Edwin Benjamin Black (October 26, 1929 – January 13, 2007) was one of the leading scholars of rhetorical criticism.
He criticized "Neo-Aristotelianism" for its lacking a larger historical, social, political, and cultural understanding of the text and for its concentrating only on certain limited methods and aspects, such as the Aristotelian modes of rhetoric: ethos, pathos, and logos.
[1] This book was developed as a continuous project for Black's Doctoral dissertation in 1962 from Cornell University.
Black concluded that Neo-Aristotelian criticism is “founded upon a restricted view of human behavior, that there are discourses, which function in ways not dreamed of in Aristotle's Rhetoric, and that there are discourses not designed for rational judges, but for men as they are.”[6] Black argued that Neo-Aristotelianism placed disproportionate emphasis on the rationality of audience and limited the room for the development of “psychological criticism” and the study of social movements.
[7] The book also accused Neo-Aristotelians of seeing historical facts in an artificial mode, which eliminated the possibility of recreative criticism.