ABSTRACT
The central claim of this book is that realist ideas are nothing new for rhetoric. From rhetoric’s early formulations in antiquity to postmodern accounts of rhetoric as an epistemic or architectonic art, rhetorical theorists have long sought to position the rhetorical within, alongside, or against the world as it exists apart from or in excess of human agency, consciousness, and language. If the term realism rubs us the wrong way today-if it raises the specter of an outdated and old-fashioned way of thinking-this is because our present moment has tended to privilege the epistemological side of things, the ways, for example, language constructs realities and our perceptions of them. Short of reducing rhetoric’s power and limiting its jurisdiction, however, the anti-realist turn in rhetoric has actually, if somewhat paradoxically, helped bolster more recent claims for rhetoric’s ubiquity and universality. As Walter J. Ong suggests, the tendency to bracket the thing-in-itself from consideration constitutes one of the greatest triumphs of the linguistic turn insofar it enables humanists to once and for all discredit anything resembling naïve realism and with it the belief that the world accurately conforms to our senses and perceptions of it. “One turns from objectivity to intersubjectivity,” Ong says, “not simply because one is overwhelmed and surfeited with objects but because one nds the more central problems really are the intersubjective ones.”1
