Written in the form it discusses, Reorienting Rhetoric is both a narrative weaving out of a theme and a systematic treatment of a set of these ideas. The theme is the role of narration in the history of Western rhetoric. The ideas include the gradual tendency to privilege only systematic language, to discard all traditional modes of thinking, and to view narrative as an object but not as a means of thinking. Reorienting Rhetoric argues that narration is a mode of thinking as important as logic and that as narration goes, so goes rhetoric. O'Banion's perspective is heavily...