Rhetoric reclaimed

by Janet Atwill

Thoroughly embedded in postmodern theory, this book offers a critique of traditional conceptions of the liberal arts, exploring the challenges posed by cultural diversity to the aims and methods of a humanist education. Janet M. Atwill investigates a neglected tradition of rhetoric, exemplified by Protagoras and Isocorates, and preserved in Aristotle's Rhetoric. This tradition, she argues, was rooted in the ancient conception of techne, or productive knowledge, a concept that appears both in literary texts dating back to the seventh century B.C.E. and in medical and technical treatises from the fifth century B.C.E. Atwill examines these traditions, together with sophistic and platonic conceptions, and considers the commentaries on Aristotle's Rhetoric by E. M. Cope and William S. J. Grimaldi, where the concepts of techne and productive knowledge disappear in the modern opposition between theory and practice. Since models of knowledge are closely tied to models of subjectivity. Atwill's