Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis

Phillip Sipiora is Professor and Associate Chair of English at The University of South Florida. He is the coeditor, with Fredric G. Gale and James L. Kinneavy, of Ethical Issues in College Writing.

This collection offers the first comprehensive discussion of the history, theory, and pedagogical applications of kairos, a seminal and recently revised concept of classical rhetoric. Augusto Rostagni, James L. Kinneavy, Richard Leo Enos, John Poulakos, and John E. Smith are among the international list of scholars who explore the Homeric and literary origins of kairos, the technologies of time-keeping in antiquity, the role of "right-timing" in Hippocratic medicine, the improvisations of Gorgias, as well as the uses of kairos in Isocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and the New Testament. Broad in its scope, the book also examines the distinctive philosophies of time reflected in Renaissance Humanism, Nineteenth-Century American Transcendentalism, Oriental art and ritual, and the application of kairos to contemporary philosophy, ethics, literary criticism, rhetorical theory, and composition pedagogy.