I don’t understand why it took Stanley Fish 20 pages to tell us that there has been a divide between people who trust rhetoric and those who don’t since antiquity (and then, proceeds to pretty much discuss the pro-rhetoric side despite saying he was going to recount the history of this argument as a whole, but whatever) and that the study of rhetoric is important. Perhaps his own rhetorical move is to kill his readers by over-explanation alone so that they never forget the existence of this debate or this study. I certainly won’t forget the growing anger I felt as every section said the same thing but wearing a slightly different outfit. “Things mean different things in different contexts” is essentially the core argument of the rhetoricians Fish is discussing, which, yeah, dudes.

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