Rhetorical Structure Theory has enjoyed continuous attention since its origins in the 1980s. It has been applied, compared to other approaches, and also criticized in a number of areas in discourse analysis, theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics. In this article, we review some of the discussions about the theory itself, especially addressing issues of the reliability of analyses and psychological validity, together with a discussion of the nature of text relations. We also propose areas for (...) further research. A follow-up article will discuss applications of the theory in various fields. (shrink)

Rhetorical Structure Theory is a theory of text organization that has led to areas of application beyond discourse analysis and text generation, its original goals. In this article, we review the most important applications in several areas: discourse analysis, theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics. We also provide a list of resources useful for work within the RST framework. The present article is a complement to our review of the theoretical aspects of the theory.

Various argumentation analysis tools permit the analyst to represent functional components of an argument (e.g., data, claim, warrant, backing), how arguments are composed of subarguments and defenses against potential counterarguments, and argumentation schemes. In order to facilitate a study of argument presentation in a biomedical corpus, we have developed a hybrid scheme that enables an analyst to encode argumentation analysis within the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), which can be used to represent the discourse structure (...) of a text. This paper describes the hybrid representation scheme and illustrates its use for investigation of contexts that license omission of elements of an argument. The analyses given in the paper involve reconstruction of enthymemes. Defeasible argumentation schemes serve as a constraint on reconstruction. In addition, the examples illustrate several other types of contextual constraints on reconstruction of enthymemes. (shrink)

Rhetorical Structure Theory, as a tool for analyzing written texts, is particularly appropriate for analyzing argumentative texts. The distinction that RST makes between the part of a text that realizes the primary goal of the writer, termed nucleus, and the part that provides supplementary material, termed satellite, is crucial for the analysis of argumentative texts.

The study we report in this article addresses the results of comparing the rhetorical trees from two different languages carried out by two annotators starting from the Rhetorical Structure Theory. Furthermore, we investigate the methodology for a suitable evaluation, both quantitative and qualitative, of these trees. Our corpus contains abstracts of medical research articles written both in Spanish and Basque, and extracted from Gaceta Médica de Bilbao. The results demonstrate that almost half of the annotator disagreement (...) is due to the use of translation strategies that notably affect rhetorical structures. (shrink)

The rhetorical structure of Vico’s pedagogy is shaped predominantly by the ars topica. While most would associate the ars topica with the classical Greek and Roman cultures, where theories of topoi predominate rhetorical theory and pedagogy, this essay shows that the ars topica in the rhetorical structure of Vico’s pedagogy must be heroic in nature, rather than classical. Embodied in the figure of Homer, the ars topica in Vico’s pedagogy stands beyond the technical consciousness (...) of the classical world. The figure of Homer stands for the imaginative poetic capacity to make figural connections and to escape the reduction of meaning to technical formulae. Such escape, for Vico, ensures the life and liberty of not only the individual mind but the civic realm. (shrink)

Book synopsis: What is the relationship between philosophy, social theory and empirical research? In what ways can we claim to 'know' the social world? What properties does the social world possess and what are their implications? This ground-breaking and multi-disciplinary book brings together a distinguished team of leading thinkers to discuss issues surrounding and informing questions such as: what is the 'social', in what ways can we 'know' it, and how can our findings be validated? These issues are discussed (...) in an accessible way, including the relationship of philosophical and research issues to each other, the nature of social reality, properties that may be ascribed to the social, research accounts and rhetorical 'persuasion', and the relations between 'gender and knowing'. The overall concern of the book is to clarify how and in what ways we can claim to know the social world and what implications and consequences this may have for social scientific practice. For too long philosophers, social theorists and methodologists have talked past each other, often unaware of the mutually beneficial insights that each offers the other. This book is intended to contribute to a more constructive encounter and dialogue in order to advance understanding of the problems and possibilities surrounding the quest to know the social world. With this overall aim in mind, it will be essential reading for advanced undergraduates and postgraduate students in the social sciences, as well as philosophers, social theorists, methodologists and social researchers in general. (shrink)

