Do you have this reference? Hynes, Peter. "Writing Across the Official Languages: Bilingualism and Rhetoric in the Canadian College." English Quarterly 20.1 (Spring 1987): 5261. I find it particularly intriguing. (In part for its contrast between the _dissertation" and the 5-paragraph essay, which I would VERY tentatively hypothesize parallels the distinction between French Rationalism and British Empericism.) At 09:54 PM 2/26/99 -0800, you wrote: My sense is that through >most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the study of >Francophone rhetoric followed the classical tradition closely. Is this >correct? This is not a terribly informed opinion, but this is my sense also. What I don't know is what, if anything, became of rhetoric as the classical tradition was replaced.