Implied Author, Authorial Audience, and Context: Form and History in Neo-Aristotelian Rhetorical Theory

Narrative ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 140-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Shen
Keyword(s):  
Rhetorical Theory ◽  
Implied Author ◽  
Authorial Audience

scholarly journals Fictional Dialogue and the Construction of Interaction in Rosa Liksom’s Short Stories

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aino Koivisto ◽  
Elise Nykänen
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Rhetorical Structure ◽  
Implied Author ◽  
Holistic Perspective ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
Fictional Worlds ◽  
Narrative Mode ◽  
Authorial Audience

This article analyzes the dynamics of fictional dialogue in three short stories by the Finnish author Rosa Liksom. These stories are constructed almost entirely of dialogue, with minimal involvement on the part of the narrator. We adopt two different approaches to dialogue. First, we analyze dialogue from a micro level, as interaction between the characters within the storyworlds, then from a more holistic perspective, paying attention to how dialogue contributes to the rhetorical structure and ethical interpretation of the stories. We show that resorting mainly to dialogue as a narrative mode works as a way of depicting tensions between Liksom’s characters, and between them and the surrounding fictional world. This, in turn, engages the reader in an interpretative process to understand the story’s logic both within the fictional worlds and on the level of communication between the implied author and the authorial audience.

A Distinction No Longer of Use: Evolutionary Discourse and the Disappearance of the Trope/Figure Binarism

1993 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 321-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shirley Sharon-Zisser
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rhetorical Theory ◽  
Common Part ◽  
The Way

Abstract: The concem with progress and utility is shared by nineteenth-century scientists, philosophers, and rhetoricians, leading to significant correspondences among their discourses. This concern is manifest, for example, in the way in which several rhetorical treatises of the nineteenth century regard the distinction between a figure and a trope, which had been a common part of rhetorical theory since the time of Quintilian, as useless and anachronistic. By examining three nineteenth-century articulations of the justifications for erasing the trope/figure distinction from the cultural repertoire, this essay reveals structural and semantic parallels between these rhetorical treatises and the discourses of evolution and utilitarianism. Thus, the essay locates the source of the synonymity which the terms “trope” and “figure” have acquired in contemporary critical metalanguage in Victorian ideologies of progress and of the unprofitability and consequent discardability of the ancient.

WHAT IS A GOD LIKE? META-THEISTIC PRESUPPOSITIONS IN THE LETTER OF JEREMIAH

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 523-545
Author(s):  
Jaco Gericke
Keyword(s):  
Implied Author ◽  
Negative Identity

In the apocryphal text of the Letter (Epistle) of Jeremiah (Ep Jer), a long list of reasons is given by the implied author as to why certain entities alleged to be gods are not in fact such. Brief summaries of the author’s various points characterise scholarly perspectives thereon. What has been overlooked in the research, however, and the topic of this article, concerns the converse fact that, in the construction of a negative identity for divinity, the text also assumes a lot about what a god must actually be like. Moreover, what is implicit in these “meta-theistic” presuppositions has never before been identified; hence the need for an attempted inferential reconstruction of what, according to the polemics of Ep Jer, makes a god divine.

Arguing over Texts

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Camper
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Rhetorical Theory ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Textual Interpretation ◽  
Ambiguous Words ◽  
And Behaviors ◽  
Textual Meaning

