CHAPTER 8 Rhetoric, Truth, and the Work of Trope Alan Rumsey The main body of this chapter will consist of three parts, the second of which is an antidote to the irst, and the third of which explains why. In the irst part I will play the part of the gadly, expressing certain reservations I have about the Rhetoric Culture project. I am in full agreement with what I take to be one of the project’s main aims: to overcome the limits of previous under- standings of discourse that give pride of place to its truth-functional aspects and devalue others as mere rhetoric. But, for reasons I will argue in the irst part of the chapter, I think it would be counterproductive to try to address this problem by simply reversing the terms of the opposition and calling for a revaluation of the rhetorical over the truth-functional. For the problem is not just with the way the terms have been valued relative to each other, but with the way the opposition has been drawn between them in the irst place. Nor can the opposition be dissolved by trying to absorb or displace what was on one side of it by what was on the other—the rhetorical. Or at least not without a radical transformation in what we mean by the rhetorical, since all the estab- lished senses of that term depend on its relation to what it had been opposed to. While I would not rule out using that old term, or perhaps rhetoricality (per Bender and Wellbery 1990) for such a transformed, nondualistic understand- ing of language function, I argue that in order to develop such an understand- ing we can draw only selectively on the traditions of classical and even modern rhetoric, while reconiguring or rejecting others. And we must be alert to the In Strecker, Ivo and Tyler, Stephen (eds.) 2009. Culture and Rhetoric. Oxford: Berghahn. Pp. 117-49