The Reading Warehouse

Rhetoric and composition theory has shown a renewed interest in sophistic countertraditions, as seen in the work of such postphilosophers as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and H l ne Cixous, and of such rhetoricians as Susan Jarratt and Steven Mailloux. As D. Diane Davis traces today's theoretical interest to those countertraditions, she also sets her sights beyond them.

Davis takes a "third sophistics" approach, one that focuses on the play of language that perpetually disrupts the "either/or" binary construction of dialectic. She concentrates on the nonsequential third--excess--that overflows language's dichotomies. In this work, laughter operates as a trope for disruption or breaking up, which is, from Davis's perspective, a joyfully destructive shattering of our confining conceptual frameworks.