Arguing over Texts presents a rhetorical method for analyzing how people disagree over the meaning of texts and how they attempt to reconcile those disagreements through argument. The book recovers and adapts a classification of recurring types of disagreement over textual meaning, invented by ancient Greek and Roman teachers of rhetoric: the interpretive stases. Drawing on the rhetorical works of Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and Hermogenes, the book devotes a chapter to each of the six interpretive stases, which classify issues concerning ambiguous words and phrases, definitions of terms, clashes between the text’s letter and its spirit, internal contradictions, applications of the text to novel cases, and the authority of the interpreter or the text itself. From the dispute over Phillis Wheatley’s allegedly self-racist poetry to the controversy over whether some of Abraham Lincoln’s letters provide evidence he was gay, the book offers examples from religion, politics, history, literary criticism, and law to illustrate that the interpretive stases can be employed to analyze debates over texts in virtually any sphere. In addition to its classical rhetorical foundation, the book draws on research from modern rhetorical theory and language science to elucidate the rhetorical, linguistic, and cognitive grounds for the argumentative construction of textual meaning. The method presented in this book thus advances scholars’ ability to examine the rhetorical dynamics of textual interpretation, to trace the evolution of textual meaning, and to explore how communities ground their beliefs and behaviors in texts.

Rhetoric, Commonplacing, and Poetics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Hadfield
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Rhetorical Theory ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Popular Work

Chapter 4 examines a variety of treatises and debates about rhetoric and its value, and whether the art of persuasion could be a dangerous tool in the hands of the unscrupulous or even whether it was a skill that risked corrupting the user, dangers that were identified by Quintilian, whose Institutio Oratoria (The Orator’s Education) shaped so much rhetorical theory and practice in the Renaissance. The chapter explores the practice of commonplacing, noting down particular maxims which could then serve as the basis of explorations of issues, a practice that, like rhetoric, generated anxiety about truth, falsehood, and lying. Particular attention is paid to Erasmus’s Colloquies and Lingua; William Baldwin’s A Treatise of Moral Philosophy, the most popular work of philosophy in sixteenth-century England; the use of commonplaces in Montaigne’s Essays; George Puttenham’s use of proverbs and figures in his Arte of English Poesie (1589); and Sir Philip Sidney’s understanding of poetry as lying in The Defence of Poetry.

scholarly journals ERASMUS AND JUAN LUIS VIVES ON RHETORICAL DECORUM AND POLITICS

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
KAARLO HAVU
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political Rhetoric ◽  
Rhetorical Theory ◽  
History Of Rhetoric ◽  
Rhetorical Situation ◽  
Internal Development ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of

Abstract The article analyses the emergence of decorum (appropriateness) as a central concept of rhetorical theory in the early sixteenth-century writings of Erasmus and Juan Luis Vives. In rhetorical theory, decorum shifted the emphasis from formulaic rules to their creative application in concrete cases. In doing so, it emphasized a close analysis of the rhetorical situation (above all the preferences of the audience) and underscored the persuasive possibilities of civil conversation as opposed to passionate, adversarial rhetoric. The article argues that the stress put on decorum in early sixteenth-century theory is not just an internal development in the history of rhetoric but linked to far wider questions concerning the role of rhetoric in religious and secular lives. Decorum appears as a solution both to the divisiveness of language in the context of the Reformation and dynastic warfare of the early sixteenth century and as an adaptation of the republican tradition of political rhetoric to a changed, monarchical context. Erasmus and Vives maintained that decorum not only suppressed destructive passions and discord, but that it was only through polite and civil rhetoric (or conversation) that a truly effective persuasion was possible in a vast array of contexts.

Managerial Theory and Technical Writing: Get a Job

1982 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-67
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Curley
Keyword(s):  
Human Behavior ◽  
Technical Writing ◽  
Rhetorical Theory ◽  
Traditional Theory ◽  
Theory Y ◽  
Theory X

We may discover the basis for a humanistic rhetoric of technical writing by examining managerial theories of human behavior. Complaints about the deficiencies of writers and their work correspond remarkably to complaints about the deficiencies of employees and their work. And both sets of complaints may actually be related to the traditional Theory X of human behavior, held by managers and teachers of writing. An alternative managerial theory proposed by Douglas McGregor, Theory Y, suggests ways to encourage an individual's initiative and to satisfy the organization's goals simultaneously. Since technical writing weds the worlds of writing and working, this managerial theory can provide a sound basis for a rhetorical theory that encourages a writer's initiative and satisfies the goals of writing simultaneously. The letter of application for employment illustrates how Theory Y works.

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