Drawing on the theory of inter-cultural rhetoric analysis and considering the important role of newspaper editorials in shaping public opinions, this article examines the schematic structures of Persian and English newspaper editorials of criticism. The aim of this comparative study was to explore the discourse conventions employed in the editorials of The New York Times and Tehran Times. While revealing some interesting genre-specific features of schematic structures of the editorials in the two newspapers, the results of the study also (...) indicated that cultural constraints did not substantially affect the schematic structures of the editorials. However, they had implications for realization of certain rhetorical structures in the editorials. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Notes and Fragments THE RHETORICAL CASE AGAINST A THEORY OF LITERATURE AND SCIENCE by Mark Kipperman In the last twenty years or so, attacks on naive realist theories of science —from the historicism of Kuhn to the outright anarchism of Feyerabend — have encouraged a perhaps equally simplistic notion of science as mere model-making, a metaphoric discourse analogous to poetry. From another direction, liberal defenders of science (...) as a liberal art, like Jacob Bronowski, would subsume both science and poetry under what we might call "liberal discourse in general," the unrestricted, trudiseeking, world-building acts of human imagination. But all such attempts —relativist, historicist, or liberal truth-seeker — to "reconcile" literature and science misunderstand both the meaning of metaphor and the meaning of truth in the humanities. If we are truly to value, understand, and preserve the uniqueness of literary discourse, we must argue that science and literature not only cannot be "reconciled" but also that they must not be. Despite my title, I intend to argue not that a theory of literature and science is impossible, but mat any theory that attempts to show that both activities can be significantly unified in a larger historical or linguistic structure will miss the point of their incompatibility as human activities. A study of literature and science should display not their theoretical unity but their rhetorical diversity, where rhetoric is understood as die study of language's purposiveness in respect to human action, language's purposiveness in persuading its audience to see and to build this kind ofworld rather than that one. While both literature and science may both use 76 Mark Kipperman77 metaphor and share similar linguistic structures, die rhetorical directions of the two activities are not only different, they are opposed. To construct a theory, as Heidegger points out in his essay "Science and Reflection," means to step back, as is implied by the etymology of the Greek théôrein, to behold the appearance from the outside; and in our world to theorize is to behold as an object, as science does.1 Theories of literature and science that invoke linguistics or historiography may well show — indeed, precisely because the standpoint of theory is adopted, probably will show — that science's own linguistic structure looks very much like literature's. But here, having adopted die dieoretical standpoint, we are already acting as scientists, treating both science and literature as objects of observation. If we act as rhetoricians, we stand inside the scientific or literary arguments and ask what their language is trying to persuade us of, and what their activities are trying to do. After the work of Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Mary Hesse, it would be difficult to deny that science, from the point of view of epistemology or historiography, creates like art a series ofhistorically evolving metaphors, models, redefinitions. And, ofcourse, I do not deny the utility ofa literary critical language that on its side shares the historiographie or analytic subtlety of a science. But if the question is a dieory not of science and criticism, but of science and belles lettres, I believe a note of caution is called for. The worlds created by scientific and literary languages are so different that their common use of metaphor is less significant than the divergence of their aims and results. Even Kuhn has warned against applying his historiographie theory of science to the arts in the face of their diverse sociological, educational, and "normal" practical activity.2 Briefly, the aim ofscientific rhetoric is to persuade us that it reflects only a world ofobjects; die aim of literature is to persuade us that it reflects a world of human speech, representations, actions. The aim ofliterary argument is to reveal truth within this public sphere. Science's language of lawfulness argues that it is pre-Adamic, repeating but not distorting nature as physis— in Aristotle's words, nature as things that come into being through "necessity" or that "have their origin in themselves." Literary language takes its place among human artifacts that come into being through deliberation, argument, production, or action, and so belongs to the historical manifestation of nature and human nature in which it originates.3 But does not science... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Appropriate Indecorum Rhetoric and Aesthetics in the Political Theory of Jacques RancièreEthan StonemanJacques Rancière is one of France's leading intellectuals and a recent addition to the who's who of Continental philosophy. Since his time as a student at the Ecole normale supérieure, Rancière has generated a body of work that is at once wide-ranging, interdisciplinary, and consistent. His arguments for a postfoundational and postliberal democratic understanding of politics (...) have influenced, echoed, or demanded critical response from such other Continental luminaries as Slavoj Žižek (1999, 2004) and Alain Badiou (2005). Much of this cachet is no doubt due to Rancière's central thesis regarding the sources, uses, and ends of politics. According to this argument, politics does not derive from putative a priori truths about knowledge, human nature, or social interaction; it is not a function of particular forms of government, and it neither establishes nor ensures socioeconomic order. Rather, for Rancière politics is a dissensual activity consisting solely in the demonstration of equality. But rather than designating something to be attained, preserved, or balanced against competing factors, Rancière's equality names an assumption that political subjects must presuppose on their own account and exhibit through their own actions. Insofar as a given social arrangement is hierarchical, the egalitarian presupposition will be necessarily agonistic and symbolically disruptive of that order. [End Page 129] In a word, Rancière champions a politics from the ground up, one that defends without patronizing the down-and-out, the disenfranchised, the unseen, and the unheard.During the last quarter of the twentieth century, while Rancière was formulating his theory of politics, American rhetoricians began to assert the continued relevance of decorum to the analysis of contemporary social phenomena (see, e.g., Fantham 1984; Leff 1987, 1990; Rosteck and Leff 1990; Hariman 1992, 1995; Smith 1992; Deem 1995). These efforts were concurrent with other attempts to foreground the aesthetic capacity of rhetoric to create, sustain, and transform perception via the symbolic manipulation of appearances (see, e.g., Farrell 1993; Whitson and Poulakos 1993; Vitanza 1997; Greene 1998). It is surprising, however, that these efforts to revitalize decorum and aesthetics have largely fail to reference recent Continental theories of aesthetics, many of which have tacit but unexplored bearing on decorum and rhetoric in general. Equally surprising is the tendency, within rhetorical studies, to discuss aesthetics without so much as broaching the subject of decorum. One exception to this trend is Robert Hariman (1992, 1995), who makes a convincing case for the conceptual intimacy between decorum and aesthetics. The classical theory of decorum, he argues, "blended significant aspects of rhetorical practice, social awareness, and political structure into an aesthetic sensibility that directed the selection of diction appropriate to one's subject or situation" (1992, 152). According to this account, decorum in the classical era engendered an aesthetic orientation toward one's sociopolitical environment and the rhetorical practices therein.I contend that Rancière's political theory makes significant strides toward bridging the gap between decorum, aesthetics, and politics while at the same time focusing attention on the role of equality and the empowering potential of indecorum. Although rhetoricians have tended not to address the inventional possibilities of indecorum per se, there has been a recurring effort among those writing on decorum to explicate the conditions of rhetorical performances of confrontation, nonadjustment, and resistance—performances that would eschew a logic of influence and assent for a tactics of opposition and disturbance. This trend has been accompanied by periodic attempts to account for rhetoric's potential to interrupt dominant modes of discourse and rationality and to identify its countervailing forces and formal constraints (Scott and Smith 1969; Windt 1972; Campbell 1973; Phillips 1996; Doxtader 2000). It is my contention that Rancière's political vocabulary can extend this line of inquiry by [End Page 130] expanding the possibility for indecorum to subvert the symbolic structures of oppression and domination while avoiding the pitfalls of adaptation and co-optation, that is, the reconstitution of decorum via dialectical syntheses of competing codes of conduct. Specifically, rhetoricians may interpret Rancière's political theory as answering Melissa Deem's... (shrink)

We present a corpus-based study of coherence in multimodal documents. We concern ourselves with the types of relationships between graphs and tables and the text of the document in which they appear. In order to understand and categorize the types of relations across modalities, we are making use of Rhetorical Structure Theory, and propose that this can adequately describe these types of relations. We analyzed a corpus comprising three different genres, and consisting of about 1500 pages of (...) material and almost 600 figures, tables and graphs. We show that figures stand in both presentational and subject matter relations to the text, and that the relationship between figures and text is one of a small set out of the larger possible rhetorical relations. We also discuss several issues that arise in the treatment of multimodal material, such as the potential for multiple connections between figure and text. (shrink)

This book aims to help readers interpret, and reflect on, their reading more effectively. It presents doctrines of ancient and renaissance rhetoric (an education in how to write well) as questions or categories for interpreting one's reading. The first chapter presents the questions. Later chapters use rhetorical theory to bring out the implications of, and suggest possible answers to, the questions: about occasion and audience (chapter 2), structure and disposition (3), narrative (4), argument (5), further elements of (...) content, such as descriptions, comparisons, proverbs and moral axioms, dialogue, and examples (6), and style (7). Chapter eight describes ways of gathering material, formulating arguments and writing about the texts one reads. The conclusion considers the wider implications of taking a rhetorical approach to reading. The investigation of rhetoric's questions is interspersed with analyses of texts by Chaucer, Sidney, Shakespeare, Fielding and Rushdie, using the questions. The text is intended for university students of literature, especially English literature, and rhetoric, and their teachers. (shrink)

The essays in Rhetorical Spaces grow out of Lorraine Code's ongoing commitment to engaging philosophical issues as they figure in people's everyday lives. The arguements in this book are informed at once by the moral-political implications of how knowledge is produced and circulated and by issues of gendered subjectivity. In their critical dimension, these lucid essays engage with the incapacity of the philosophical mainstream's dominant epistemologies to offer regulative principles that guide people in the epistemic projects that figure centrally (...) in their lives. In its constructive dimension, Rhetorical Spaces focuses on developing productive, case-by-case analyses of knowing other people in situations where social-political inequalities create asymmetrical patterns of epistemic power and privilege. Framing all of the essays is the conception of rhetorical spaces which shows that prevailing intellectual-political climates can work to enhance or to thwart possibilities of establishing cognitive authority for the members of a society who belong to groups other than the dominant ones. Finally, bridging the gap between theory and practice, Lorraine Code shows how the issue of reconfiguring structures of authority and expertise are not just matters of individual responsibility, but require a radical restructuring of the communities and social orders in which people know and act. (shrink)

In accordance with the compositionality criterion and hierarchy principle of Rhetorical Structure Theory, this study reframes each tree in the RST Discourse Treebank into three new dependency trees with ultimate nodes being clauses, sentences, and paragraphs, respectively, which also draw on an analogy between syntactic and discourse trees. Detailed percentages of various RST relations at the three granularity levels are examined, illuminating the discourse processes of organizing units of one granularity level into those of the next upper (...) level and suggesting certain homogeneity and interaction across levels in the Treebank, particularly at the two upper levels. The study demonstrates the applicability of RST analysis between same-level terminal units. With unique analytical advantages, the newly constructed discourse dependency trees provide new research prospects. (shrink)

Noah Rosenberg et al.'s 2002 article “Genetic Structure of Human Populations” reported that multivariate genomic analysis of a large cell line panel yielded reproducible groupings (clusters) suggestive of individuals' geographical origins. The paper has been repeatedly cited as evidence that traditional notions of race have a biological basis, a claim its authors do not make. Critics of this misinterpretation have often suggested that it follows from interpreters' personal biases skewing the reception of an objective piece of scientific writing. I (...) contend, however, that the article itself to some degree facilitates this misrepresentation. I analyze in detail several verbal and visual features of the original article that may predispose aspects of its racial interpretation; and, tracing the arguments of one philosopher and one popular science writer, I show how these features are absorbed, transformed into arguments for a biological basis of race, and re-attributed to the original. The essay demonstrates how even slight ambiguities can enable the misappropriation of scientific writing, unintentionally undermining the authors' stated circumspection on the relationship between cluster and race. (shrink)

A social conception of science -- The pursuit of forms -- Beyond the doctrine of signs -- Structures of mediation -- Signs in action -- Prospects of communication -- From a rhetorical point of view.

