Born: 1950.

Education: Loyola University of Los Angeles, BA, English; University of Southern California, MA, English, PhD, rhetoric, linguistics, and literature.

Steven Mailloux was assistant professor of English, Temple University, 1976–77; assistant professor of English, University of Miami, 1977–79; associate professor of English, University of Miami, 1979–82; professor of English, Syracuse University, 1982–86; professor of English, University of California, Irvine, 1987–91; Chancellor's Professor of rhetoric, University of California, Irvine, 1991–2010; 2009–present; President's Professor of rhetoric, Loyola Marymount University. His work in reader-response criticism and American New Pragmatism reengaged contemporary literary theory with ancient rhetoric. Rhetorical hermeneutics was his invention.

Publications

Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction (1982), Rhetorical Power (1989), Disciplinary Identities: Rhetorical Paths of English, Speech, and Composition (2006). His influential articles include “Evaluation and Reader-Response Criticism: Values Implicit in Affective Stylistics,” Style (1976); “Stanley Fish's ‘Interpreting the Variorum’: Advance or Retreat?,” Critical Inquiry (1976); “Reader-Response Criticism?,” Genre (1977); “The Red Badge of Courage and Interpretive Conventions: Critical Response to a Maimed Text,” Studies in the Novel (1978); “Literary Criticism and Composition Theory,” College Composition and Communication (1978); “Convention and Context,” New Literary History (1983); “Truth or Consequences: On Being Against Theory,” Critical Inquiry (1983); “Rhetorical Hermeneutics,” Critical Inquiry (1985); “Judging the Judge: Billy Budd and ‘Proof to All Sophistries,’ “ Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature (1989); “Persuasions Good and Bad: Bunyan, Iser, and Fish on Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Literature,” Studies in the Literary Imagination (1995); “Rhetoric Returns to Syracuse: Curricular Reform in English Studies,” English Studies/Culture Studies: Institutionalizing Dissent (1994);