Reality Fictions

Thomas W. Benson is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Rhetoric and Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at the Pennsylvania State University. His many books include the edited volume, American Rhetoric: Context and Criticism. Carolyn Anderson is an associate professor and undergraduate program director in the Department of Communications at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. With Thomas W. Benson, she is the author of Documentary Dilemmas: Frederick Wiseman's Titicut Follies.

This is a rare marriage of film and rhetorical criticism, in which the authors pay intricate attention to cinematic technique, not for its own sake, but within the larger context of examining how the films work rhetorically. They are particularly concerned with how the audience is likely to interpret the films-with the various reading strategies that Wiseman seems to Invite in each one.... This is a very fine book for the serious student. It is a complex, intelligent, careful and continually insightful treatment of an arresting subject and ranks as an important contribution to the scholarship of film and rhetoric.-Quarterly Journal of Speech