Rhetoric and Irony Western Literacy and Western Lies [Hardcover]

This pathbreaking study integrates the histories of rhetoric, literacy, and literary aesthetics up to the time of Augustine, focusing on Western concepts of rhetoric as dissembling and of language as deceptive that Swearingen argues have received curiously prominent emphasis in Western aesthetics and language theory. Swearingen reverses the traditional focus on rhetoric as an oral agonistic genre and examines it instead as a paradigm for literate discourse. She proposes that rhetoric and literacy have in the West disseminated the interrelated notions that through learning rhetoric individuals can learn to manipulate language and others; that language is an unreliable, manipulable, and contingent vehicle of thought, meaning, and communication; and that literature is a body of pretty lies and beguiling fictions. In a bold concluding chapter Swearingen aligns her thesis concerning early Western literacy and rhetoric with contemporary critical and rhetorical theory; with feminist studies in language, psychology, and culture; and with studies of literacy in multi- and cross-cultural settings.

Her achievement is an example of serious, detailed scholarship that both challenges established terms and concepts and also uses historical analysis to look at a number of contemporary issues....A significant contribution to studies in rhetoric and literacy. Swearingen has foregrounded the dialogic complexity and liberating potential of both classical and contemporary rhetoric and literacy. --College Composition and Communication

Swearingen combines solid erudition with provocative viewpoints, and raises questions of crucial interest to us all....An enjoyable book. --Philosophy & Literature

Scholars interested in both classical and contemporary rhetorical theory will find many of Swearingen's discussions provocative....Rewards the reader with much useful information about the philosophical dimension of classical rhetoric and the high l'