RHETORIC

the principles of training communicatorsthose seeking to persuade or inform; in the 20th century it has undergone a shift of emphasis from the speaker or writer to the auditor or reader. This article deals with rhetoric in both its traditional and its modern forms. For information on applications of rhetoric, see the articles broadcasting, communication, and propaganda. the principles of training communicators, whether speakers, writers, auditors, or readers. In its original form, rhetoric was the systematic study of oratory and applied to the training of orators for debate and other forms of public speaking in classical Greece and Rome. It was, in Aristotle's words, the art of persuasion. Attempts were made to carry rhetoric over to written language in the centuries after Rome's decline and the disappearance of public forums. It continued to decline in influence as a tool of knowledge, especially after the 16th century, but became entrenched in many school systems, where vestiges of classical rhetoric still remain. Classical rhetoric was a dual matter of practical application and philosophy. Most historians of rhetoric attribute its invention to the development of democracy in Syracuse in the 460s BC, when dispossessed landowners were given a chance under the new egalitarian government to argue their claims before a group of fellow citizens. So important was the ability to speak well and persuasively that shrewd speakers sought help from teachers of oratory, called rhetors, who in turn developed theories for successful speechmaking, or rhetoric. The use of language in this way was of interest to philosophers as well because the oratorical arguments called into question the relationships among language, truth, and morality. Plato and Aristotle wrote important works touching on the nature of language and its effects, and both shared a similar theory of knowledge in which truth was something preconceived. It was accepted from conventional wisdom, passed from generation to generation, without question, and the role of language was primarily to present it. Language, then, was basically decoration for fixed ideas, and rhetoric was the method of arranging these ideas in appealing ways and elaborating on them. Plato preferred that philosophers manage rhetoric because he felt that they could better use truth to improve humanity. Aristotle, however, felt that rhetoric was a skill that any educated person could use, and he wrote works that were basically educational in spirit. The uses of rhetoric, according to Aristotle, were divided into three areas. Deliberative speeches were made to advise political assemblies; forensic speeches were made in law courts; and epideictic speeches were made during ceremonies to praise and sometimes to blame others for current situations. In each of these areas there was a suasive element, an attempt to persuade listeners of something or to produce an intended effect. Related fields of discourse using language were logic and dialectic, which belonged more to philosophy than to rhetoric. Rome adopted most of this theory for similar purposes. It had a legislative and judicial system in which oratory was equally important, and the educated class was trained in rhetoric to produce effective legislators and statesmen. The two most prominent rhetoricians of the empire were Cicero, of the 1st century BC, and Quintilian, of a century later. By elaborating Greek practices, Roman rhetoric developed a process of speech composition broken into five categories: invention, or analyzing the speech topic and collecting the materials for it; disposition, or arranging the material into an oration; elocution, fitting words to the topic, the speaker, the audience, and the occasion; pronunciation, or action, delivering the speech orally; and memory, lodging ideas within the mind's storehouse. This compartmentalizing of process gave rhetoric a mechanical quality that became more pronounced as the times changed. With the decline of Rome came the disappearance of public forums. Rhetoric was practiced by theologians, whose style of preaching somewhat resembled the Roman orators but whose speech content was firmly dictated by church doctrine. By the 16th century rhetoric was being applied to letter writing. Through the influence of the French rhetorician Petrus Ramus, rhetoric was reduced to matters of style mainly and became a collection of tropes, or figures of speech, like metaphor, simile, and personification. At this point it gained a reputation for being flowery ornamentation without substance. Its use was relegated chiefly to grammar schools, where it stayed for three centuries without changing substantially. What has occurred in rhetoric recently is due to the changes in the theories of knowledge after the Renaissance. Beginning with Ren Descartes and John Locke through Friedrich Nietzsche to such contemporary philosophers as Thomas Kuhn, the relationship of language to reality has changed. The classical idea that language reflected some absolute truth or reality has given way to the idea that language largely determines what reality means to us. Given these changes in epistemology, classical rhetoric provides a misleading model for those interested in language as communication or as transmitter of knowledge. Truth is no longer a fixed idea that language presents in appealing ways but an idea relative to the perspective that language provides. Progressive thinkers of the poststructuralist school, who see language as a cultural structure which preexists and conditions the individual, would have rhetoric examine not only language but other forms of discourse in culture related to language, such as motion pictures, television, advertising, financial markets, political parties, educational systems, and so forth, which are rhetorical by nature, that is, instituted to persuade and to effect particular results. Other modern rhetoricians feel that all linguistic communication is argumentation, and they advocate the analysis and interpretation of such discourse based on an understanding of audience response and social situations. Additional reading The following works may be regarded as fundamental to the points made in the preceding article: Edwin Black, Rhetorical Criticism (1965); Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1960); William J. Brandt, The Rhetoric of Argumentation (1970); Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941), A Grammar of Motives (1945), and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950); Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, La Nouvelle Rhetorique: trait de l'argumentation, 2 vol. (1958; Eng. trans., The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, 1969); John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism (1941); and Stephen E. Toulmin, The Uses of Argument (1958). See also Chaim Perelman, The New Rhetoric: A Theory of Practical Reasoning, in The Great Ideas Today (1970).In addition, the following is helpful in understanding the modern critique of rhetorical traditions: Lloyd F. Bitzer and Edwin Black (eds.), The Prospect of Rhetoric: Report of the National Developmental Project (1971). Raymond F. Howes (ed.), Historical Studies of Rhetoric and Rhetoricians (1961); and R.S. Crane (ed.), Critics and Criticism, Ancient and Modern (1952), are particularly useful in understanding respectively the critics and rhetoricians of Cornell and Chicago, the universities at which modern rhetoric received especially strong impetus. Other works useful in a study of the history of rhetoric include Wilbur Samuel Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 15001700 (1956); George Kennedy, The Art of Persuasion in Greece (1963); and Walter J. Ong, Ramus: Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958). In addition to Ransom's book, I.A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936), helped illuminate the early stages of the modern relationship between rhetoric and literary criticism. A book-length treatment of non-Western rhetoric is Robert T. Oliver, Communication and Culture in Ancient India and China (1971).