Invention as a Social Act

The act of inventing relates to the process of inquiry, to creativity, to poetic and aesthetic invention. Building on the work of rhetoricians, philosophers, linguists, and theorists in other dis­ciplines, Karen Burke LeFevre challenges a widely-held view of rhetorical invention as the act of an atomistic individual. She proposes that invention be viewed as a social act, in which individuals in­teract dialectically with society and culture in dis­tinctive ways. Even when the primary agent of inv