E.T. As rhetorical transcendence

This essay explicates a cosmological evolutionary perspective termed “the perennial philosophy” in order to interpret how various scholarly and popular discourses constitute a collective exigence of fragmentation and a rhetoric of transcendent wholeness. The framework is then used to analyze the mythic rhetoric of E.T., which is based on collaboration rather than combat, transcendence rather than dialectic. E.T. is seen as an oxymoronic child who embodies the past, present, and future and who may represent a proto‐type of an emerging cosmic hero.