Review Essays: Sweetening Rhetorical Projects

Susan Wells’ Sweet Reason: Rhetoric and the Discourses of Modernity is an often brilliant but at times frustrating book. It undertakes a project that has been suspended by those who want to re-validate rhetoric (and rhetoricians) within hermeneutics, especially by following the laborious normalizing work involved in Richard Rorty’s anti-foundational relocation of “truth” in the play of interpretative methods. Wells would herself suspend the competitive and entirely disciplinary contest between Aristotelian classical rhetoric (on her account, modernized by Brian Vickers and Jasper Neel, for instance) and hermeneutic rhetoricians who prefer reading the Phaedrus.