Susan Miller (3)

In Trust in Texts (2008), Susan Miller writes a history of rhetoric, understanding "persuasion as a result of situated emotional investments in the desires aroused by crafted, and expected, language" (x). She defines rhetoric as "multiple metadiscourses derived from ritual, imaginative, and affiliative discursive practices that we trust for their well-supported and reasoned statements, but also because they participate in infrastructures of trustworthiness we are schooled to recognize, show more sometimes by lessons and habits we cannot name" (2). Miller questions the notion that there is only one rhetorical tradition, because persuasion is "a matter of trust that precedes any form of its expression and . . . worthiness for that trust will be verified against multiple discursive conventions" (8).

Toward the end of her book, while discussing publishing, Miller argues that we trust media: "we trust the media of publication itself, a contemporary charismatic pull, without reference to a specific result from the attraction" (142). Rhetorical history, according to Miller, has washed out the emotional, the spiritual, and "a specific belief in things unseen" (147). show less

A must have for those interested in composition studies and pedagogy. Foundational collection.