was 40 years earlier than reader-response 
criticism which became fairly well distributed near 
the end of the ’70s. But reader-response criticism 
was practised by Richards and McLuhan 40 years 
before and very well practised by them.

And that is important because advertising and 
especially television is so intensely laden with 
rhetorical devices that anybody who knew a lot 
about rhetoric for using it in being a good 
professor, addressing one’s class knowingly and 
pertinently, I would be able to analyze some of the 
most telling artifacts of our culture by applying 
the old skills of rhetoric and seeing how they