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SOURCE: “Emerson, Disclosure, and the Experiencing Self,” in Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 29, No. 1, 1996, pp. 51-64.
In the following essay, Petruzzi contends that the disclosive theory of truth allows for a more complete description of Emerson's rhetorical theory than either Enlightenment rhetoric or Romantic rhetoric.
Introduction
Emerson was educated at Harvard at a time when composition and rhetorical theory were dominated by Hugh Blair's “commonsense” rhetoric. The nature of Emerson's rhetorical theory has most often been positioned somewhere between the two poles of Scottish “commonsense” and Romantic rhetorics. I will argue that the disclosive theory of truth presents a more complete and richer way to describe Emerson's rhetorical theory than either the Enlightenment rhetoric of “commonsense” or the Romantic rhetoric of “self-expression.” For Emerson, the experiencing-self functions to organize discourse and construct reality through the continual effort to deconstruct the discourse of public interpretations, what Heidegger calls the “they-self...
This section contains 5,595 words (approx. 19 pages at 300 words per page) |
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