Which properties are characteristic of the enthymeme in Aristotle's Rhetoric? There is no consensus on this point. The present discussion centres on three properties. 1. Is there always an implicit premise? (Answer: Above all, a pragmatic level and a logical level must be distinguished.) 2. Do the premises consist by definition of probabilities and signs? (Answer: No.). 3. Are all enthymemes reducible to a syllogistic form? (Answer: The literature pertaining to this question is dominated by a false dilemma: an enthymeme (...) does not have either a topical or a syllogistic structure). In general, Aristotle's approach to the enthymeme in the Rhetoric appears to shift from argumentation theory to logic. (shrink)

Ockham’s razor is the characteristic scientific penchant for simpler, more testable, and more unified theories. Glymour’s early work on confirmation theory eloquently stressed the rhetorical plausibility of Ockham’s razor in scientific arguments. His subsequent, seminal research on causal discovery still concerns methods with a strong bias toward simpler causal models, and it also comes with a story about reliability—the methods are guaranteed to converge to true causal structure in the limit. However, there is a familiar gap between (...) convergent reliability and scientific rhetoric: convergence in the long run is compatible with any conclusion in the short run. For that reason, Carnap suggested that the proper sense of reliability for scientific inference should lie somewhere between short-run reliability and mere convergence in the limit. One natural such concept is straightest possible convergence to the truth, where straightness is explicated in terms of minimizing reversals of opinion and cycles of opinion prior to convergence. We close the gap between scientific rhetoric and scientific reliability by showing that Ockham’s razor is necessary for cycle-optimal convergence to the truth, and that patiently waiting for information to resolve conflicts among simplest hypotheses is necessary for reversal-optimal convergence to the truth. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric and Capitalism:Rhetorical Agency as Communicative LaborRonald Walter GreeneIt is a commonplace to describe rhetorical agency as political action. From such a starting point, rhetorical agency describes a communicative process of inquiry and advocacy on issues of public importance. As political action, rhetorical agency often takes on the characteristics of a normative theory of citizenship; a good citizen persuades and is persuaded by the (...) gentle force of the better argument. More radical visions of argument might include strikes, sit-ins, and boycotts in the rhetorical arsenal of good citizenship, and some might even flirt with violence as rhetorical action. This model of rhetorical agency requires a translation of the conceptual apparatus of rhetoric and its alignment with the problematics of democratic theory and actually existing democratic regimes. Classical models that hoped to harness rhetorical agency to the making of the "orator-statesman" (sic) must reimagine political participation in terms of publics and counterpublics, social movements, electoral campaigns, communication media and technologies, as well as supra- and sub-national institutional settings. As the classical norms of citizenship rub against (post) modern realities, a permanent anxiety over the meaning and potential of rhetorical agency seems destined to be lodged in the critical imagination of rhetorical studies. If politics today is, in Jodi Dean's words, "a domain of financially mediated and professionalized practices centered on advertising, public relations, and the means of mass communication," then actually existing rhetorical agency manifests itself in efforts to "raise the money, buy the television time, register the domain names, build the website, and craft the accessible, user-friendly, spectacular message" (2003, 96).If we recognize Dean's description of the political as an accurate description of the rhetorical situation today, rhetorical studies is left with three strategies: It can refashion a deliberative vision of rhetorical agency into a normative ideal for critiquing the structural conditions (capital, media [End Page 188] concentration) of political participation. Second, it can enlarge the field of normatively acceptable ways and means of political participation, for example, by embracing the more spectacular politics associated with visual and body rhetorics. Finally, rhetorical studies can work on the "demand" side and design new strategies and tactics for activating the rhetorical participation of citizens, for example, by encouraging the creation of communicative norms necessary for reinvigorating voluntary and civic organizations. However, while each of these approaches provides a research agenda, none of them gets at the root cause of the anxiety over agency: the attachment of rhetorical agency to a vision of political change. The anxiety over agency pushes rhetorical critics and theorists into becoming moral entrepreneurs scolding, correcting, and encouraging the body politic to improve the quality and quantity of political participation.The purpose of this paper is to offer an escape route from theorizing rhetorical agency as a model of political communication.1 In opposition to a political-communicative vision of rhetorical agency, this paper suggests a different materialist ontology, one that imagines rhetorical agency as a form of living labor. I will argue that rhetorical agency belongs to the domain of communicative labor, a form of labor increasingly necessary to the workings of contemporary capitalist production. In other words, I want to replace a political-communicative model of rhetorical agency with a materialist-communicative model. To highlight the similarities and differences between the two models, I will focus on how the interface between politics, communication, and economics plays out in the Marxist tradition of rhetorical studies. I will organize this tradition into two sections: the first, represented by James Aune, advocates a hermeneutic approach to rhetorical agency, and the second, represented by Dana Cloud, argues for imagining rhetorical agency as a class-based social movement. By focusing on the work of my comrades, the paper risks being received as a "left sectarian" polemic.2 As I will demonstrate in each section, the problem with these two approaches has less to do with Marxism and more to do with how they turn to hermeneutics and social movements to imagine rhetorical agency in the idiom of communication theory. In the third section of the paper I will resituate rhetorical agency into a materialist ontology of labor and capitalist production. In so... (shrink)

The “extreme consequence” is a very common pattern in advertising messages that presents an odd, even negative, situation resulting from the use of the advertised product as a good reason to buy it. By analyzing selected advertisements employing this pattern using the conceptual integration theory and the Argumentum Model of Topics, we aim to understand how “extreme consequence” works at the rhetorical and argumentative levels. The analyses allow us to detect the typical, generic, cognitive, and argumentative structure (...) underlying the pattern and to identify the rhetorical and argumentative role played by its main components, namely exaggeration and cause-effect relation. (shrink)

This paper suggests a specific contribution of contemporary history and philosophy of science to the theory of history. The “pragmatic” in the technical sense of analysis of use and user aspects of scientific discourse, and the “pragmatist”, in the sense of a focus on utility as canon, dimensions of modern philosophy of science illumine the structure of historical inquiry. Simply put, the structure of writing produced by the historical discipline is argumentative. Further, the nature of the historical (...) argumentative strategies is best described by reference to classical rhetorical, to topical modes of argument. (shrink)

