Abstract

In the closing moments of Phaedrus, Socrates announces rhetoric's last gasp: "And now the play is played out; and of rhetoric enough" (2006, 69). Of course, news of rhetoric's death has been greatly exaggerated. Indeed, the death and subsequent rebirth of rhetoric have been declared countless times, and debates surrounding the nature and character of rhetoric— from antiquity through the renaissance and even into the modern day— seem to continue almost interminably. In the contemporary context, such debates often flow inexorably from a constitutive indecision that marks rhetorical studies's complicated relationship to a foundational definition of rhetoric. More often than not, after a brief foray into debates ..