Jeanne Fahnestock, “Rhetorical Style: The Uses of Language in Persuasion” (Oxford UP, 2011)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Mar 15, 2012 · 55m

A thing I enjoy about this job is being encouraged to read books that unexpectedly turn out to be profoundly relevant to my own interests. Jeanne Fahnestock‘s new book, Rhetorical Style: The Uses of Language in Persuasion (Oxford University Press, 2011), turns out to be just such a volume. I read it with a constant sense of surprise that this long and distinguished tradition provides insights on many objects of current linguistic enquiry (and indeed a sense of embarrassment that I didn’t already know that). But there is plenty in this book for readers who don’t share my eccentric obsessions…