In the field of philosophy, Plato's view of rhetoric as a potentially treacherous craft has long overshadowed Aristotle's view, which focuses on rhetoric as an independent discipline that relates in complex ways to dialectic and logic and to ethics and moral psychology. This volume, composed of essays by internationally renowned philosophers and classicists, provides the first extensive examination of Aristotle's Rhetoric and its subject matter in many years. One aim is to locate both Aristotle's treatise and its subject within the (...) more general context of his philosophical treatment of other disciplines, including moral and political theory as well as poetics. The contributors also seek to illuminate the structure of Aristotle's own conception of rhetoric as presented in his treatise. The first section of the book, which deals with the arguments of rhetoric, contains essays by M. F. Burnyeat and Jacques Brunschwig. A section treating the status of the art of rhetoric features pieces by Eckart Schütrumpf, Jürgen Sprute, M. M. McCabe, and Glenn W. Most. Essays by John M. Cooper, Stephen Halliwell, and Jean-Louis Labarrière address topics related to rhetoric, ethics, and politics. The final section, on rhetoric and literary art, comprises essays by Alexander Nehamas and André Laks. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetorical Circulation in Late CapitalismNeoliberalism and the Overdetermination of Affective EnergyCatherine ChaputIn the world we have known since the nineteenth century, a series of governmental rationalities overlap, lean on each other, challenge each other, and struggle with each other: art of government according to truth, art of government according to the rationality of the sovereign state, and art of government according to the rationality of economic agents, and (...) more generally, according to the rationality of the governed themselves. And it is all these different arts of government, all these different types of ways of calculating, rationalizing, and regulating the art of government which, overlapping with each other, broadly speaking constitute the object of political debate.Michel Foucault, The Birth of BiopoliticsCritical rhetoricians interested in the power dynamics between rhetoric and capitalism have established for themselves the ambitious task of explaining how multiple, intertwined rationalities govern individual and collective [End Page 1] behavior in relationship to the ever-shifting logics of capitalism. Approaches to this complicated directive frequently envision rhetoric as a mediating force among agentive subjects who act within well-defined political economic landscapes. Wedded to a political-communicative model wherein appropriate rhetorical choices persuade those with authority to distribute disputed political and economic rights, rhetorical theory becomes a sophisticated handbook for discovering topoi and executing decorous statements. This focus, according to Ronald Walter Greene, results in a "permanent anxiety over the meaning and potential of rhetorical agency" that positions rhetoricians as "moral entrepreneurs scolding, correcting, and encouraging the body politic" (2004, 188, 189). Committing themselves to endless debates about correct responses in situated spaces, rhetorical theories that underscore agency lose site of the world in flux and of our participation in that world's unpredictable unfoldings. Alternatively, Greene suggests rethinking rhetorical theory through a materialist-communicative model wherein the immaterial labor of communication produces value. Conceptualizing discursive practices as a form of labor rather than a form of political signification sidesteps anxiety about well-chosen language and emphasizes the life-affirming activity involved in deciphering issues, inventing paths through those issues, and communicating new ideas to others. In short, Greene's materialist model challenges critical rhetoricians to end their perennial search for a discursive key to the storehouse of political economic goods (a practice propelled by liberal democratic hopes) so that they can begin to invent analyses and modes of production better suited to the contours of contemporary neoliberalism.Unlike liberalism's clearly assigned spaces for public life and private life or work time and leisure time, neoliberal spaces bear few obvious markers. The neoliberal landscape consists of blurred boundaries that fold into one another: information flows almost instantaneously, commodities and people transgress national boundaries, time accelerates, space collapses, and distinctions between such classic demarcations as agent and subject or politics and economics erode. Facilitated by dramatic changes in our sociopolitical boundaries, economic neoliberalism, what James Arnt Aune calls "economic correctness" (2001), reigns throughout vast uneven terrains opened up from the imploded borders of our liberal world. While economics does indeed rule the neoliberal landscape, it does not do so according to uncompromising rationalism. Political and cultural practices flowing into the previously segregated spaces of economics enable market rule through logics that operate entirely outside the rational-irrational divide. Economic neoliberalism moves from situation to situation, disregarding spatial boundaries between the political, economic, [End Page 2] and cultural realms as well as their attendant modes of persuasion, wearing away at the rhetorical linkages between appropriate discursive choices and agentive power.Regardless of the particularities of neoliberalism's spaces, structures, and governing practices, many rhetoricians continue to mediate among different worldviews based on outmoded liberal gauges. Some rhetorical theorists, for instance, maintain that the problematics of neoliberalism result from an imbalance between reason and passion. Even though the most ardent supporters of neoliberal practices hold firmly to a belief in its scientific rationality, rhetorical theorists often argue that passion overpowers reason in neoliberal discourse. The rhetorical form that sustains this disequilibrium is, according to Bradford Vivian, neoliberal epideictic. Based on an impassioned identification, epideictic texts "unite an otherwise fractured citizenry in a dynamic affective experience" (Vivian 2006, 15). Epideictic rhetoric functions didactically to unite the public... (shrink)

ABSTRACT Catherine Malabou builds on neuroscience to offer a theory of the plasticity of the brain, arguing that trauma holds transformative potential. This article argues, however, that her theory prioritizes resilience in the face of episodic moments of violence and trauma, which undertheorizes the trauma of chronic conditions experienced by racialized, particularly Black, subjects. Instead, this article turns to Christina Sharpe’s theory of wake work and, more specifically, Black annotation and Black redaction, to demonstrate how, in the (...) wake of transatlantic slavery, there is space for the collective disruption of symbolic structures to generate openings for imagining and circulating alternative possibilities to the hegemonic institutions of the past and present. Contrasting Malabou’s focus on the transformation of the brain during episodic violence and trauma, this article contends that Sharpe may demonstrate the possibility of plasticity in form and the symbolic in quotidian experiences and practices. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetorical Circulation in Late CapitalismNeoliberalism and the Overdetermination of Affective EnergyCatherine ChaputIn the world we have known since the nineteenth century, a series of governmental rationalities overlap, lean on each other, challenge each other, and struggle with each other: art of government according to truth, art of government according to the rationality of the sovereign state, and art of government according to the rationality of economic agents, and (...) more generally, according to the rationality of the governed themselves. And it is all these different arts of government, all these different types of ways of calculating, rationalizing, and regulating the art of government which, overlapping with each other, broadly speaking constitute the object of political debate.Michel Foucault, The Birth of BiopoliticsCritical rhetoricians interested in the power dynamics between rhetoric and capitalism have established for themselves the ambitious task of explaining how multiple, intertwined rationalities govern individual and collective [End Page 1] behavior in relationship to the ever-shifting logics of capitalism. Approaches to this complicated directive frequently envision rhetoric as a mediating force among agentive subjects who act within well-defined political economic landscapes. Wedded to a political-communicative model wherein appropriate rhetorical choices persuade those with authority to distribute disputed political and economic rights, rhetorical theory becomes a sophisticated handbook for discovering topoi and executing decorous statements. This focus, according to Ronald Walter Greene, results in a "permanent anxiety over the meaning and potential of rhetorical agency" that positions rhetoricians as "moral entrepreneurs scolding, correcting, and encouraging the body politic" (2004, 188, 189). Committing themselves to endless debates about correct responses in situated spaces, rhetorical theories that underscore agency lose site of the world in flux and of our participation in that world's unpredictable unfoldings. Alternatively, Greene suggests rethinking rhetorical theory through a materialist-communicative model wherein the immaterial labor of communication produces value. Conceptualizing discursive practices as a form of labor rather than a form of political signification sidesteps anxiety about well-chosen language and emphasizes the life-affirming activity involved in deciphering issues, inventing paths through those issues, and communicating new ideas to others. In short, Greene's materialist model challenges critical rhetoricians to end their perennial search for a discursive key to the storehouse of political economic goods (a practice propelled by liberal democratic hopes) so that they can begin to invent analyses and modes of production better suited to the contours of contemporary neoliberalism.Unlike liberalism's clearly assigned spaces for public life and private life or work time and leisure time, neoliberal spaces bear few obvious markers. The neoliberal landscape consists of blurred boundaries that fold into one another: information flows almost instantaneously, commodities and people transgress national boundaries, time accelerates, space collapses, and distinctions between such classic demarcations as agent and subject or politics and economics erode. Facilitated by dramatic changes in our sociopolitical boundaries, economic neoliberalism, what James Arnt Aune calls "economic correctness" (2001), reigns throughout vast uneven terrains opened up from the imploded borders of our liberal world. While economics does indeed rule the neoliberal landscape, it does not do so according to uncompromising rationalism. Political and cultural practices flowing into the previously segregated spaces of economics enable market rule through logics that operate entirely outside the rational-irrational divide. Economic neoliberalism moves from situation to situation, disregarding spatial boundaries between the political, economic, [End Page 2] and cultural realms as well as their attendant modes of persuasion, wearing away at the rhetorical linkages between appropriate discursive choices and agentive power.Regardless of the particularities of neoliberalism's spaces, structures, and governing practices, many rhetoricians continue to mediate among different worldviews based on outmoded liberal gauges. Some rhetorical theorists, for instance, maintain that the problematics of neoliberalism result from an imbalance between reason and passion. Even though the most ardent supporters of neoliberal practices hold firmly to a belief in its scientific rationality, rhetorical theorists often argue that passion overpowers reason in neoliberal discourse. The rhetorical form that sustains this disequilibrium is, according to Bradford Vivian, neoliberal epideictic. Based on an impassioned identification, epideictic texts "unite an otherwise fractured citizenry in a dynamic affective experience" (Vivian 2006, 15). Epideictic rhetoric functions didactically to unite the public... (shrink)

