Rhetoric

From monstrouspossibility

Wikipedia Entry Google Definitions Collection of Writings on Rhetoric by Category

According to the little widget dictionary on this mac, rhetoric is "the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing, especially the use of figures of speech and other compositional techniques; language designed to have a peruasive or impressive effect on its audience, but is often regarded as lacking in sincerity or meaningful content". While this works decently as a general definition, it does encompass the term's 2,500 year history or its potential, as Eagleton identifies it, to rescue literary theory from the useless hobby of navel-gazing elites.

Rhetoric comes from the ancient Greeks, where "rhetor" meant "orator", and where oration existed as one of the chief methods to achieve power and fame. Eventually, the sophists perfected and taught the art throughout the society, eventually gaining a rather sour reputation that follows them to this day in the form of the pejorative term "sophistry", used to denounce deliberately, convolutely specious and misleading arguments. The sophists generated the idea of moral relativism, and discovered that any argument can have a counter argument, and it's effectiveness rests on the audience's reaction to it. Later, Aristotle wrote the definitive text on classical Rhetoric ("the opposite of dialectic"), concerning himself with, as he puts it, "the power of eloquence".

According to Eagleton, " The received form of critical analysis all the way from ancient society to the eighteenth century, examined the way discourses are constructedin order to achieve certain effects (p. 179).

Interest in the formal devices of language, but also converned with how these devices are actually effective at the point of 'consumption'. (ibid, p. 180)

'creative' as well as 'critical' activity. (ibid.)

provide an antidote to Structuralism and its denial of historicism in culture

also useful as a tool for understanding language, our species' use of it, and its place in defining reality. The 20th century development of rhetoric as a sub-field of the social sciences.