Rebirth of Rhetoric brings together contributions from several fields to provide a forum in which a unifying theory for language and literature studies can be debated.The book does not aim to resurrect classical Renaissance rhetoric, but to remake it within a contemporary context. The context of texts (both spoken and written) is one of the main emphases of this collection, whether it is the ideology informing the text, or the way in which a text is transformed by its audience. The book also aims to present a range of practical approaches to the study of texts of all kinds: literary; televisual; film and photography. It also argues the case for developments in the Arts and Humanities which will bring together people working in Education, Linguistics, Composition, Literature and Cultural Studies.
Rebirth of Rhetoric brings together contributions from several fields to provide a forum in which a unifying theory for language and literature studies can be debated.The book does not aim to resurrect classical Renaissance rhetoric, but to remake it within a contemporary context. The context of texts (both spoken and written) is one of the main emphases of this collection, whether it is the ideology informing the text, or the way in which a text is transformed by its audience. The book also aims to present a range of practical approaches to the study of texts of all kinds: literary; televisual; film and photography. It also argues the case for developments in the Arts and Humanities which will bring together people working in Education, Linguistics, Composition, Literature and Cultural Studies.
Dialogue has suffered a long eclipse in the history of philosophy and the history of rhetoric but has enjoyed a rebirth in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Martin Buber, and Mikhail Bakhtin. Among twentieth-century figures, Bakhtin took a special interest in the history of the dialogue form. This book explores Bakhtin's understanding of Socratic dialogue and the notion that dialogue is not simply a way of persuading others to accept our ideas, but a way of holding ourselves, and others, accountable for all of our thoughts, words, and actions. In supporting this premise, Bakhtin challenges the traditions of argument and persuasion handed down from Plato and Aristotle, and he offers, as an alternative, a dialogical rhetoric that restructures the traditional relationship between speakers and listeners, writers and readers, as a mutual testing, contesting, and creating of ideas. The author suggests that Bakhtin's dialogical rhetoric is not restricted to oral discourse, but is possible in any medium, including written, graphic, and digital.
This collection of essays provides original studies of various New Testament texts read through the eyes of rhetorical criticism as well as a tribute to the continuing influence of Wilhelm Wuellner and his work.
The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media offers a historical critique of composition studies’ rebirth narrative, using that critique to propose a new rhetoric for new media work. Author Jeff Rice returns to critical moments during the rebirth of composition studies when the discipline chose not to emphasize technology, cultural studies, and visual writing, which are now fundamental to composition studies. Rice redefines these moments in order to invent a new electronic practice. The Rhetoric of Cool addresses the disciplinary claim that composition studies underwent a rebirth in 1963. At that time, three writers reviewed technology, cultural studies, and visual writing outside composition studies and independently used the word cool to describe each position. Starting from these three positions, Rice focuses on chora, appropriation, commutation, juxtaposition, nonlinearity, and imagery—rhetorical gestures conducive to new media work-- to construct the rhetoric of cool. An innovative work that approaches computers and writing issues from historical, critical, theoretical, and practical perspectives, The Rhetoric of Cool challenges current understandings of writing and new media and proposes a rhetorical rather than an instrumental response for teaching writing in new media contexts.
This book provides examples of the best modern scholarship on rhetoric in the renaissance. Lawrence Green, Lisa Jardine, Kees Meerhoff, Dilwyn Knox, Brian Vickers, George Hunter, Peter Mack, David Norbrook and Pat Rubin look at the reception of Aristotle's Rhetoric in the renaissance; the place of rhetoric in Erasmus's career, Melanchthon's teaching, and sixteenth century protestant schools; the rhetoric textbook; the use of rhetoric in Raphael, renaissance drama, Elizabethan romance, and seventeenth century political writing. It will become essential reading for advanced studies in English, rhetoric, art history, history, history of education, history of ideas, political theory, and reformation history.
