that this century is undergoing a reality crisis has become a banality, easily and pragmatically shrugged off. Perhaps it is in fact undergoing a crisis of the imagination; a fatigue, a decadence. And rhetoricians usually appear in times of decadence, that is, when stable values disappear, when forms break down and new ones appear, coexisting with all the old ones. Their task is then to try to make sense of what is happening by working out reasoned typologies of structures.… Today the rhetoricians of innumerable kinds are more voluble than they have been for centuries.1