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Points of departure
What is rhetoric?
As we will discuss in our first class, rhetoric has historically been defined as the
art of persuasion, as the persuasive aspects of any discourse whatever its purpose, as the
figurist elements in discourse, and as the art of distracting or inflaming an
audience to avoid speaking the truth. Histories can be composed for each of these
definition. A figurist tradition can be composed that reaches from the sophists
through Nietszche to deconstructivist accounts of language as metaphoric rather than
referential, and the dismissive attitudes of Plato have interesting continuities with
modern science's claims to transcend the vagaries of language to speak for unmediated
truths. My historical perspective centers on the civic tradition in rhetoric, which
concentrated on persuasive discourse concerned with deliberating over political needs,
abjudicating conflicts, and celebrating public values. This tradition can be
traced to classical sources such as Isocrates, Aristotle and Cicero and related to
rhetoric's traditional relations to the ethical and political concerns of moral
philosophy. From this perspective, rhetoric is integrally involved with political
philosophy and practice, and with the ethical process of translating traditional beliefs
into practical action to address the shared needs of a group.
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In my assessment, one of the most useful definition of rhetoric is that offered by Aristotle: the
art of discovering the available means of persuasion in a particular situation, or as it
is translated in the edition included in Bizzell and Herzberg, "the faculty of
observing in any given case the available means of persuasion" (153). This
definition foregrounds the process of discovering what is possible in a particular
situation for the purpose of persuading audiences how to act upon it. Below I
have links to articles that develop themes arising from this definition. Here I just
want to outline how the elements of the art of rhetoric are related to this definition.
Most obvious is the five-part process of composing discourse: invention,
arrangement, style, memory and delivery. Less obvious, as we discussed in class, is
that invention was not a solitary process for the ancients but integrally concerned with
the inventive potentials of commonplace assumptions and discursive conventions. This
definition also explicitly emphasizes the situational nature of rhetoric, with the means
of persuasion arising from the resources of the situation (rhetor/ethical appeal,
referent/logical appeal, and audience/pathetical appeal), and various types of discourse
defined by types of situations (deliberative/political assemblies, forensic/law courts,
and epideictic/ceremonial occasions). Less obviously, rhetoric has been positioned
in the process of the social construction of shared beliefs by treating sites of
controversy in a discursive domain as places or topoi where new possibilities can
be discovered.
Rhetoric's historical attention to places where what is assumed has been called
into question is perhaps the key to its critical potential to be more than the art of
convincing the public to accept the leadership of the educated. As the counterpart
to dialectic, as Aristotle also defined it, rhetoric is concerned with the generative
potentials of received assumptions, and these potentials need not be contained within an
Aristotelian frame of reference. In our discussions, we will move back and forth
among various senses of rhetoric and the praxis of negotiating shared beliefs
against changing needs in order to develop definitions of rhetoric that are not limited to
the agonistic ethos of The Rhetorical Tradition.
so what is "the rhetorical tradition"?
This question used to be easy to answer. You
could run down a genealogy that ran through centuries of theories of rhetoric enumerating
a fairly well defined and agreed upon litany of names, dates, and concepts. Now
"rhetoric" is a contested term, and "rhetorical tradition" can pretty
much be defined anyway you want. Research on the histories of rhetoric has become
dauntingly expansive because wide-ranging aspects of education, politics and literacy
are now included in "our" histories. Of course, what you include in
a history should be shaped by what you want to get out of it. What do you want your
history of rhetoric to do for you?
Of course history making is a collaborative process.
In rhetoric and composition, we have over the last decade moved beyond what used to
be unproblematically termed The Rhetorical Tradition. You are reading an anthology
of something called The Rhetorical Tradition. What is it? What does
it represent, what are the terms for defining it, and how do those definitions shape what
is worth saying, what purposes are served by writing it, and who gets to speak, write,
listen, read, and remain in silence. The Rhetorical Tradition used to be largely a
history of ideas about rhetoric, especially public persuasive and deliberative discourse,
though genres varied according to what sorts of discourse had power in the historical
context. The best known classical classical categorization of rhetoric divides it into
deliberative, judicial, and ceremonial, which were understood to be the three discursive
domains of the public sphere. In the West, the public has often been limited to
white male free property-owning males, and The Rhetorical Tradition was pretty clearly a
male tradition, valuing argument and persuasion as power over audiences and situations.
I have written about this
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