Great Readings in Rhetoric
A curated directory of foundational treatises, transformative monographs, and landmark essays in Rhetoric. These works trace how thinkers across traditions have conceptualized persuasion, civic deliberation, symbolic action, and the discursive construction of knowledge.
Classical Rhetorical Foundations
| Title | Author(s) |
|---|---|
| Rhetoric | Aristotle |
| Gorgias | Plato |
| Phaedrus | Plato |
| De Oratore (On the Ideal Orator) | Cicero |
| Institutio Oratoria (The Orator's Education) | Quintilian |
Modern Rhetorical Theory and Argumentation
| Title | Author(s) |
|---|---|
| A Grammar of Motives | Kenneth Burke |
| The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation | Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca |
| The Uses of Argument | Stephen E. Toulmin |
| The Rhetoric of Fiction | Wayne C. Booth |
| The Rhetorical Situation | Lloyd F. Bitzer |
| The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation | Richard E. Vatz |
| Genre as Social Action | Carolyn R. Miller |
Public Sphere, Ideology, and Civic Discourse
| Title | Author(s) |
|---|---|
| The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere | Jürgen Habermas |
| Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy | Nancy Fraser |
| The "Ideograph": A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology | Michael Calvin McGee |
| Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis | Raymie E. McKerrow |
| Publics and Counterpublics | Michael Warner |
Feminist, Cultural, and Decolonial Rhetorics
| Title | Author(s) |
|---|---|
| Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance | Cheryl Glenn |
| Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence | Cheryl Glenn |
| Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness | Krista Ratcliffe |
| Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women | Jacqueline Jones Royster |
| Stories Take Place: A Performance in One Act | Malea Powell |
Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Digital Media
| Title | Author(s) |
|---|---|
| The Rhetoric of Science | Alan G. Gross |
| Shaping Science with Rhetoric: The Cases of Dobzhansky, Schrödinger, and Wilson | Leah Ceccarelli |
| Health and the Rhetoric of Medicine: Diagnostic Realities | Judy Z. Segal |
| Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice | Douglas Eyman |
| Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames | Ian Bogost |
| Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design | Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen |