Twentieth Century Sophistries: Popular Science, Human Manuals, and American Rhetorical History

Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Young, Michael
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 14, 2024
- Committee Members:
- Stuart Selber, Major Field Member
Debbie Hawhee, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Jeffrey Nealon, Major Field Member
Janet Lyon, Professor in Charge/Director of Graduate Studies
Michele Kennerly, Minor Field Member
Kirt Wilson, Outside Unit & Field Member - Keywords:
- history of rhetoric
rhetorical education
Dale Carnegie
public speaking
Scientology
L. Ron Hubbard
science fiction
brainwashing
deprogramming
Patty Hearst - Abstract:
- Twentieth Century Sophistries ventures the study of rhetorical education in American popular culture on the basis of an institutional analogy with the sophists of antiquity. To wit, the commercial sale of techniques for speech power generates a social configuration that shapes, decisively, both the form and content of rhetorical pedagogy. This configuration not only evokes perennial problems of speech and writing education, it also continues to shape American rhetorical culture; moreover, it has played a significant role in the development of Rhetorical Studies as a discipline in the modern academy. This dissertation offers an interpretation of that role through a sequence of three historical episodes in which the institutional trajectories of popular programs of rhetorical education intersected with disciplinary rhetoric. The first reads the divergence of popular from academic rhetoric from their common roots in elocutionism though the story of a little-known conflict early in Speech Communication’s history. The second documents the midcentury reconvergence of commercial and disciplinary rhetoric in the paradigms of communication education and General Semantics. The third demonstrates the salience of modern sophistic enterprise to American history by showing how competition among schools of rhetorical education defined counter-revolutionary politics in the ‘70s through the early ‘90s. The twin goals of this history are to (1) theorize and historicize the complex relationship of Rhetorical Studies to its pop culture analogues; and (2) draw out the significance of that relationship for the present and future of rhetorical education.