Steven Mailloux reviews All in All (More or Less)

Walter Jost. All in All (More or Less): Rhetorical Considerations in Literature, Thought, and Experience. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024. 649 pp.

Review by Steven Mailloux

8 May 2025

In All in All (More or Less) Walter Jost thinks with and across rhetoric, philosophy, and literature, proposing a heuristic model for further interpretive work in these discursive genres. Rhetoric is the privileged perspective in this exploration, as Jost develops a rhetorical mode of pluralistic thinking that provides both a hermeneutic framework for identifying and interrelating other styles of theorizing and a critical strategy for meticulously dealing with the rich details of particular literary texts, especially those of what he calls “American low modernism” (p. 1)

Through various concrete examples, Jost illustrates a rhetorical criticism placed within a larger rhetorical-philosophical pluralism, foregrounding the theoretical instruments and interpretive strategies he finds in the thinking of Richard McKeon and Ludwig Wittgenstein, both working within a broadly pragmatic tradition of ordinary language philosophy. Treating the later Wittgenstein as a rhetorical philosopher, Jost emphasizes his focus on meaning and doing and characterizes him as a rhetorical grammarian and “a proto-metaphysical pluralist” (p. 39). Similarly, he promotes McKeon’s philosophical pluralism and his explicit use of rhetoric as an architectonic for the various arts. These two thinkers come up again and again as Jost develops his rhetorical-philosophical pluralism in Parts I and II and uses it to frame the rhetorical close reading in his ordinary language criticism in Part III. But besides Wittgenstein and McKeon, Jost often cites and creatively uses other, less well-known twentieth-century writers such as the French literary critic and editor Jean Paulhan and the Antillean creative writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant. Especially welcome among Jost’s interpretive touchstones is the important rhetorical thinker of the nineteenth century, John Henry Newman, a still-neglected figure Jost has championed throughout his distinguished career.

Jost characterizes his own mode of thinking as “contextual-rhetorical” and applies this frame architectonically and pluralistically to all modes of thinking, including that of rhetoric itself (p. 31). He locates his rhetorical-contextualist project directly in the wake of the linguistic turn, using McKeon, his student Richard Rorty, and especially his student Robert Brandom to demonstrate that “we have all only begun to make the linguistic turn” (p. 128). Such an attempt produces abundant benefits in theory and practice, providing rich mappings of how the linguistic turn developed rhetorically in American and European philosophy and literary study as well as proposing renewed rhetorical orientations for a practical criticism emphasizing themes and performances of thought in a range of literary texts.

Rhetorical criticism of American low modernism becomes the focus of the last third of All in All. A term coined in his earlier writings, Jost sees low modernism manifest in a range of discursive genres in the twentieth century that focus on the everyday and ordinary in human experience. Rhetorically thinking with Reginald Rose’s play and Sydney Lumet’s film, Jost focuses on how Twelve Angry Men displays little ordinary things as significant to our way of being, and among those everyday things are rhetorical acts performed and commented on by characters. In the film, the protagonist played by Henry Fonda thinks like a rhetorician, proposing alternative interpretations and dealing phronetically with the personalities of his fellow jurors, while the director Lumet thinks cinematically like a “McKeon-esque philosopher of rhetoric” (p. 447). Jost reads the “gap-metaphorics” of Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome (1911) to argue that the main character fails to take advantage of what is ready-to-hand in everyday experience and that the rhetorical display of this failure encourages the reader to be better prepared to see the opportunities of human flourishing within the ordinary (p. 470). Jost concludes with an extended discussion of the rhetorical thinking in Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry. Bishop is interested in the mind thinking and her poems rhetorically present two hermeneutic modes of seeing-as—assimilative and discriminative—that help the reader imaginatively investigate a “grammatical-rhetorical means of conceptualizing the world and ourselves” (p. 525).

The rhetorical hermeneutics Jost develops from Hans-Georg Gadamer might usefully be supplemented by incorporating the work of other thinkers who directly or indirectly borrow from early Heidegger such as Stanley Fish’s neopragmatism and James Crosswhite’s deep rhetoric. Also in line with his project are various rhetorical pragmatists in composition, communication, and cultural studies such as Robert Danisch, Amy Dayton, and Nathan Crick. And though I agree more with Jost’s rhetorical humanism than with some post-humanist and new materialist rhetorics, Jost’s pluralism would benefit from explicit acknowledgement of the useful correctives of the linguistic turn and hermeneutics in the work of Thomas Rickert on ambient rhetoric, Diane Davis on rhetoricity, and Michelle Ballif on rhetorical hauntology. But these are minor quibbles. Walter Jost has written a remarkable book, one that makes a major contribution to rhetorical criticism and theory, and more generally to thinking about thinking within humanistic studies and beyond.