ABSTRACT
The emphasis prior to the twentieth century on rhetoric and oratory as the center of both literary and writing instruction provided a viable means of incorporating the analysis of political argumentation, but rhetoric has been exiled to academically marginal departments of speech. Many academic sources in the marxist tradition, broadly speaking, have contributed to the focus on the intersections between politics and culture that have recently coalesced into cultural studies—Frankfurt School critical theory, women's and ethnic studies, the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, and poststructuralist and postmodernist theory, among others. In addition to these means of direct social control, and more pertinent to cultural studies, is the conservative influence of what Richard Ohmann once termed "the politics of inadvertence." A good case can be made that the very lack of clearly defined political controversy in the United States is a preferable alternative to countries that suffer from constant, often violent political conflict.
