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 dis-ciplines, 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 in-teract dialectically with society and culture in dis-tinctive ways. Even when the primary agent of invention is an individual, invention is pervasively affected by rela-tionships of that individual to others through lan-guage and other socially shared symbol systems. LeFevre draws implications of a view of invention as a social act for writers, researchers, and teachers of writing.