrechts-Tyteca. First published as an article in the Quarterly Journal ofSpeech, this chapter builds on Warnick’s insights in her earlier essay, “LucieOlbrechts-Tyteca’s Contribution to The New Rhetoric,” by considering the“rhetorical situations in which Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca collabo-rated” and providing a “diachronic study of both scholars, both alone and incollaboration” to “better address the question raised by their collaboration”(58). Frank and Bolduc, using the terminology of The New Rhetoric itself,understand Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca as a “philosophical pair”(77) and interpret their collaborative work as a “dissociation of philo-sophical and literary impulses brought to bear on the problems ofpostwar Europe” (77).While Frank and Bolduc point out how Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s contri-butions offered important extensions into the literary and comic realm,section 2, “Extensions of The New Rhetoric,” more formally connects keyconcepts from The New Rhetoric to those of other important thinkers,extending their reach in the process. Alan Gross opens the section with hisessay, “Solving the Mystery of Presence: Verbal/Visual Interaction in Dar-win’s Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs.” By connecting concepts ofpresence with the work of Peirce’s semiotics as well as Gestalt theory, heextends The New Rhetoric’s concepts into the realm of the visual. Given theever more digital world in which we exist and argue, the move to considerthe visual in terms of The New Rhetoric is a provocative and productive onethat likely will generate many avenues of exciting new scholarship. Extend-ing the work they began in an earlier essay on “communion,” Richard Graffand Wendy Winn put The New Rhetoric’s concept in conversation withKenneth Burke’s “identifıcation,” terming them “cognate concepts” that404 RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS“evolved convergently” (104). Roselyne Koren provides a window into theway The New Rhetoric’s conception of argumentation allows scholars toovercome diffıculties presented by French linguistics and to engage moreethically and honestly with value judgments, because The New Rhetoric“permits one to demarcate the axiom’s limits if one wishes to be a ‘whole’person and not to dissociate or to rank judgments of reality and value”(142). She explains that part of The New Rhetoric’s “considerable advantage”is that it concedes that “scientists judge, evaluate, and may even takesubjective ethical stands without compromising the rules of the scientifıcgame, since they must, like all utterers, explicitly justify their subjectivedivisions” (142).The third section, “The Ethical Turn in Perelman and The New Rhetoric,”continues this line of ethical inquiry with important explorations of Perel-man’s international work through his involvement with the United NationsEducational, Scientifıc, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). As RayDearin points out, “no single individual was more heavily involved in theUNESCO project than Chaim Perelman” (148). Using Perelman’s contri-butions to the UNESCO project as an “anchor point,” Dearin provides aninsightful consideration of Perelman’s “reflections upon the confusionssurrounding the concepts of democracy” (149) that shows how Perelman’sidea “corresponds closely to the philosophy of openness and pluralism thatunderlies the new rhetoric project” (149). Linda Bensel-Meyers uses Perel-man and Richard McKeon’s shared involvement with UNESCO as a way toput their rhetorical theories in conversation, attempting “to reconcile thetwo rhetorical approaches as similar philosophies of negotiating valuejudgments that can present us with a programmatic approach to highereducation with implications for the role of rhetoric and writing across thecurriculum in the formation of tomorrow’s global citizens” (164).Whereas section 3 extends New Rhetoric concepts to the realm of inter-national ethics, section 4, “Uses of The New Rhetoric,” examines the prag-matic applications in the classroom and beyond. Jim Crosswhite’s excellentchapter provides a fabulous meditation on the benefıts and challenges ofteaching The New Rhetoric to undergraduates. In this lovely essay he reflectson what happens when he teaches an upper division course, “InventingArguments,” based on The New Rhetoric’s techniques. Perhaps it is appro-priate to end this review of The Promise of Reason with the prospect ofBOOK REVIEWS 405pedagogy, because there is still much to discover, invent, and implement inthis area.As a whole, this collection delivers on the promise to offer a capaciousand contextualized understanding of the many promises of reason The NewRhetoric provides. In putting international approaches together, Gage suc-ceeds in opening up a multidisciplinary, transnational conversation, andprovides a path for this dialogue to grow and develop in the next 50 yearsand beyond. It offers a wonderful introduction to The New Rhetoric’s keyissues for scholars new to the text and its concepts while simultaneouslyenabling scholars more familiar with The New Rhetoric to further theirknowledge by providing them deeper analysis of ideas that have come to besynonymous with the text—“the universal audience,” “ethics,” “presence,”and “invention.” With any collection, some essays are stronger than others,but on the whole each of the contributions offers insightful analysis andproves worthy of the time spent reading it. I know that the next time I teachThe New Rhetoric, I will be assigning this volume as required reading,whether in whole for graduate students or in selected parts for undergrad-uates. My only complaint is that such a wonderful volume is so expensive.Then again, who can put a price on the wisdom contained within?JANICE W. FERNHEIMER, University of Kentucky406 RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

[Review of] \u3cem\u3eThe Promise of Reason: Studies in\u3c/em\u3e The New Rhetoric. Edited by John T. Gage. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011; pp. 272. $60.00 cloth.

https://uknowledge.uky.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004&amp;context=wrd_facpub

[Review of] \u3cem\u3eThe Promise of Reason: Studies in\u3c/em\u3e The New Rhetoric. Edited by John T. Gage. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011; pp. 272. $60.00 cloth.

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