Yesterday’s entry wasn’t the most coherent I’ve written, but maybe that’ll give a good idea of the extent of my struggles with Hardt & Negri. It’s tough stuff.
Anyway: in addition to the paper on Tactitus, rhetoric, and empire, and in addition to the dissertation, I’m also working on something for publication, and need some help with it. It’s a morbid question, though, for which I apologize in advance: I mean no insensitivity.
What I’m seeking is a list of contemporary rhetors and rhetoricians, from varying fields and with varying perspectives, who were all alive and working at the same time but are unfortunately now no longer with us. The figures I think of first are Michel Foucault, James Berlin, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Who else comes to mind?
Roland Barthes
Kenneth Burke
Paul de Man
Marshall McLuan
J-F Lyotard
Walter Ong
Ivan Illich
Bill Hicks
Excellent suggestions all. Thank you both, and I’d be happy to hear others.
Chaim Perelman
Mikhail Bakhtin (died in 1975, don’t know if that fits the time frame you want)
Michel de Certeau (okay, more of a cultural theorist, but we read him in a rhetoric seminar in 2002 for his theory of ordinary language)
I’ll probably think of more later.
Ernesto Grassi
Richard Weaver (died 1963, again, maybe doesn’t fit the time frame)
Thanks, Clancy — yet more excellent suggestions. Still, out of all the suggestions, I think Bill Hicks is my favorite, for the same reason that I suggested Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and wanted to suggest someone like Senator Robert Byrd: they’re rhetors rather than rhetoricians, practitioners rather than theorists. Stokely Carmichael; Bella Abzug.