Rhetoric as epistemology of resistance

Abstract

There is deep, cultural divide between rhetoric studies in Continental Europe and in the United States, and this divide offers an opportunity to reflect on rhetoric as an epistemology of power politics. When I delivered the 12th Kenneth Burke Lecture in Rhetoric at Penn State, in 2010, I found myself standing on the great divide between North American rhetoric culture and my own¹. I had to make a confession to the audience: I had hardly read anything by Kenneth Burke, possibly the most important scholar in rhetoric as a political espistmology on the other side of the Acheron – except his essay on Hitler’s rhetoric (1939), which I had found, at the time, politically naïve and, in any event, far less prescient than Curzio Malparte’s genial Technique ducoup d’état (1931). But naivety is a matter of context, and I may have been the naive one.