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What is Rhetoric?

What is Rhetoric?. Definitions of rhetoric, classic and modern. Rhetoric is the art of discovering the available means of persuasion in the given case (Aristotle) The art of using language so as to persuade or influence others (OED)

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What is Rhetoric?

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  1. What is Rhetoric?

  2. Definitions of rhetoric, classic and modern • Rhetoric is the art of discovering the available means of persuasion in the given case (Aristotle) • The art of using language so as to persuade or influence others (OED) • Rhetoric is the study of misunderstanding and its remedies (I.A. Richards) • Wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric. And wherever there is 'meaning,' there is 'persuasion.' (K. Burke)

  3. Persuasion or Manipulation? • Rhetoric is the art of dressing up some unimportant matter so as to fool the audience for the time being (E. Pound) • Rhetoric, that powerful instrument of error and deceit (John Locke) • [Rhetoric] is not only foreign to good usage, it is its antithesis: Its essence consists in a violation of the norms of language (Todorov) • As cookery [is to] medicine -- rhetoric [is to] justice (Plato)

  4. Rhetoric as communication Structured • Means and Meaning Effective • Producing a desired effect Practical • Useful? • Praxis - practice, not (just) theory Ethical?

  5. Rhetoric as a constitutive or creative act Wayne C. Booth: “When our words and images remake our past, present, or future, they also remake the personae of those of us who accept the new realities”

  6. The Parlor Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.

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