The fertility of contemporary social theory is matched only by its problematic relationship to its past. The future of social theory therefore lies with a renegotiation of that relationship. I begin by unearthing the theological origins of theorizing and its secularization as epistemology in the 19th century. I then provide an account of the recent renaissance in social theory - epitomized by the various `structure-agency' debates - that reveals its intellectual kinship to scholastic theology. I diagnose (...) this scholasticism in terms of sociology's current social exigencies and conclude that the historiography of sociology implicit in scholasticism needs to be overturned so that social theorists may come to recover the concrete social contexts that historically have called forth the need to theorize. (shrink)

This article explores how older adults negotiate and partially counter normative expectations of “health citizenship” that stress individual responsibility for maintaining health and preventing health problems. Based on interviews with 55 participants in Canada and the U.K. about what healthy living means to them in their everyday lives, we examine how the dominant discourse of personal responsibility in participants’ responses is counterpointed by a more muted, yet significant, alternative critical perspective on the relative roles and responsibilities of government and citizens (...) in making healthy living possible. Drawing on Hauser’s (1999) concept of vernacular rhetoric along with recent theories of environmental citizenship, we analyze how participants exercise their civic-political judgment by using a logic of dissociation to argue that what government says about the importance of healthy living is incompatible with what government does to support citizens’ abilities to eat healthily and live actively. By deploying this technique of argumentation to address structural-political-economic dimensions of healthy living, participants enact, in modest ways, an alternative, critical-collective mode of health citizenship that complicates and, at least partially, disrupts neoliberal constructions of the individually responsible, “good” health citizen. (shrink)

This book builds on existing work in genre analysis and move analysis in English for Specific Purposes and applies this new framework to academic philosophical discourse, offering new insights into how ESP traditions can elucidate shifts in language conventions across disciplinary contexts. The volume begins by surveying the state-of-the-art in English for Specific Purposes and genre theory, as well as other genre theory paradigms before turning the focus on move analysis. Lucas and Lucas seek to maximize the potential (...) of move analysis to precisely operationalize functional units of discourse by implementing a cognitive theory of genre grounded in frame semantics. Using the case of academic research articles in philosophy, the authors demonstrate how this framework can reveal distinctive dimensions unique to philosophical discourse and in turn, how such an approach might be applied more broadly to examine nuances in language across disciplines and inform ESP research in the future. This book will appeal to students and researchers in English for Specific Purposes, discourse analysis, academic writing, applied linguistics, and rhetoric and composition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.4 (2003) 353-375 [Access article in PDF] A Rhetoric for Polytheistic Democracy: Walt Whitman's "Poem of Many in One" Peter Simonson Department of Communication University of Pittsburgh This essay aims to generate rhetorically oriented normative communication theory useful for the current socio-intellectual moment. It draws upon Walt Whitman's 1850s poetry as an artistically compelling statement of what I call polytheistic democracy, a form of life (...) marked by three overlapping ideals: pluralistic tolerance for multiple gods and moral orientations; commitment to recognizing, preserving, and artfully representing socio-cultural variety; and receptivity to contact with a diverse range of particular others. Whitman offers theory in the sense of a structured way of seeing. It is normative in that it describes a world that might be, not one that is, and provides orienting visions, regulative ideals, and topoi of praise and criticism that stand available to guide the communicative practices of individuals, groups, and institutions alike.The theory is "rhetorically oriented" in that it draws upon techniques and vocabularies developed within the rhetorical tradition. Methodologically, it is generated through rhetorical criticism and imitatio. I offer a reading that brings out the rhetorical dynamics of Whitman's vision of polytheistic democracy as articulated in his 1856 "Poem of Many in One" (later and canonically titled "By Blue Ontario's Shore"), a central social statement in his much-revised masterwork, Leaves of Grass. In so doing, I hold Whitman up as a model for imitatio, the complex interpretive practice whereby, in Michael Leff's words, historical texts come to serve "as equipment for future rhetorical production" (1997, 201). Imitatio is an intellectually generative process. "As the embodied utterances of the past are interpreted for current application, their ideas and modes of articulation are reembodied, and old voices are recovered for use in new circumstances" (203).I couple imitatio with a neo-pragmatist rhetorical criticism oriented toward practice and reflection in the current cultural moment. Whitman gains significance insofar as he helps us experience, think about, and act [End Page 353] within the worlds we now traverse. 1 Among other qualities, those worlds are marked by heterogeneous groups and people who must continuously find ways to live with one another; by large institutions that stand as steady reminders that individuals may not matter very much; by ubiquitous electronic and print media offering copious streams of symbolic culture; and by countervailing geographical forces of circulation and social segmentation of fleshly bodies in the material spaces of public life. In worlds with such qualities, Whitman is a useful locus of imitatio—someone whose cosmopolitan social imagination, deep pluralism, wide-ranging habits of contact, and attention to corporeal individuals all serve as useful equipment for new rhetorical and moral production."Poem of Many in One" has a self-exemplifying 2 aspect to it, for it models what it aims to cultivate in the world. Whitman's print-based rhetoric provides an overarching vision of polytheistic democracy and mass community, scattered across time and space and actualized partly through individuals. His discourse models this social condition by displaying radical openness to high and low, sacred and profane, the admired and the socially despised. It is rhetorically driven by a copious style and an aesthetically oriented democratic ethos that Whitman's mediated eloquence aims also to generate in its readers. Its success thus hinges on readerly receptivity and cultivated ethos that re-embodies aspects of his sensibility and rhetorical techniques, giving them new momentum in scattered realms of social being.I amplify key components of Whitman's normative vision not to trump competing moral principles and orientations but to supplement them. In this sense, my essay is pluralist all the way down. It is socially pluralist in that I believe in encouraging the development and preservation of multiple sets of normative orientations, with no single principle or moral perspective ordering all others. It is individually pluralist in that I understand moral principles as interpretive and rhetorical resources deployed and judged on the basis of their contingent appropriateness and usefulness. 3 "One does not... (shrink)