This volume features two dimensions of Michael Osborn’s work with rhetorical metaphor. The first focuses on his early efforts to develop a conception of metaphor to advance the understanding of rhetoric, while the second concerns more recent efforts to apply this enriched conception in the analysis and criticism of significant rhetorical practice. The older emphasis features four of Osborn’s more prominent published essays, revealing the personal context in which they were generated, their strengths and shortcomings, and how they may have inspired the work of others. His more recent unpublished work analyzes patterns of metaphor in the major speeches of Demosthenes, the evolution of metaphors of illness and cure in speeches across several millennia, the exploitation of the birth-death-rebirth metaphor in Riefenstahl’s masterpiece of Nazi propaganda Triumph of the Will, and the contrasting forms of spatial imagery in the speeches of Edmund Burke and Barack Obama and what these contrasts may portend.
Examining the development of rhetoric and composition, using the writings of Theresa Jarnagin Enos as a basis for studies of broader trends, this book explores topics including the historical relations of rhetoric and composition, their evolution within programs of study, and Enos’s research on gender.
Possession and Persuasion: The Rhetoric of Christian Faith is a rhetorical analysis of Christian history and theology initially prompted by my experience in a fundamentalist Christian sect. The story of this experience is briefly told in the prologue, "The Rhetoric of Surrender," which describes the "surrender" of my life to God through a commitment to an authoritarian Christian sect in Gainesville, Florida, in 1972, when I was a freshman at the University of Florida. I spent the following fifteen years, first, as a student recruit, trainee, and then leader in the founding church in Gainesville, and then, as a recruiter and trainer in other parts of the U.S. until I finally left the movement (now called the International Churches of Christ) in 1987. I subsequently combined graduate study in rhetoric with a continuing interest in biblical and historical scholarship in an effort to understand how my religious experience fit into the broader context of Christian history and theology. I concluded that the New Testament language of faith, originally formulated to persuade hearers of the Christian message by means of understanding, had been radically redefined and its effects rhetorically reengineered by the ecclesiastical Christianity which had gradually emerged after the first century; this process of rhetorical reinvention produced a language of faith that possessed its hearers by means of a mystical form of indoctrination, in the interest of building a religious empire. The degree to which ecclesiastical Christianity, throughout its history, has taken its faith-language seriously--my experience having been produced by a movement that took this language to its logical conclusion --is the degree to which its adherents experience a religious bondage that amounts to the antithesis of the spiritual freedom and social equality of the original experience of Christian faith. Part I, "Faith as Possession," addresses critical changes made by post-apostolic theologians in the apostolic discourse of the New Testament about the message of Jesus, specifically with reference to the rhetorics of "authority" (Chapter One), "knowledge" (Chapter Two), and "justice" (Chapter Three). This rhetorical reengineering of apostolic language facilitated the rise of the institutional Church, which rapidly replaced the apostolic message as the authorized mediator between God and humanity in general and between God and the community of faith in particular. That is, the dynamic of persuasion by an eschatological message was rapidly replaced by the dynamic of possession by an ecclesiastical system. The redefinition and reconceptualization of these apostolic terms amounted to the rhetorical invention of Christianity, a form of Greco-Roman mythology which has little in common with the faith of Jesus as it is revealed in the New Testament. The faith of Christianity became, and continues to be to varying degrees, a form of possession insofar as it consists of, in both a mystical and an institutional sense, belonging to "the Church," which relieves its members of their responsibility for their own identity and destiny. Part II, "Faith as Persuasion," explores the rhetoric of three apostolic ideals, which have generally received little more than lip service by post-apostolic Christianity: "understanding" (Chapter Four), "anticipation" (Chapter Five), and "freedom" (Chapter Six). These concepts are integral to persuasion as the modus operandi of the apostolic Christian faith. Understanding is a prerequisite to authentic persuasion in that persuasion, or belief, without understanding is the essence of possession. In that the meaning and power of the Christian message are a matter of the hope of resurrection to life in the coming kingdom of God, anticipation is the logical response to being understandingly persuaded of the truth of the message. And insofar as internal bondage characterizes life without hope
