Rhetorical Perspective

[zmaalej]

Dear friends,

I should think that the questions set by Peter Cramer to the List translate
the anxiety of many of us about whether or not rhetoric is relevant to a
wider range of our preoccupations. I cannot but agree with Phil Graines that
rhetoric is not restricted to public discourses (e.g. I have tried to apply
the classical rhetorical categories logos, pathos, and ethos to
self-promotional discourse), which I think answers Peter's second question.
I agree with James that the critical heritage we inherit does indeed
restrict us in our freedom to act, but this doesn't prevent us from
innovating. The question will be: are we willing to submit areas of human
knowledge to methodologies we inherited to improve them? The answer to the
question is definitely positive; part of the human knowledge transmission
and generation is based on this principle of acknowledging the past as
relevant to the present and future, and, most importantly, building on it.
All scientific research falls within this perspective of investigation.
    To Peter's first question, which is whether rhetoric is just a matter of
language, Phil Graines answers that it is mostly a matter of language.
Although I partly agree with this, I think that rhetoric is also a
non-linguistic matter. Take, for instance, sales and discounts; don't they
speak to us in their own rhetoric, which exhorts us into seeing, thinking,
and acting? I think that we should agree on what rhetoric is. Brooks &
Warren (1974: 5) contend that "[R]hetoric, more specifically, is the art of
using language effectively." But I think that this definition is incomplete
for our purposes because it seems one-sided to me. When I listen to you or
read you, I will not be said to be using language as intensely or
effectively as when you are doing it, because I will not be using language
at all.
    To modestly try to complement Brook & Warren's definition, I would say
that rhetoric is a strategy of listening/reading, speaking/writing, and
seeing. As a hearer/reader, I need to be equipped with enough tools/devices
to preclude others from duping me into blindly submitting me to their
tactics; once I have these I can defeat their purposes. In this sense,
Critical Discourse Analysis is a form of reader-oriented rhetoric. As a
speaker/writer, I have to use language effectively and appropriately for
communication to take place. In this sense, Stylistics and Pragmatics are a
kind of modern version of rhetoric of use, a strategy of reading. As to
seeing, we have been offered by Speranza right today the opportunity to talk
about one major version of rhetoric as seeing represented by Lakoff &
Johnson's cognitive theory of metaphor. Cognitive theory offers us the
opportunity to see the world we live in in a fresher light, where metaphor
is not just a matter of linguistic use but fundamentally as a way of life
where language, thought, and action proceed from the same source.
    To finish, I would like to go back to Seth's post. When I talked about a
necessary rhetorical competence parallel to linguistic competence (which I
borrowed from Orecchioni's _L'Implicite_), I meant a methodology or a
strategy as Seth is suggesting. However, considering composition as content
and rhetoric as method makes us guilty of the same mistake early
stylisticians made when they separated content from form. Wouldn't
composition here be thought and rhetoric the dress of thought? There are
cases where you can easily separate composition from rhetoric. But how about
other cases where the two are, so to speak, fused? Sometimes rhetoric is
grammaticalized, some other times it is the very thought, not possible to
dissociate from the content.

This is food for thought, and apologies for this long post.

Take care
Zouhair
-----Original Message-----
From: Seth L. Kahn-Egan <slkahneg at MAILBOX.SYR.EDU>
To: DISCOURS at linguist.ldc.upenn.edu <DISCOURS at linguist.ldc.upenn.edu>
Date: 03 ÝíÝÑííå, 1999 0:55
Subject: Re: Rhetorical Perspective


>I've been reading the postings on this thread pretty carefully, and
>there's a take on the issue that I haven't seen from anybody yet.  For the
>record, I'm not entirely behind this idea--it's just a thought I've been
>stewing on for some time...
>
>The use of the term "perspective" seems to guide the discussion towards
>a variety of spatial metaphors; rhetoric is a place from which we
>see/read/make language/symbols/etc.  What happens if we shift the metaphor
>from spatiality to methodology--instead of conceptualizing rhetoric as a
>vantage-point, we might think of it as ways of seeing/reading/making
>language/symbols/etc.  What got me thinking about this is a conversation
>last semester in my rhetorical theory course, during which we bandied
>around the relationships between composition and rhetoric.  I suggested
>that composition is the content of our discipline and rhetoric (or, if
>you prefer, rhetoricizing) is the method.
>
>I haven't really been able to think this through in any kind of systematic
>way, so pardon its sketchiness.  Does this seem like a viable distinction
>to anyone else?
>
>Seth Kahn-Egan, Syracuse U.
>
>Seth Kahn-Egan
>Syracuse University
>PhD Student in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric
>slkahneg at mailbox.syr.edu
>315-423-8042 (home)
>____________________________________________________________________
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