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Rhetoric and Public Culture | Reading List

Revised February 2004; for graduate students entering fall 2005

Aristotle. On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. Trans. George A. Kennedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Austin, J. L. How To Do Things With Words (The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955). Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.

Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 3rd. ed. (1941; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). Read especially, "The Philosophy of Literary Form," "The Rhetoric of Hitler's 'Battle,'" and "Literature as Equipment for Living."

Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997. Read especially the Introduction.

Cicero. De Oratore. Trans. H. Rackham. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942. (Loeb Classical Library volumes 348 & 349).

De Luca, Kevin Michael. Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism. NY: Guilford Press, 1999. Read especially chapters 3 & 5.

Farrell, Thomas. Norms of Rhetorical Culture. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1993.

Gates, Henry Louis. "The Signifying Monkey and the Language of Signifyin(g): Rhetorical Difference and the Orders of Meaning." In The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. 44-88.

Habermas, Jürgen, Sara Lennox, Frank Lennox, "The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article," New German Critique, No. 3 (Autumn, 1974), 49-55.

Hariman, Robert. Political Style: The Artistry of Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Isocrates. "Against the Sophists" and "Antidosis." In Isocrates I. Trans. David C. Mirhady and Yun Lee Too. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000.

Jarratt, Susan C. Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991.

Lanham, Richard. A. "The 'Q' Question." In The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Lentricchia, Frank. Criticism and Social Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Lucaites, John Louis, Celeste Michelle Condit, and Sally Caudill (Eds.). (1999). Contemporary Rhetorical Theory. Guilford.

Ober, Josiah. Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989. Read especially, Chs. 1-4, 7.

Perelman, Chaim and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. Wilkinson and Weaver (Transl.). Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1969.

Peterson, Tarla Rai. Sharing the Earth: The Rhetoric of Sustainable Development. Columbia, SC: U of SC P, 1997. Read especially, the Introduction and chapters 3 & 5.

Plato. Gorgias. Trans. Terence Irwin. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980.

Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. W.C. Helmbold and W.G. Rabinowitz. NY: Macmillan Pub Co, 1956.

Poulakos, John. Sophistical Rhetoric in Classical Greece. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994. Read especially the first two chapters.

Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. NY: Zone Books, 2002. Read especially the Introduction, and chapters 1-2.

**Also, read the journals in the field, particularly: Communication and Critical Cultural Studies, The Quarterly Journal of Speech, and Rhetoric and Philosophy. If you would like a reference book, see: James Jasinski, Sourcebook on Rhetoric: Key Concepts in Contemporary Rhetorical Studies (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2001).