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The Ethos of Rhetoric. Edited by Michael J. Hyde. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004; pp xxviii + 231. $39.95.
Despite its uninspiring title, The Ethos of Rhetoric is a provocative blend of works that treats the subject of ethos diversely in traditional and nontraditional ways. The 11 essays in this book, edited by Michael J. Hyde, were first presented at the 2002 Annual Convention of the Southern States Speech Communication Association. The main theoretical texts grounding these essays are Aristotle's Rhetoric and Martin Heidegger's works on ethos, particularly his book Being and Time. Thus Hyde's book expands the traditional Aristotelian notion of ethos as "credibility" and explores various interpretations of ethos, in Heidegger's theory, as "dwelling place."
In the introduction, Hyde eloquently touches on his personal interpretation of ethos as "an essential relationship that exists among the self, communal existence, discourse, Being, and, perhaps, God"(xiv). All of these potentialities of ethos, like those in the essays, not only can be understood as but also can be interchanged with the term dwelling. The ambiguity of "ethos as dwelling" imparts multifarious conceptions of ethos in all 11 chapters. The essays treat a variety of topics: the ethos of Aristotle's writings, the...