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Philosophies of history have fallen on hard times. Grand comic metanarratives were the first casualty, auguring ironically in the futility of their own pronouncements. Positive and negative teleologies were next to fall. But if finalized themes and Utopian schemes are not exactly in vogue, it remains the case that his tory?as systematic documentation and reminiscence about the past?is and must be ongoing. This is transparently because things that matter con tinue to happen: with ideas, cultures, nature itself. And even if we never really learn from history, all other things being equal, history has shown that it is helpful to keep careful records. In an age that personalizes nearly everything, it is easy enough to recognize the familiar dissociation of act and accountability on a personal scale. What may appear as nothing more serious than petty truancy for a person may become amnesia, revisionism, and much worse when the zone of accountability is widened, the deeds are deepened, the stakes are increased. In each case, the argument is the same: identification through a sort of opaque empathy. In short, you had to be there.

There is something of this anachronistic doggedness in all importance, and to use it as a criterion of thought is to impose on thought a spellbound fixity, and a loss of self-reflection. The great themes are nothing other than primeval rumblings which cause the animal to pause and try to bring them forth once again. This does not mean that the hierarchy of importance should be ignored. Just as its nar row-mindedness reflects that of the system, so it is saturated with all the latter s force and stringency. Thought ought not, however, to repeat this hierarchy, but by completing, end it. The division of the world into important and unimportant matters, which has always served to neutralize the key phenomena of social injustice as mere exceptions, should be followed up to the point where it is convicted of its own untruth. The division which makes everything objects must itself become an object of thought, instead of guiding it. The large themes will then make their appearance, though hardly in the traditional "thematic" sense, but refractedly and eccentrically.

This essay reintroduces Rhetoric as the principle art for giving emphasis and importance to contested matters; in other words, for making things matter. In a speculative reading of the Aristotelian rhetorical tradition, Aristotle's interpretations of magnitude, contengency and practical wisdom are critically examined from both an aesthetic and an ethical-political point of view. The concluding discussion attempts to apply these same concepts to a growing dilemma in the present age. The dilemma is that monumental changes in scale have all but eroded the prospects for engaged encounters with contemporary contingency. It remains the challenge of rhetorical practice to reframe actions and events so that they and we may hold some hope for an engaged civic life.

The largely invisible but pervasive American cultural practice of scrapbook keeping is examined in this essay. Through a synthesis of ethnographic and rhetorical methods, the cultural genre of scrapbook is defined and explored. Interview data from 55 informants are explored to disclose the meaning of scrapbooks as an artifact of life narration for many youthful middle‐class Americans. Phases of selection, organizing, and sharing indicate that the scrapbook is a text that needs to be captioned and performed for both the self and ‘other’ as audiences. In an era often characterized by loss of belonging and cultural fragmentation, this is an American art of memory.

This essay reconsiders validity as the “soundness” of a rhetorical argument. Characteristics of rhetorical argument which contribute to this reconsideration are examined: the complicity of an audie...

(1976). Knowledge, consensus, and rhetorical theory. Quarterly Journal of Speech: Vol. 62, No. 1, pp. 1-14.

(1976). Language‐action: A paradigm for communication. Quarterly Journal of Speech: Vol. 62, No. 4, pp. 333-349.

Books reviewed THE DIALECTICAL IMAGINATION: A HISTORY OF THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL AND THE INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL RESEARCH 1923–1950. By Martin Jay. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973; pp. xvii+382. $12.50. ORIGIN AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL: A MARXIST PERSPECTIVE. By Phil Slater. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977; pp. xvii+185. $13.75. THE ORIGIN OF NEGATIVE DIALECTICS: THEODOR W. ADORNO, WALTER BENJAMIN, AND THE FRANKFURT INSTITUTE. By Susan Buck‐Morss. New York: The Free Press, 1977; pp. xv+335. $15.95. CRITICAL THEORY: SELECTED ESSAYS. By Max Horkheimer. Trans. Matthew J. O'Connell, et al. New York: Seabury Press, 1972; pp. xxi+290. Paper $4.95. THE ORIGIN OF GERMAN TRAGIC DRAMA. By Walter Benjamin. Trans. John Osborne. New York: Schocken Books, 1977; pp. 1+256. $17.25. ILLUMINATIONS. By Walter Benjamin. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969; pp. 1+278. Paper $4.75. UNDERSTANDING BRECHT. By Walter Benjamin. Trans. Anna Bostock. New York: Schocken Books, 1973; pp. xix+124. $7.95. REFLECTIO...

The major parties faced special problems in 1976 which they attempted to overcome in part through the ritual forms of their national conventions. The Democrats played upon the theme of unity, the Republicans upon the theme of conflict, as each sought legitimation of the party and its chosen leader.

In this article, a number of Don Cushman's former (but also current) students have set down some anecdotes and experiences which capture part of his superb spirit as a teacher.

(1975). Conversion of America's consciousness: The rhetoric of The Exorcist. Quarterly Journal of Speech: Vol. 61, No. 1, pp. 40-47.

In this reconsideration of social knowledge, an attempt is made to resolve ambiguities related to the original project. Three regions of dispute fostered by the initial essay are examined and explained: first, the definition of social knowledge; second, the issue of form; third, the problem of normative impact.

This essay uncovers in the classical tradition an underlying paradox that helps to explain contemporary confusions about rhetoric's mimetic status. Aristotle situated rhetoric in a conflicted relationship—between rhetoric as an ethical‐political practice and poetic. The aesthetic possibility of rhetoric is thus liberated and limited by constraints imposed by Aristotle's most perfected poetic form, tragedy.

Even though the communication practices at Three Mile Island confounded advocates and critics alike, the root assumptions of this discourse have remained unexamined. This essay theorizes, however, that much of contemporary communication tends to withhold its presuppositions from ready critical access. Accordingly, it may remain for a rhetorical crisis to disclose for us the limits of our most ordinary activities. Our contention is that Three Mile Island presented such a crisis. In actuality, if not intent, the inadequacies of accidental rhetoric at Three Mile Island point to a failure larger than the technical breakdown of 1979: the failure of technical reason itself to offer communication practices capable of mastering the problems of our age. The essay begins by examining three inclusive world views which have gradually advanced the power of technical reason over social concerns in general and nuclear power in particular. Following a detailed reconstruction of the discourse at Three Mile Island, the ess...

As with all sad and sudden departures, there is an unfinished path that others now must take. The work of the late Chaim Perelman was always something of a willed legacy. But as it is, the elaboration of this legacy must set aside the occasion for something the author would have well understood: a dialogue of mind, one that begins in the real, but must continue — if it is to continue at all — in the imagination. I am concerned in this essay with the domain of practical reason, and the specific contributions of Perelman’s work to its investigation. However, this essay hopes to move beyond epideictic and exposition at the same time. Specifically, I will claim that there is a rich path to be followed in the connection between the rhetorical audience, and the “rules” that Perelman would have guide practical inference. However, in the body of Perelman’s translated work, at least, that connection has been set aside, in favor of a formal (or rule-constituted) theory of audiences themselves. The theory is elegant, and has been enticing to a diminishing generation of traditional philosophy. But it has lent some force to the charge that traditionalists are wont to rationalize philosophy and philosophize rhetoric. Rather than dwell on such charges, the body of my essay will offer some substantive direction to the rules of practical reason through the use of an extended example (the Dispute over Choice vs. Right to Life).