Victor J. Vitanza – författare

Examines the principles of historiography that are generally applied to writing what we call "The History of Rhetoric." Focusing on the Sophists Gorgias and Isocrates, and on how each has been received and refigured by historians, the book moves beyond these approaches to postmodernist ones.Vitanza introduces his book with the questions: "What Do I Want, Wanting to Write This ('our') Book? What Do I Want, Wanting You to Read This ('our') Book?" Thereafter, in a series of chapters and excursions and as schizographer of rhetorics (erotics), he interrogates three recent, influential historians of Sophists (Edward Schiappa, John Poulakos, and Susan Jarratt), and how these historians as well as others represent Sophists and, in particular, Isocrates and Gorgias under the sign of the negative. Vitanza concludes-rather rebegins in a sophistic-performative excursus-with a prelude to future (anterior) histories of rhetorics. Vitanza asks: "What will have been anti-Oedipalizedized (de-negated) hysteries of rhetorics? What will have they looked like, sounded, read like? Or to ask affirmatively, what, then, will have libidinalized-hysteries of rhetorics looked, sounded, read like?"

This reader presents essays that editor Victor Vitanza describes as "efforts at revisionary histories that are either quasi-traditional histories or radical subversive histories." They are influential works published over the past four decades by major rhetoricians and historians with radically different presumptions and challenges to the status quo of history. Their discussions present a full array of possible histories in terms of originations, classicisms, scientific objectivities, temporalities, literary criticisms, feminisms, modernity/post-modernity, aesthetics, and perpetually more and more contestations. Providing a forum for scholars’ original voices as the discussions have developed over the decades, this collection is a unique and valuable text for advanced study on the history of rhetoric.

This reader presents essays that editor Victor Vitanza describes as "efforts at revisionary histories that are either quasi-traditional histories or radical subversive histories." They are influential works published over the past four decades by major rhetoricians and historians with radically different presumptions and challenges to the status quo of history. Their discussions present a full array of possible histories in terms of originations, classicisms, scientific objectivities, temporalities, literary criticisms, feminisms, modernity/post-modernity, aesthetics, and perpetually more and more contestations. Providing a forum for scholars’ original voices as the discussions have developed over the decades, this collection is a unique and valuable text for advanced study on the history of rhetoric.