This book focuses on seven entries in Carl R. Burgchardt’s Readings in Rhetorical Criticism, to which it adds a complementary effort. While maintaining a strategy of ongoing dialogue with both the prospective reader and the texts under scrutiny, the book acknowledges the author’s privileged moment of essential identification and represents a step out of the limiting frame of the inherently political character of inquiry. This allows the book to present personal narrative about guidance by specific critics such as Edwin Black, Forbes Hill, Karlyn Khors Campbell, Kenneth Burke, William Lewis, and Raymie McKerrow through the labyrinth of “that Leviathan, the public mind” (H. Wichelns).

The volume mediates a cross-cultural re-conceptualization of academic writing, more adequately inscribed within the symbolic border between the consolidated American and other fragile profiles of the discipline of Communication Studies.