Contents

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. Acknowledgments ix
4. Introduction 1
5. Part I. Antifoundationalism and Rhetoric
6. 1. Rhetoric 33
7. 2. The Contingency of Language 65
8. 3. A Short History of Rhetoric 86
9. Part II. Theoretical Elaborations
10. 4. Language Obscures Social Change 101
11. 5. Toward a “Materialist” Rhetoric: Contingency, Constraint, and the Eighteenth-Century Crowd 128
12. 6. The Decentered Subject of Feminism: Postfeminism and Thelma and Louise 147
13. 7. Habermas’s Rational-Critical Sphere and the Problem of Criteria 170
14. 8. Foundational Thuggery and a Rhetoric of Subsumption 195
15. Part III. Extensions and Complications
16. 9. Hymes, Rorty, and the Social-Rhetorical Construction of Meaning 227
17. 10. “Too Little Care”: Language, Politics, and Embodiment in the Life-World 254
18. 11. History and the Real 292
19. 12. The Subject of Invention: Antifoundationalism and Medieval Hermeneutics 318
20. 13. The Royal Road: Marxism and the Philosophy of Science 341
21. Part IV. Teaching and Writing (in) an Antifoundational World
22. 14. Beyond Antifoundationalism to Rhetorical Authority: Problems Defining “Cultural Literacy” 371
23. 15. Composition Studies and Cultural Studies: Collapsing Boundaries 389
24. 16. What We Need to Know about Writing and Reading, or Peter Elbow and Antifoundationalism 411
25. 17. Teaching as a Test of Knowledge: Passion, Desire, and the Semblance of Truth in Teaching 423
26. 18. Composition in an Antifoundational World: A Critique and a Proposai 436
27. Contributors 455
28. Index 457