Description
Book SynopsisThoroughly embedded in postmodern theory, this book offers a critique of traditional conceptions of the liberal arts, exploring the challenges posed by cultural diversity to the aims and methods of a humanist education. Janet M. Atwill investigates a neglected tradition of rhetoric, exemplified by Protagoras and Isocorates, and preserved in Aristotle''s Rhetoric.
This tradition was rooted in the ancient sophistic and platonic conceptions of techné, or productive knowledge, that appears both in literary texts from the seventh century B.C.E. and in medical and technical treatises from the fifth century B.C.E. Atwill examines these traditions, together with sophistic and platonic conceptions, and considers the commentaries on Aristotle''s Rhetoric by E. M. Cope and William S. J. Grimaldi, where the concepts of techné and productive knowledge disappear in the modern opposition between theory and practice.
Since models of knowledge are closely tied
Trade Review
In Rhetoric Reclaimed, Janet Atwill offers a new framework for understanding the history of Western rhetoric and a reinterpretation of Aristotle's place within that history.... She has done much to illuminate the competing forms of knowledge and subjectivity inscribed in the canonical texts of ancient rhetoric and has recovered a lost or under-appreciated dimension of these texts. In so doing, Rhetoric Reclaimed... also suggests a starting point for reassessing and renegotiating the priorities and values we have inherited from the rhetorical tradition.
* Rhetorik *
The publication of Janet Atwill's Rhetoric Reclaimed has served to powerfully recuperate and supplement an important conversation among the Greek sophists, one in which the notion of techné emerged not only as a rhetorical strategy, but also as a way of being and as an attitude about knowledge.... The importance of Atwill's book lies in its suggestion that attention to téchne can enlarge our understanding of rhetoric in general and the theorizing and teaching of cooperative approaches to writing in particular.
* Journal of Advanced Composition *
