In this provocative and forcefully written book, Steven Mailloux takes issue with the validity of a number of distinctions commonly made in contemporary literary theory and cultural studies―distinctions between theory and cultural studies, reader and text, truth and ideology, aesthetics and politics. Rhetorical Power offers both a practical proposal for approaching texts rhetorically in their historical contexts and a bold theoretical statement of the historical specificity of every interpretive act and the impossibility of foundationalist accounts of interpretation in general. Mailloux first presents the case for a rhetorical hermeneutics and against foundationalist theories of interpretation. Doing hermeneutic theory, he argues, entails doing rhetorical history. By means of a detailed analysis of reader-response criticism, he highlights the connections between institutional politics and the interpretive rhetoric of academic literary criticism. Mailloux then uses Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as an exemplary text, not only pursuing his theoretical argument about interpretation but developing a broader claim for the potential role of rhetoric within cultural studies. In the final part of the book, he restates his critique of foundationalist hermeneutics through readings of Ken Kesey, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and Richard Rorty, and he concludes by examining the role of rhetoric and theory in a congressional dispute over the Reagan administration's reinterpretation of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty.

Rhetorical Power

In his earlier Rhetorical Power, Steven Mailloux presented an innovative and challenging strategy for combining critical theory and cultural studies. That book has stimulated wide-ranging discussion and debate among diverse audiences―students and specialists in American studies, speech communications, rhetoric/composition, law, education, biblical studies, and especially literary theory and cultural criticism. Reception Histories marks a further development of Mailloux's influential critical project, as he demonstrates how rhetorical hermeneutics uses rhetoric to practice theory by doing history. Reception Histories works out in detail what rhetorical hermeneutics means in terms of poststructuralist theory (Part One), nineteenth-century U.S. cultural studies (Part Two), and the contemporary history of curricular reform within the so-called Culture Wars (Part Three). Mailloux situates, defends, and elaborates the theory he first proposed in Rhetorical Power, and he exemplifies it with a new series of provocative reception histories. He also both critiques and reconceptualizes the version of reader response criticism he developed in his first book, Interpretive Conventions. Throughout Reception Histories, Mailloux demonstrates his distinctive blend of neopragmatism and cultural rhetoric study. By tracing the rhetorical paths of thought, this book offers a new way to read the current volatile debates over higher education and contributes its own original proposals for shaping the future of the humanities.

Reception Histories: Rhetoric, Pragmatism, and American Cultural Politics

Book annotation not available for this title.Title: Disciplinary IdentitiesAuthor: Mailloux, StevenPublisher: Modern Language Assn of AmerPublication Date: 2006/12/01Number of Pages: 165Binding Type: PAPERBACKLibrary of Congress: 2006015590

Disciplinary Identities: Rhetorical Paths of English, Speech, And Composition

For over thirty years, Steven Mailloux has championed and advanced the field of rhetorical hermeneutics, a historically and theoretically informed approach to textual interpretation. This volume collects fourteen of his most recent influential essays on the methodology, plus an interview.Following from the proposition that rhetorical hermeneutics uses rhetoric to practice theory by doing history, this book examines a diverse range of texts from literature, history, law, religion, and cultural studies. Through four sections, Mailloux explores the theoretical writings of Heidegger, Burke, and Rorty, among others; Jesuit educational treatises; and products of popular culture such as Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and Star Trek: The Next Generation. In doing so, he shows how rhetorical perspectives and pragmatist traditions work together as two mutually supportive modes of understanding, and he demonstrates how the combination of rhetoric and interpretation works both in theory and in practice. Theoretically, rhetorical hermeneutics can be understood as a form of neopragmatism. Practically, it focuses on the production, circulation, and reception of written and performed communication.A thought-provoking collection from a preeminent literary critic and rhetorician, Rhetoric’s Pragmatism assesses the practice and value of rhetorical hermeneutics today and the directions in which it might head. Scholars and students of rhetoric and communication studies, critical theory, literature, law, religion, and American studies will find Mailloux’s arguments enlightening and essential.

Rhetoric's Pragmatism: Essays in Rhetorical Hermeneutics (RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric)

In Interpretive Conventions, Steven Mailloux provides a general introduction to reader-response criticism while developing his own specific reader-oriented approach to literature. He examines five influential theories of the reading process—those of Stanley Fish, Jonathan Culler, Wolfgang Iser, Norman Holland, and David Bleich. He goes on to argue the need for a more comprehensive reader-response criticism based on a consistent social model of reading. He develops such a reading model and also discusses American textual editing and literary history.

Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction

The skeptical relativism and self-conscious rhetoric of the pragmatist tradition, which began with the pre-Socratic Sophists and developed through an American tradition including William James and John Dewey, have attracted new attention in the context of postmodernist thought. At the same time there has been a more general renewal of interest in rhetoric itself. This book explores the various ways in which rhetoric, sophistry, and pragmatism overlap in their current theoretical and political implications, and demonstrates how they contribute both to a rethinking of the human sciences within the academy and to larger debates over cultural politics.

Rhetoric, Sophistry, Pragmatism (Literature, Culture, Theory)

From the Preface:"Contemporary theory has usefully analyzed how alternative modes of interpretation produce different meanings, how reading itself is constituted by the variable perspectives of readers, and how these perspectives are in turn defined by prejudices, ideologies, interests, and so forth. Some theorists gave argued persuasively that textual meaning, in literature and in literary interpretation, is structured by repression and forgetting, by what the literary or critical text does not say as much as by what it does. All these claims are directly relevant to legal hermeneutics, and thus it is no surprise that legal theorists have recently been turning to literary theory for potential insight into the interpretation of law. This collection of essays is designed to represent the especially rich interactive that has taken place between legal and literary hermeneutics during the past ten years."

Interpreting Law and Literature: A Hermeneutic Reader

Loyola Marymount University is a top-ranked national university by U.S. News and World Report, which places LMU among the top six Jesuit universities in the country and in the top six private universities in California. Founded in 1911, LMU is a Catholic, Jesuit, and Marymount university with more than 7,100 undergraduate students and more than 3,000 graduate and law students. LMU offers 56 undergraduate majors and 56 minor programs, along with 46 master’s degree programs, three doctorate programs and 12 credential/authorization programs. LMU’s intercollegiate athletics teams compete in the West Coast Conference with 14 Division I varsity sports.

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Loyola Marymount University

Steven Mailloux is President’s Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric at Loyola Marymount University and Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. He is the editor and author of several books, including RHETORIC'S PRAGMATISM: ESSAYS IN RHETORICAL HERMENEUTICS. His papers are held in the Critical Theory Archive at the University of California, Irvine. He is currently working on Jesuit rhetoric, spirituality, and political theology as well as co-editing the fifth volume of the CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF RHETORIC.

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Inspiring ‘Perfect Eloquence’ in the 21st Century

President's Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric

Steven Mailloux is President's Professor
of Rhetoric at Loyola Marymount University. Previously, he taught rhetoric, critical theory, and U.S. cultural studies as Professor of
English and Comparative Literature and Chancellor's Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction (Cornell, 1982), Rhetorical Power (Cornell, 1989), Reception Histories: Rhetoric, Pragmatism, and American Cultural Politics (Cornell, 1998), and Disciplinary Identities: Rhetorical Paths of English, Speech, and Composition (MLA, 2006).

Steven Mailloux

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Inspiring ‘Perfect Eloquence’ in the 21st Century