Classical Rhetoric Vs Modern Rhetoric

The classical model, then, depends upon stable assumptions about knowledge and the world that are, in Halloran's words, "no longer tenable." The classical orator could rely upon a common cultural heritage, and upon an ethos that measured his ability to embody the ideal of such a common culture. Halloran's thesis about the difference between classical and modern rhetoric rests upon the relationship between self and world. He writes, "To inhabit a world is to possess images of how things are beyond the reach of one's immediate experience, images that have implications for how one experiences the immediate, and that generate values which make claims on the conduct of one's life. In the absence of a world given by a stable and coherent cultural

If Stephen North, Patricia Harkin, and others are correct, then rhetoric's disciplinary fate is tied up with those factors which render rhetoric post-disciplinary. If, as Halloran writes, modern rhetoric is characterized by the ability to risk one's self, then the discipline of rhetoric, or the cultural dominance of rhetoricality, is alive and kicking only to the degree that it is able to continually open itself to other disciplines and risk its transformation. The lesson that Birkerts offers is a cautionary one for rhetoricians: as soon as difference on a wide scale becomes equated with decline, we will be speaking about the death of our own discipline as well. In their brief analysis of the relationship between rhetoric and literary criticism, Bender and Wellbery offer the following observations:
Especially in literary studies, a field often deeply troubled by the rifts of history and by the fear of cultural oblivion, one encounters projects that anxiously work to reconstitute for the present a unity of tradition and doctrine that no longer exists...Once rhetoricality is understood as the fundamental condition under which any contemporary literary criticism must proceed, the discipline itself will be transformed because its boundaries will be redrawn"