Reflecting on "Logic and Audience" and Preparation for Next Week

Folks,

I genuinely commend you on many of the realizations you gleaned from our first exploratory. There are several reasons why I asked you to schematize The New Rhetoric, but one principal reason is to remind us that any claim we make about a figure, text, or theory -- whether revisionist or not -- is itself always "in respect to," and that any re/reading of these treatises requires our being willing to let the text speak on its own terms as well as through the terms of specific secondary scholarship or primary/secondary histories with which we identify. By the same token, any intervention we wish to make into theories of argument is both a revisionist reading and a critical reflection on our own reading apparatus.