In[ter]vention: Locating Rhetoric's Ethos

Abstract

Rhetorical invention is the principal source of politics and ethics as contemporary theories from various disciplines demonstrate. The complex reflexive relationship among politics, ethics, and invention demands ethical responsibility, requiring rhetoricians (who hold a key to this subject) to acknowledge and attend to their ethos, used here in the classical sense of ethos as “gathering place.”

Notes

¹I thank my RR reviewer Hugh Burns whose insightful, encouraging, and beautifully expressed comments were indispensable to the shaping of this manuscript.

²I borrow the term “in[ter]vention” from Debra Hawhee who uses the term to describe the god Kairos as a figure that mediates “the outside of the self, i.e., the nodes where the ‘self’ encounters the world, and the discourse or the ‘other’ that the self encounters” (25).