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This essay argues that the genealogy of the schism between poetics and rhetoric can be understood best by contrasting the attitudes of Plato and Aristotle towards the social impact of the poetic tradition with those of Isocrates. Plato seeks to discipline the process of poetic and political enculturation by splitting mimesis as representation from mimesis as performative imitation and audience identification. Aristotle completes Plato's Utopian project by constructing a hierarchy wherein representational mimesis of the tragic plot in the Poetics is central to a philosophical life, while mimesis as performative imitation of style in the Rhetoric is of marginal utility. In so doing, he counters Isocrates' performative conception of speech education, according to which identification and performance both activate and sustain one's civic identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Goading and provoking were writer Michael Calvin McGee's most effective pedagogical tactics, and the author recall his mentor's question in the moments of intellectual fogginess and occasional disciplinary identity crises. The author singled out this scene from my kaleidoscope of McGee memories because the tension between "cloud hopping" and "clod hopping" has marked both the tradition of rhetoric as an academic discipline and rhetoricians own self-understanding as scholars and teachers. Being an academic rhetorician is not easy on one's psyche, given the uneasy tension between theory and practice throughout rhetoric's history. Most people who received liberal arts education know that being a rhetorician is not quite like being a surgeon or a plumber. As Plato and Aristotle, as well as a host of philosophically inclined folks after them decreed, rhetoric is useful but it does not involve knowledge of things and phenomena that exist outside discourse. They deal with things and phenomena that are governed by natural laws, not by human laws, traditions, and institutions. For much of its history, rhetoric was seen as a way of enabling people to participate in these distinctly human institutions, either by advocating the status quo or by urging social change.