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Vitanza introduces his book with the questions: "What Do I Want, Wanting to Write This ('our') Book? What Do I Want, Wanting You to Read This ('our') Book?" Thereafter, in a series of chapters and excursions and as schizographer of rhetorics (erotics), he interrogates three recent, influential historians of Sophists (Edward Schiappa, John Poulakos, and Susan Jarratt), and how these historians as well as others represent Sophists and, in particular, Isocrates and Gorgias under the sign of the negative. Vitanza concludes--rather rebegins in a sophistic-performative excursus--with a prelude to future (anterior) histories of rhetorics. Vitanza asks: "What will have been anti-Oedipalizedized (de-negated) hysteries of rhetorics? What will have they looked like, sounded, read like? Or to ask affirmatively, what, then, will have libidinalized-hysteries of rhetorics looked, sounded, read like?"

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CHOICE Review

In answering the question "What is it to write histories of rhetoric?" this volume follows Vitanza's edited volume Writing Histories of Rhetoric (CH, Dec'94) and further opens the door to the vastness of historiography. In postmodern fashion Vitanza readies the field by pointing out the rubble of what is already there and what is not, and thus attempts to write a prelude to future histories of rhetoric. A Dionysian tour de force, it cuts and pastes the English language to include in its discussion subjectivity and negative dialectic, aesthetics and politics, Lyotard and Derrida, Isocrates and Gorgias, and current historians of the Sophists--among a myriad of concepts, philosophers, and rhetoricians. The goal is to take the reader to "the idea of the dispersion of power in various accounts" and to those rhetors of a new Third Sophistic finding ways of rethinking power. The notion that women should write their "own past and destiny," their own "rhetorical feminisms" set within this male writing, confronts the danger line that Vitanza challenges, a line of "necessary confusion," with its one and two at the edge of many. If it is necessary to erect a "tower of Babel" occasionally, this is such a structure for the history of rhetoric. For upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty. T. B. Dykeman Fairfield University

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Victor J. Vitanza is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Arlington. He is the editor of two books, PRE/TEXT: The First Decade and Writing Histories of Rhetoric .