Who better to suggest a new rhetorical figure than the author of the respected and enduring Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (1991)? In the Preface Lanham says, ‘‘Rhetorical figures are patterns of speech or writing that provide patterns for thought’’ (p. xiii). He calls the pattern of thought wherein one looks through something and then at something (as when one reads a book and later reads a review or a rhetorical analysis of the book) oscillation and recommends a new trope he names oscillatio*a moving back and forth. A book review may be considered a form of oscillatio, moving between a text and a commentary on the text. Lanham also works with oscillation in his earlier book, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts (1993), which the distinguished economist Deidre McCloskey called ‘‘a stunner.’’ The Economics of Attention is, for me, another stunner. This work presents us with what may be needed to restore rhetoric to its appropriate pre-Ramist centrality. Rhetoric’s restoration is dependent, according to Lanham, not so much on academe as on the world of commerce. Rhetoric has become the central economic pivot point of our age. How can this possibly be true? Who has ever heard of linking rhetoric and economics? Answering this question is the goal of the book.

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I was born on November 9th, 1929, in Brooklyn, New York. I am the third of three sons born to Catherine M. Dance (nee Tester, 1898–1983) and Clifton L. Dance (1893–1986). My mother was a Brooklyn b...

Ciphers and deciphering have an origin embedded in the idea of codex books, of text, of other than electronic pulsations. There is a subtext in this volume addressing the problem of moving from a “looking at” to a new “looking through” environment (p. 1). When William Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” in his novel Neuromancer (1982), it was the rare reader who brought to the term any prior interpretive experience. Cyberspace and virtual reality were easily conflated. Gibson’s work was fiction and Gibson’s use of the term was situated in a fictional narrative. Cyberspace quickly migrated from its original fictional home to the electronic ambience of computer-mediated activities. For many of us cyberspace is the same as the Internet, the world wide web, and all of the activities encompassed within electronic communication. What presumption it takes to review a book like this. The closest thing I remember is when I was a start-up assistant professor about 50 years ago. I was teaching at the University of Kansas and I received an invitation to review an encyclopedia. I wasn’t comfortable with rejecting any invitation to get published so I accepted the invitation and about three weeks later a complete set of an encyclopedia was delivered to my door. I opened the box, looked at the 20 volumes, and asked myself what in heaven’s name I was thinking of when I said I would do it. I handled the challenge by going through the set and picking out those entries that dealt with something I knew a little about: wine, speech, I. P. Pavlov, horses, sleight of hand, Vietnamese, and so on. I reviewed those entries with what critical acumen I had available and let the reader generalize to the entire set. Deciphering Cyberspace is not encyclopedic but it is a serious effort to deal with a multifaceted subject by means of triangulation. In his introduction Shyles says:

As the oldest living editor of Communication Education (I cannot believe I just wrote those words) I would like to revisit the conceptualization and formation of the basic course in public speaking. In many ways the undergraduate course in basic public speaking is the discipline’s “bread and butter” course. The course introduces new students to the discipline, provides continuing teaching opportunities for both permanent and adjunct faculty and often supports graduate programs through its staffing by graduate assistants. This is an important course. In 1992 “Commentaries” in the J. of Applied Communication Research questioned whether or not, in the basic speech communication course, we are teaching skills or teaching thinking (Palmerton, 1992, 335–341) and whether or not we are either charged with or successful at teaching critical thinking in the basic speech communication course. (Powell, 1992, 342–347.) In July, 2000, Todd Frobish’s essay appeared in Communication Education taking to task authors of public speaking textbooks for not incorporating current research findings into their writing. In the Winter 2001 issue of the online American Communication Journal Todd Frobish hosts a series of short responses by authors of currently popular public speaking texts as to whether or not their works reflect the most up-to-date treatments of a variety of research findings concerning rhetoric that bear upon public speaking. The January, 2002 issue of Communication Education focused on the “Communication Curriculum” and in an essay by Morreale and Backlund presents overviews of “Communication” courses and competencies. I suggest that the concern evidenced in these “commentaries” with what has been and is happening in the basic course is not a result of the inherent nature or possible limitations of the subject matter but of a drifting away from the original, pre-Ramist, paradigm of speech and thought. (Lanham, 1993, Chapter 7, 154–194) The present exemplar, or model, for most basic courses focuses on public speaking skills. The course’s measure of success is the degree to which the student improves in platform abilities. The problem isn’t so much with including what is new but with accurately recalling and revitalizing tradition. I am suggesting a consideration of a different model for the basic course. The model I am recommending reviving is one of the oldest of our disciplinary paradigms. The basic course in speech communication should focus on heightening the student’s conceptual acuity by means of heightening the student’s public speaking ability. This course’s measure of success would be the degree to which the student improves in conceptual acuity through the improvement of his or her public speaking skills. The speech and thought braid has been recognized throughout history. Ptah-hotep, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, each spoke of the relationship between speech and thought. In contemporary times scholars continue to examine the conceptually creative and developmen-

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(1982). A speech theory of human communication: Implications and applications. Journal of Applied Communication Research: Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 1-8.

To build theory and conduct research requires clarity in and among the concepts with which we are dealing. It is argued that the concern of this discipline is with the uniquely human qualities of communication and that the term "spoken language" is primitive and minimum to this disciplinary concern. "Spoken language" is coterminous with human communication although not with all communication exhibited by humans.

Although human organizations make use of human communication they do not make use of human communication theory. This essay calls for a reordering of values in the study of human communication in human organizations and offers a preliminary discourse on a primitive theory of human communication appropriate to the called‐for reordering.

(1978). Human Communication Theory: A Highly Selective Review and Two Commentaries. Annals of the International Communication Association: Vol. 2, Communication Yearbook 2, pp. 7-22.