Trust in Texts: A Different History of Rhetoric

Acknowledgments

xiii Acknowledgments This project has taken much longer to complete than I knew could be the case when I began. A 1997–98 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship allowed me to begin substantial research into biological, literary, historical, and philosophical perspectives on emotion. That topic was then a tentatively emerging, still embarrassing scholarly interest, acknowledged most frequently as a way to reconceptualize and popularize rationalism. Consequently, I remain grateful to my friends and former colleagues Kathleen Woodward and Herbert Blau, who were then as always ahead of most academic curves. They were enormously helpful readers of my first attempts to articulate some overlooked complications of attraction and charisma that constitute any history of trusted discourses. Over the time since then, my scattered friends—David Bartholomae, Lynn Bloom, Charles Berger, Stuart Culver, Janet Giltrow, and Gary Olson, with Karl Kageff at Southern Illinois University Press—have offered support that allowed me to continue through a number of forced hiatuses. I am also especially grateful to an accumulating cohort of students in graduate rhetoric classes that I have taught. Their responses to my increasing unwillingness to accept received histories of one unified rationalist rhetoric and their suggested alternative versions of those narratives were the best tests of my formation of a different plausible case and the best sources of conservative good sense. Among many, I am variously indebted to Suellyn Duffy, Chris Diller, Doug Downs, Shaleane Gee, Gaelynn Henderson, Octavio Pimentel, Brian Rajeski, Kelly Ziegler, Sam Wakefield, and Michael Wright. I am also indebted to 2004–2005 sabbatical support from the University of Utah’s College of Humanities, which allowed me to complete this book as I began another project. Invitations to try out portions of my case among its xiv Acknowledgments most stringent critics occasioned the book’s first tentative participation in academic conversations, so I also thank the Modern Language Association, Utah’s Tanner Humanities Center, the Rhetoric Society of America, Drake University, Northern Illinois University, Iowa’s Project on the Rhetoric of Inquiry, and the American Society for the History of Rhetoric for providing the best possible audiences. In those and other settings, Susan Jarratt, Janet Atwill, Patricia Bizzell, Jackie Royster, Michael Leff, Larry Green, Ralph Cintron, Steve Mailloux, Victor Vitanza, and Lynn Worsham were wonderful conversants. Daniel Gross’s The Secret History of Emotion appeared just as this study was completed, so our brief conversations cannot adequately recognize his work as the secret sharer of my claims. I also thank my Utah colleagues for direct interventions in the completion of the manuscript. They have been kind and patient and have served as sources of variously crucial corrections and equally crucial approval. Scott Black, Richard Preiss, Tom Stillinger, and Barry Weller, colleagues in the Department of English, read sections of the manuscript to check its accuracy and to comment on the chapters that take up early modern and eighteenth-­ century rhetorics. Len Hawes and Daniel Emory in the Department of Communication welcomed this project with details of professional interactions that equally forewarn and comfort me. Raul Sanchez in the University Writing Program was this study’s faithful friend and constant critic. Barry Weller’s editing was crucial. I would not have undertaken nor completed this work without Carol Poster’s generous support at every step. Our frequent conversations and shared discoveries across obvious intellectual borders inform many of my statements. She and the final reviewers of the manuscript, Greg Clark and Patty Harkin, are this book’s latest protection from not writing, as here, to say more. trust TEXTS in ...