An examination of footnotes, quotations, and name-lists shows that historians try to follow the reality rule - to tell about the past the most likely story that can be sustained by the relevant existing evidence. But this is modified by the maximum impact rule - stories must have evocative force, and the reader should actively confront the past. The maximum impact rule may require the historian to sacrifice some completeness and exactness for evocative impact; and there is no parallel to (...) this sacrifice in scientific explanations. History, as it is practiced, is a rule-bound discipline, with rules and a rhetoric different from those of scientific explanation. There is no need for historians to structure their explanations according to the pattern of the sciences. (shrink)

The thesis argues for the need to reexamine current theoretical conceptions or assumptions regarding Romantic self-consciousness and its perceived dependency on a productive dimension of expression. The origins of the allegedly aporetic relation between an inward form of consciousness and its linguistic "presentation" are traced in the Idealist reflection on self-consciousness by Kant, Fichte, and Schelling. Inadvertently, language as a productive force reveals itself as the contingent "ground" for the highly elusive, though philosophically essential, "unity" of self-consciousness. Thus the respective (...) conception of self-consciousness as a relation , production , or re-membring is always grounded in a stratum of "immediacy" that can no longer be contained within a systematic philosophical idiom. Through an incisive critique of the Idealists, Schleiermacher demonstrates that any notion of "immediacy" is essentially homologous to the transformation that all language undergoes in each individual utterance. Pointing to the "coinherence" of the psychological and the grammatical poles of interpretation, Schleiermacher develops a theory of "style" whereby consciousness becomes readable rather than being postulated as an autonomous transcendental agency. ;Wordsworth's narrative poetry conceives of self-consciousness as originating in a purportedly primordial affect. Beginning with the dialogic poems in the Ballads, yet also in Tintern Abbey and in the 1799 Prelude, Wordsworth experiments with a densely figurative form of "presentation" of these affective origins. Yet as his revisions--both between discrete narrative segments in his poetry yet also between earlier and later versions of the Prelude--evidence, Wordsworth becomes increasingly weary of the opacity that inheres in the figurative presentation of this "original" affect. The densely allusive and deliberately self-referential diction of later versions of the Prelude not only compromises the earlier paradigm of self-consciousness as originating in an inward affect, but it also highlights the mutual and irreducible "coinherence" of rhetorical and psychological structures. The final chapter examines Shelley's ironic response to the Wordsworthian impasse in Epipsychidion where the autobiographical vision of a perfect self continues to disintegrate under the verbal onslaught of the very language that constituted it in the first place. (shrink)

'This book makes a significant and needed contribution to post-structural philosophy and literary theory.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric, Narrative, and the Lifeworld: The Construction of Collective IdentityAlan G. GrossAt the beginning of King Lear, at the point of ceding his throne to his three daughters, Lear asks each for a public acknowledgment of her love. Goneril and Regan flatter their father with effusive declarations, but Lear’s youngest, and his favorite, Cordelia, refuses to do so:I love your Majesty According to my bond; no more or less...................... (...) Good my lord, You have begot me, bred me, lov’d me; I Return those duties back as are right fit, Obey you, love you, and most honour you. Why have my sisters husbands, if they say They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed, That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry Half my love with him, half my care and duty. Sure I shall never marry like my sisters, To love my father all.(1936, 1.1.94–107) [End Page 118]Furious, Lear disinherits his daughter.Cordelia’s speech is remarkable only in its articulation of what Lear should have known; its dramatic impact is a consequence of Lear’s reaction to his daughter’s argument for divided loyalty that is based on a string of commonplaces that are part of the lifeworld that Lear and his daughter—and every other person in the play—inhabit. Any part of this lifeworld may be thematized, of course; it may be brought out into the open as a topic of discussion. That is what Cordelia does; under duress, she shifts from what Jürgen Habermas calls communicative action to a level he calls discourse, a level that reveals the relationship between the personal and the social as well as their underlying cultural presuppositions. Because Lear refuses to grasp the obvious, the narrative progress of the play is temporarily interrupted and permanently veers off course. Although on occasion we can thematize aspects of our lifeworld, the lifeworld as a whole cannot be subject to scrutiny; it is the totality of certainties, skills, practices, and interpretative frames that we take for granted as we each find our way in the everyday worlds that form the changing horizons of our experience. I take it for granted that too many cooks spoil the broth; telephoning is a skill I do not puzzle over; waiting patiently in line is a social behavior I practice without thinking; with no special effort, I interpret the intimacy of a couple’s relationship by the way they publicly behave toward each other.The lifeworld, a concept initiated by Edmund Husserl and elaborated by Alfred Schütz, Martin Heidegger, and Jürgen Habermas, has been largely neglected by rhetorical theorists and critics. It is the purpose of this paper to show that remedying this neglect opens up fruitful avenues of critical practice and theory. I proceed, first, by defining the lifeworld. Next, I shift perspectives: I analyze how collectivities make sense of their lives by telling stories about themselves grounded in their lifeworld values. It is in the lifeworld’s role in storytelling that, I claim, Aristotle’s Rhetoric becomes an important part of the picture. This is because the Rhetoric is, at bottom, a theory of the way lifeworld values enter into the public sphere. This characterization of the Rhetoric permits us to reconcile two important instantiations of the lifeworld, Habermas’s and Aristotle’s, a reconciliation in which communicative action becomes a special case of rhetorical interaction. Finally, from the perspective of the lifeworld, I reflect on the significance of an exemplary case of the construction of collective identity, the Selma march. [End Page 119]Defining the LifeworldEdmund Husserl’s The Crisis of the European Sciences contains the first explicit philosophical analysis of the lifeworld as “the world that is constantly pregiven, valid constantly and in advance as existing.... Every end presupposes it; even the universal end of knowing it in scientific truth presupposes it, and in advance” (1970, 382). Because the lifeworld is presupposed in everyday communication, it can be entered only by disciplined reflection: “Contemplation is privileged to the extent that it reveals the structures of the world and has them as theme” (1973, 65). Although the lifeworld... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric, Narrative, and the Lifeworld: The Construction of Collective IdentityAlan G. GrossAt the beginning of King Lear, at the point of ceding his throne to his three daughters, Lear asks each for a public acknowledgment of her love. Goneril and Regan flatter their father with effusive declarations, but Lear’s youngest, and his favorite, Cordelia, refuses to do so:I love your Majesty According to my bond; no more or less...................... (...) Good my lord, You have begot me, bred me, lov’d me; I Return those duties back as are right fit, Obey you, love you, and most honour you. Why have my sisters husbands, if they say They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed, That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry Half my love with him, half my care and duty. Sure I shall never marry like my sisters, To love my father all.(1936, 1.1.94–107) [End Page 118]Furious, Lear disinherits his daughter.Cordelia’s speech is remarkable only in its articulation of what Lear should have known; its dramatic impact is a consequence of Lear’s reaction to his daughter’s argument for divided loyalty that is based on a string of commonplaces that are part of the lifeworld that Lear and his daughter—and every other person in the play—inhabit. Any part of this lifeworld may be thematized, of course; it may be brought out into the open as a topic of discussion. That is what Cordelia does; under duress, she shifts from what Jürgen Habermas calls communicative action to a level he calls discourse, a level that reveals the relationship between the personal and the social as well as their underlying cultural presuppositions. Because Lear refuses to grasp the obvious, the narrative progress of the play is temporarily interrupted and permanently veers off course. Although on occasion we can thematize aspects of our lifeworld, the lifeworld as a whole cannot be subject to scrutiny; it is the totality of certainties, skills, practices, and interpretative frames that we take for granted as we each find our way in the everyday worlds that form the changing horizons of our experience. I take it for granted that too many cooks spoil the broth; telephoning is a skill I do not puzzle over; waiting patiently in line is a social behavior I practice without thinking; with no special effort, I interpret the intimacy of a couple’s relationship by the way they publicly behave toward each other.The lifeworld, a concept initiated by Edmund Husserl and elaborated by Alfred Schütz, Martin Heidegger, and Jürgen Habermas, has been largely neglected by rhetorical theorists and critics. It is the purpose of this paper to show that remedying this neglect opens up fruitful avenues of critical practice and theory. I proceed, first, by defining the lifeworld. Next, I shift perspectives: I analyze how collectivities make sense of their lives by telling stories about themselves grounded in their lifeworld values. It is in the lifeworld’s role in storytelling that, I claim, Aristotle’s Rhetoric becomes an important part of the picture. This is because the Rhetoric is, at bottom, a theory of the way lifeworld values enter into the public sphere. This characterization of the Rhetoric permits us to reconcile two important instantiations of the lifeworld, Habermas’s and Aristotle’s, a reconciliation in which communicative action becomes a special case of rhetorical interaction. Finally, from the perspective of the lifeworld, I reflect on the significance of an exemplary case of the construction of collective identity, the Selma march. [End Page 119]Defining the LifeworldEdmund Husserl’s The Crisis of the European Sciences contains the first explicit philosophical analysis of the lifeworld as “the world that is constantly pregiven, valid constantly and in advance as existing.... Every end presupposes it; even the universal end of knowing it in scientific truth presupposes it, and in advance” (1970, 382). Because the lifeworld is presupposed in everyday communication, it can be entered only by disciplined reflection: “Contemplation is privileged to the extent that it reveals the structures of the world and has them as theme” (1973, 65). Although the lifeworld... (shrink)

