ABSTRACT
Reviving rhetoric seems to a promising way forward, a productive movement that is also, in an important sense, iconic—a matter of both retrospect and prospect in asserting a continued focus on textual practice and on the curriculum and cultural value of what Robert Scholes has described evocatively as textual power. Accounts such as these are useful in pointing to the significance and value of rhetoric as a key principle in the contemporary relationships among English teaching, 'critical literacy' and cultural studies, perhaps especially when informed by the insights of social semiotics and postmodern critical practice. 'English' was the avowed cornerstone of the Australian school curriculum, as it was in other Anglophone countries. In an overview of twentieth-century rhetorics and rhetoricians, Moran, M. G and M. Ballif trace a history that moves from what they call "current-traditional rhetoric", through "expressive rhetoric" and "cognitive rhetoric" to social-epistemic rhetoric, with a focus finally on the emergence of "poststructuralist and postmodern rhetorics".
