Holes, God-shaped and Otherwise: A Response to Right Talk and Philip C. Wander

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Notes

¹Bob Scott, my PhD adviser, uses this phrase to describe relatively uninteresting, scientistic, or cookie-cutter modes of rhetorical criticism.

²Ronald Walter Greene, for example, has been critiquing the neoliberal rhetoric that concerns Smith for some years (see “Rhetorical Capital”; “Rhetoric and Capitalism”).

³I think we could even argue that in the twentieth century, rhetorical studies adopted such a one-sided approach until Burke was taken up and rhetoric-as-seduction eclipsed argumentation, the supplication of good reasons, and so forth. Even so, attempts to more directly engage emotional appeals and affect have been met with some derision (for example, Brockriede; Corder). For a recent, excellent attempt to engage the affect of rhetoric, see Thomas Rickert's Acts of Enjoyment.