Rhetoric’s Pragmatism

“Touching on issues of transdisciplinary interest, Mailloux’s book will attract readers from varied disciplines. Not only that, readers will be forced consider and reconsider the assumptions that undergird their interests in philosophy, rhetoric, and cultural and reception studies. Eschewing defined borders and instead seeking to build academic bridges, Mailloux once again opens up space for engaging intellectual conversations.”

—Mark Porrovecchio Philosophy in Review

“These essays elegantly argue for the urgency of studying rhetoric in the twenty-first century… . Rhetoric’s Pragmatism will earn the same high distinction that has marked Mailloux’s career over the last three decades and more.”

—Dale M. Bauer, author of Sex Expression and American Women Writers, 1860-1940

“This book participates in multiple disciplinary conversations as few books do. Steven Mailloux doesn’t even try to be transdisciplinary—after all his years of study and scholarship, it has become natural to him. Thus, while Rhetoric’s Pragmatism will especially appeal to the rhetoric community, it will also be required reading for historians, educators, theologians, scholars in American literature and culture, cultural studies scholars, and the host of scholars in the humanities who want to understand how a refined and expansive project can draw from and influence so many.”

—Jack Selzer, author of Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village

“The essays of Mailloux’s monograph invent, collectively, a new model for managing the infinitizing complexity of rhetorical hermeneutics. They model, too, practices of reading with which to make ourselves against the shuttle of our times, on behalf of fuller relations between the partialities of past and future. The book is a gem of scholarship.”

—Ira Allen Rhetoric Society Quarterly

“Steven Mailloux’s work has been at the center of conversations about the intersection of rhetoric and pragmatism, and his latest collection of essays, Rhetoric’s Pragmatism, makes the case for why we should continue to attend to this intersection.”

—Robert Danisch Rhetoric & Public Affairs

Steven Mailloux is President’s Professor of Rhetoric at Loyola Marymount University and the author or editor of several other books, including Disciplinary Identities: Rhetorical Paths of English, Speech, and Composition and Reception Histories: Rhetoric, Pragmatism, and American Cultural Politics.