Rhetoric Before and Beyond Post-Truth

Rhetoric has long had a contentious relationship with the idea of truth, and the field of contemporary rhetorical studies has often been skeptical of easy understandings of truth. Meanwhile, hostility to truth is doing a lot of real-world damage, even if truth itself may never have been completely reliable. The idea of post-truth poses systemic problems for rhetoric’s traditional concerns. Active obfuscation, negation of truth, and even truth-indifference are certainly not new. But the past couple of decades have seen a proliferation and pervasiveness of falsities, rendering the term “post-truth” an identifiable marker of the contemporary moment. Public life regularly provides examples of both post-truth in action and efforts to combat it by invoking truth. In Rhetoric Before and Beyond Post-Truth, a range of English, communications, philosophy, and political science scholars draw on the resources of rhetoric to understand this moment, how truth has functioned in the past, and how it may continue to function when it is no longer accepted.