This book reinvents aspects of the rhetorical tradition as part of a philosophical pluralism oriented to “All-in-Allness”. The book as a whole culminates in Part Three, where the author demonstrates how “ordinary language criticism” fruitfully bears on cultural models – film, drama, novels, poetry – belonging to “American Low Modernism.”
Walter Jost is Professor of English at the University of Virginia, USA, and author of Rhetorical Thought in John Henry Newman and Rhetorical Investigations. He has edited or co-edited seven other books, among them Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time and Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking After Cavell After Wittgenstein.
Part 1.- Chapter 1: This Way Please: Possibilities of Pluralism.- Chapter 2: The Linguistic Turn after Richard McKeon: Richard Rorty and Robert Brandom.- Chapter 3: Aspect Perception in Brandom and Wittgenstein.- Part 2.- Chapter 4: Topics, Tropes, Arguments I: Terms (including a Companion to Chapter Four).- Chapter 5: Topics, Tropes, Arguments II: Sequences.- Chapter 6: Topics, Tropes, Arguments III: Consequences: The Prism-House of Language.- Part 3.- Chapter 7: Judgment Calls: Sweating the Little Things in Reginald Rose’s and Stanley Lumet’s “Twelve Angry Men”.- Chapter 8: Nothing Doing in Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome: “I had the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps.”.- Chapter 9: Not Without Reason: Thinking Elizabeth Bishop’s Weak-Transcendental “Crusoe in England”.- Chapter 10: Grammar School for the Aspect-blind and A-rhetorical: Elizabeth Bishop’s “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance” (or, Allin All More or Less).