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Edwin Black (rhetorician)

Edwin Benjamin Black
Born October 26, 1929
Houston, Texas
Died January 13, 2007(2007-01-13) (aged 77)
League City, Texas
Nationality American
Occupation Rhetorician, university professor
Known for Rhetorical criticism

Edwin Benjamin Black (October 26, 1929 - January 13, 2007) was one of the leading scholars of rhetorical criticism. He criticized "Neo-Aristotelianism" for its lacking a larger historical, social, political, and cultural understanding of the text and for its concentrating only on certain limited methods and aspects, such as the Aristotelian modes of rhetoric: ethos, pathos, and logos. He urged critics to analyze both the motives and goals within situated cultural norms and ideologies.

Born in Houston, Texas on October 26, 1929, Edwin Benjamin Black attended the University of Houston and graduated with a Degree of Philosophy in 1951. He earned his Master of Arts in Rhetoric and Public Address in Cornell University in 1953, and then he continued his Ph.D. study in Cornell University with a minor in philosophy and social psychology. He had a long teaching career started from Washington University in St. Louis (1956-1961). He then moved to the University of Pittsburgh as assistant professor in English Department (1961-1967) and finally to the University of Wisconsin Madison (1967-1994). He earned the Cornell doctorate in 1962.

Black’s major intervention can be summarized into three parts:

Black’s main publications include: Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method (1965) and The Second Persona (1970).

Black died on January 13, 2007.

This book was developed as a continuous project for Black’s Doctoral dissertation in 1962 from Cornell University. The book focused on the examination of fifteen essays from A History and Criticism of American Public Address and discussed the limitation of Neo-Aristotelianism's theories on rhetorical criticism. Black concluded that Neo-Aristotelian criticism is “founded upon a restricted view of human behavior, that there are discourses, which function in ways not dreamed of in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and that there are discourses not designed for rational judges, but for men as they are.”


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