We are living in an age of crisis—or an age in which everything is labeled a crisis. Financial, debt, and refugee “crises” have erupted. The word has also been applied to the Arab Spring and its aftermath, Brexit, the 2016 U.S. election, and many other international events. Yet the term has contradictory political and strategic meanings for those challenging power structures and those seeking to preserve them. For critics of the status quo, can the rhetoric of crisis be used to (...) foment urgency around issues like climate change and financialization, or does framing a situation as a “crisis” play into the hands of the existing political order, which then seeks to tighten the leash by creating a state of emergency? Critical Theory at a Crossroads presents conversations with prominent theorists about the crises that have marked the past years, the protest movements that have risen up in response, and the use of the term in political discourse. Tariq Ali, Rosi Braidotti, Wendy Brown, Maurizio Lazzarato, Angela McRobbie, Jean-Luc Nancy, Antonio Negri, Jacques Rancière, Saskia Sassen, and Joseph Vogl offer their views on contemporary challenges and how we might address them, candidly discussing the alternatives that new social movements have offered, alongside an exchange between Zygmunt Bauman and Roberto Esposito on theories of community. Sparring over crucial developments in these past years of catastrophe and the calamity of everyday life under capitalism, they shed light on how crises and the discourse of crisis can both obscure and reveal fundamental aspects of modern societies. (shrink)

This article argues that rhetorical theory will never dominate a quasi-originary and ontolgising rhetoricity that nonetheless calls for it. This rhetoricity is not simply a game played ‘in the world’, to borrow Derrida's phrasing; it is—like writing, like metaphoricity, like the ‘yes-yes’ or (en)gage—one more name for ‘the game of the world’. To get some traction on this undeclinable yet unmasterable rhetoricity, we’ll examine what Derrida calls ‘a danger of rhetoricism’ in de Man's work, a tendency to overestimate (...) the authority of the linguistic, the verbal, the discursive. The goal is not so much to substantiate Derrida's suspicions about de Man's ‘rhetoricism’ as it is to get on the tail of a rhetorical force that is irreducible to it, an ineluctable affectability or responsivity that is bound up in the very structure of sur-vival. (shrink)

This chapter offers a close reading of a passage from the literary and philosophical work Minima Moralia that enacts Theodor W. Adorno's radical concept of nonpropositional truth content in philosophical aesthetics after Auschwitz. Readers of Adorno's texts, especially those devoted to philosophical aesthetics, can hardly fail to be struck by their chiastic structure. The aesthetic theory that Adorno develops constitutes not only a theory of the aesthetic but also a theory that is itself aesthetic, hence a (...) theory of literature that exhibits qualities associated with literary texts, and a theory of music that harbors within itself traces of musical composition. The rhetorically self-conscious tropes of his posthumous Aesthetic Theory, the stylized literary studies of his Notes to Literature, his musically inflected meditations on musicological questions from Ludwig van Beethoven to Arnold Schönberg, and so many of his other texts perform this provocative inversion in a variety of registers and conceptual modulations. (shrink)

This article identifies the structural and conceptual aspects of a visual construction often used in advertisements to establish a metaphoric or associative relation, that is, symmetric object alignment (SOA). It offers an account of the formal ingredients of SOA, which fall into two groups: object-constitutive factors (like size, shape, and color) and object-depictment factors (like perspective, orientation, and distance from viewing point). Both factors allow us to treat SOA as a visual rhetorical scheme. We also discuss how SOA relates (...) to conceptual structure, metaphoric or otherwise. Four types of relations are distinguished, based on the way in which perceptual and conceptual characteristics interact. Finally, we discuss the way in which these characteristics relate to the processing of such visual messages. One depictment factor will be focused on in particular: one-to-one versus one-to-many alignments. An attempt is made to connect these 2 patterns to the much-discussed topic in verbal metaphor theory, object comparison versus categorization. (shrink)

Bringing together essays that span the career of I.A. Richards--as both literary critic and pedagogue--this collection provides a much-needed re-introduction to a thinker whose works have been largely neglected of late. Carefully chosen, edited, and annotated, the selections make accessible a wide array of Richards's ideas on language and learning, focusing on his discussion of literacy, his critique of positivist linguistics, his explorations of C.S. Peirce's semiotics, and his theory of translation, which led not only to his well-known analysis (...) of the structure and foundation of metaphor but to one of the earliest and most cogent formulations of reader-response theory. Berthoff's editing eliminates the distracting elements of Richards's style--the digressions and obscure allusions that have often hindered readers, and have in part contributed to the neglect his work has met with in recent years--while identifying and illuminating the chief principles of his critical thought and practice. Organized in four parts--Practical Criticism, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, The Meaning of Meaning, and Design for Escape--the book offers a lucid introduction to Richards's writings, with valuable headnotes to each section and a unique index of "speculative instruments" that examines the principal ideas Richards thought with. Readers are certain to find this volume essential to an understanding of Richards's "practical criticism," and invaluable in sharpening and re-directing their own thoughts on current linguistic practice, literary criticism, and educational theory. (shrink)

