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Reviewed by:
  • The Promise of Reason: Studies in The New Rhetoric ed. by John T. Gage
  • Janice W. Fernheimer
The Promise of Reason: Studies in The New Rhetoric. Edited by John T. Gage. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011; pp. 272. $60.00 cloth.

My own exploration of The New Rhetoric began with some hope and a modest promise of reason when I was a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin. Trish Roberts-Miller promised the text would be dense, but likely useful for expanding how I thought about reason. I hoped it would help me make sense of a particularly persnickety and seemingly incommensurable series of events concerning Jewish identity that took place in Israel and the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I remember being fascinated and confused, but most of all excited, by the possibilities for rhetorical interpretation, criticism, and theory that The New Rhetoric opened up for me. John T. Gage’s collection, The Promise of Reason: Studies in The New Rhetoric, so named for the 2008 Conference held in Eugene, Oregon, where “more than 120 scholars from 13 countries” presented their work and where many of the essays debuted (6) in somewhat shorter form, offers a fascinating and thankfully far less confusing entrée into the most salient issues, which The New Rhetoric helps to ponder more deeply and reasonably. With its 16 essays representing a variety of approaches, the collection offers up many areas of inquiry for a variety of scholars, and does so eloquently.

Gage’s excellent collection is notable for gathering international contributions from a range of disciplines into a single volume. It is one of the few volumes to feature scholars from the United States, Europe, and the Middle East side-by-side, demonstrating not only the international appeal but also the continuing intellectual pull of The New Rhetoric. As anyone who has edited a special issue or collection knows well, one of the challenges of putting various voices together is maintaining cohesion among diversity; in this respect, John Gage has done magnificent work as an editor, not only culling some of the most important work from the conference but also juxtaposing the essays in such a way that they shed light on one another as well as the concepts from The New Rhetoric that they explore in greater [End Page 402] detail. The headnotes to each of the four sections offer careful consideration of the essays within and provide a strong roadmap for readers looking to make connections among the contributions. The sheer volume of essays—16—promises to provide something for everyone who is drawn to develop a better understanding of one of the most important rhetorical texts of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, my limited space here prevents me from discussing each essay in detail; therefore, in what follows, I highlight some key contributions from each of the sections.

The volume opens with two introductions—one from John Gage himself and a second from Perelman’s daughter, Noémi Perelman Mattis. Together, this pairing offers both scholarly and personal frames for considering the importance and continuing relevance of Perelman’s life’s work to pursue and study justice, values, and argument. Gage hopes the volume will encourage “scholars in different national and educational cultures to be in dialogue rather than to work solely in their separate traditions of inquiry” (3), and the remarks of Perelman Matis extend this dialogue to include consideration of personal and political matters as well.

Section 1, “Conceptual Understandings of the New Rhetoric,” highlights key fundamental concepts that gird various pathways into the text. Responding to critics who argue that The New Rhetoric “lacks a viable criterion…for establishing the validity of argumentative reasoning” (21), Barbara Warnick opens the section with her essay, “Empiricism, Securement and The New Rhetoric,” in which she examines “the ways in which the epistemological viability of The New Rhetoric is secured, not by formal principles of logical consistency or decontextualized truth standards, but instead by a confluence of empirical findings based on its authors’ examination of argument structures and practices” (22). Jeanne Fahnestock’s essay, “‘No Neutral Choices’: The Art of Style in The...

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