The Ethos of Rhetoric

In The Ethos of Rhetoric, fourteen noted rhetorical theorists and critics answer a summons to return ethics from abstraction to the particular. They discuss and explore a meaning of ethos that predates its more familiar translation as moral character and ethics. Attentive to this more primordial meaning of the term, the contributors understand the phrase the ethos of rhetoric to relate to the way discourse is used to transform space and time into dwelling places where people can deliberate about and collectively understand some matter of interest. Such dwelling places define the grounds, abodes, and habitats where a person's ethics and moral character take form and develop. Together the contributors define ethical discourse and describe what its practice looks like in particular communities. In the volume's introduction, Michael J. Hyde maintains that the ethos of rhetoric provides a foundation for all else that can be said about the discipline. essays the relationship between place and the performance of communal discourse. Barbara Warnick, in a contribution addressing how an expansion of ethos might enrich the critic's understanding of rhetoric, rounds out the theoretical grounding of the book. The final seven essays turn to the ethos of metoric's manifestations in everyday existence. Case studies by Walter Jost, John Poulakos, Eric King Watts, Martin J. Medhurst, David Zarefsky, Carole Blair and Neil Michel, and Carolyn R. Miller develop the idea of ethos as genius loci of region, nation, and tribal identity. Among the phenomena these contributors examine are the rhetoric of a Black Arts movement leader, the 2000 presidential campaign, President George W. Bush's response to the September 11th terrorist attack, and the cold war computer culture.