Considering Rhetoric/ Doing Rhetorical Criticism

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Considering Rhetoric/Doing Rhetorical Criticism

• Thursday, September 20

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Definitions of Rhetoric

• Aristotle--discovering, in any given case, the
  available means of persuasion
• Hauser--the management of symbols to coordinate
  social action
• Foss--rhetoric is the action humans perform when
  they use symbols for the purpose of communicating
  with one another

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Understanding Rhetorical Criticism--Foss

• Rhetorical criticism--the process of
  systematically investigating and explaining
  symbolic acts and artifacts for the purpose of
  understanding rhetorical processes
• Three dimensions
• systematic analysis
• symbolic acts and artifacts
• understanding rhetorical processes

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Why engage in rhetorical criticism?

• To understand why rhetoric succeeds
• To understand how to diagnose and revise our
  attempts when rhetoric fails
• To extend rhetorical theory--providing
  explanations of how rhetoric works and why
• To prevent the misuse of rhetoric

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What is rhetorical criticism?

• Rhetorical criticism is necessarily analytical.
  The scheme of a rhetorical study includes the
  elements of the speakers personality as a
  conditioning factor it includes also the public
  character of the man--not what he was, but what
  he was thought to be. It requires a description
  of the speakers audience, and of the leading
  ideas with which he plied his hearers--his
  topics, the motives to which he appealed, the
  nature of the proofs he offered...

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Wichelns continued...

• These will reveal his own judgment of human
  nature in his audiences, and also his judgement
  of the questions which he discussed. Attention
  must be paid too, to the relation of the
  surviving texts to what was actually uttered in
  case the nature of the changes is known, there
  may be occasion to consider adaptation to two
  audiences--that which heard and that which read.

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Wicheln continued...

• Nor can rhetorical criticism omit the speakers
  mode of arrangement and his mode of expression,
  nor his habit of preparation and his habit of
  delivery from the platform though the last two
  are perhaps less significant. Style--in the
  sense which corresponds to diction and sentence
  movement--must receive attention, but only as one
  among various means that secure for the speaker
  ready access to the minds of the auditors.

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Wichelns.

• Finally, the effect of the discourse on its
  immediate hearers is not to be ignored, neither
  in the testimony of witnesses, nor in the record
  of events. And throughout such a study, one must
  conceive of the public man as influencing men in
  his own times by the power of discourse.