If Third World women form ‘the bedrock of a certain kind of global exploitation of labour,’ as Chandra Mohanty argues, how can our theoretical definitions of exploitation account for this? This paper argues that liberal theories of exploitation are insufficiently structural and that Marxian accounts are structural but are insufficiently intersectional. What we need is a structural and intersectional definition of exploitation in order to correctly identify global structural exploitation. Drawing on feminist, critical race/post-colonial and post-Fordist critiques of the Marxist (...) definition and the intersectional accounts of Maria Mies and Iris Marion Young, this paper offers the following definition of structural exploitation: structural exploitation refers to the forced transfer of the productive powers of groups positioned as socially inferior to the advantage of groups positioned as socially superior. Global structural exploitation is a form of global injustice because it is a form of oppression. (shrink)

The Poetic Structure of the World is a major reconsideration of a crucial turningpoint in Western thought and culture: the heliocentric revolution of Copernicus and Kepler. FernandHallyn treats the work of these two figures not simply in terms of the history of science orastronomy, but as events embedded in a wider field of images, symbols, texts, and practices. Thesenew representations of the universe, he insists, cannot be explained by recourse to explanations of"genius" or "intuition."Instead, Hallyn investigates the problem of (...) how new scientific hypothesesare actually formed and the complex way in which certain facts and not others are selected tosupport a particular theory. He contends that the scientific imagination is not fundamentallydifferent from a mythic or poetic imagination and that the work of Copernicus and Kepler must beexamined on the level of rhetorical structure. Hallyn shows the sun-centered universe to beinseparable from the aesthetic, epistemological, theological, and social imperatives of bothneoplatonism and mannerism in the sixteenth centuryFernand Hallyn is a Professor in the Departmentof French Literature at the University of Ghent. Distributed for Zone Books. (shrink)

Sutra is a form of text representation that has been used in both Tamil and Sanskrit literature to convey information in a short and crisp manner. Nanool, an ancient Tamil grammar masterpiece has used sutras for defining grammar rules. Similarly, in Sanskrit literature, many of the Shāstrās have used sutras for a concise representation of their content. Sutras are defined as short aphorisms, formulae-like structures that convey the complete essence of the text. They act as indices to the elaborate content (...) they refer to. Inspired by their characteristics, this article proposes an indexing mechanism based on sutras for discourse structures built using rhetorical structure theory and also using Sangati, a concept proposed in Sanskrit literature. The indices identified by the indexer are ideal for question answering, summary generation, and information retrieval systems. The indexer has been tested on IR system using 1000 Tamil language text documents. A performance comparison has also been made with one of the existing RST-based indexing technique. (shrink)

According to Aristotle, character (êthos) and emotion (pathos) are constitutive features of the process of phronetic practical deliberation: in order to render a determinate action-specific judgement, practical reasoning cannot be simply reduced to logical demonstration (apodeixis). This can be seen by uncovering an important structural parallel between the virtue of phronêsis and the art of rhetoric. This structural parallel helps to show how Aristotle's account of practical reason and deliberation, which constructively incorporates the emotions, illuminates key issues in contemporary democratic (...) theory concerning deliberation at the political level. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Nietzsche’s Rhetoric on the Grounds of Philology and HermeneuticsAdrian Del Caro"The philosopher believes the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the structure: posterity finds it in the stone with which he built."Human, All Too Human, 1.201"All science only achieved continuity and constancy when the art of correct reading, that is philology, reached its height."Human, All Too Human, 1.270The complexity of Nietzschean rhetoric demands first a (...) basic working definition of rhetoric. In the etymological sense of Greek rhe¯torike¯, the art of oratory, and extrapolated to include the art of communicating effectively through writing, Nietzsche's rhetoric is a highly stylized, deeply self-aware manner of expression designed to convey meaning and to appeal. In the more limited sense of my essay, Nietzschean rhetoric is furthermore a discourse whose communicative and appealing aspects are aimed at the earth for the purpose of grounding human beings. By "rhetoric" I do not mean the negative connotation associated with "insincere or grandiloquent language" (Webster's), though it is certainly the case that Nietzsche's rhetoric frequently takes flight and requires grounding. It is to be expected that a classical philologist by training, and both a teacher and a writer by profession, would have a close understanding and practiced application of rhetoric; the particular challenge in explicating Nietzsche's rhetoric lies in the task to which his rhetoric is put, as well as in the zeal with which he pursued his task. I am not primarily concerned with what Nietzsche had to say about rhetoric while lecturing at the University of Basle, though I agree that Gilman, Blair, and Parent are right to emphasize the importance of rhetoric for the interpretation of Nietzsche's writings and in its own right as a competitor with philosophy (1989, xii, xvi, xx), rather, I am concerned [End Page 101] with the practice of rhetoric that distinguishes Nietzsche's writings from the early 1870s until the so-called Wahnsinnszettel (postcards and letters of madness) written in early January 1889. I also agree with Moore, who analyzes the specifically biological and medical idiom of Nietzsche and concludes "that new light can be thrown on [Nietzsche's] thought by situating it within the historical context of nineteenth-century theories of evolution and degeneration" (Moore 2002, 1-2).1In an early aphorism entitled "Origin of faith" Nietzsche concluded: "Habituation of spiritual principles [Grundsätze] without grounds [Gründe] is called faith."2 I provide the German to demonstrate that whenever possible, Nietzsche drew on the Germanic Grund in his discussions of grounding, even though he was keenly aware of Greek and Latin alternatives and could have used them. So for example Nietzsche's translator (say Holling-dale) could have chosen to use English "grounds" for German Gründe, but chose instead to use "reasons," which is also correct though not exactly in the spirit of Nietzsche's etymological nuance.3 Grundsätze, literally "grounding propositions," given idiomatically as "principles," has no comparable etymology in English. What one becomes accustomed to or adopts as a habit based on faith versus grounds, cannot by definition be grounded, whether or not it is a principle. Based on this example, living with grounds or reasons is living with foundation, with base and support. Living without grounds is simply acquiring habits, living by faith, living groundlessly. A similar usage is involved in English "grounds for dismissal," whereby "grounds" equals "reasons." Even the words founded and unfounded preserve some of the strength of "grounded" and "ungrounded" as I use them. In German "unfounded" is unbegründet or grundlos, participle and adjective respectively, and Nietzsche availed himself whenever possible of German expressions based on ground.The aphorism immediately following "Origin of faith" relies even more on Grund, and its translation into English deserves close attention. "Aus den Folgen auf Grund und Ungrund zurückgeschlossen" becomes "Reasons judged a posteriori on the basis of consequences,"4 which I would render as "grounds and ungrounds retroactively concluded from consequences." Nietzsche uses Grund twice already in the title, and in the body of this "aphorism" of thirty lines a variation of Grund occurs six more times (Gründe, Gr... (shrink)

This article offers a structural analysis of Cicero's Orator, sections 140–8. Situating Cicero's defence of a form of educational activity in relation to his earlier denials that he is teaching anything, the article proposes an explanation for Cicero's apparent reversal of position rooted in status theory, the conceptual framework developed by Greek and Roman rhetorical theorists for schematizing the points at issue in a case and the corresponding lines of approach that a defender should take. Understanding the status-inspired (...) organization of Cicero's self-defence affords readers smoother passage through a text that is often difficult and obscure. Furthermore, this analysis shows how Cicero deploys rhetorical techniques in defence of his educational endeavours both to support his claim to continued relevance and to exemplify the versatility of the ideal orator whom he portrays in the Orator. (shrink)

Ignorance and incompleteness -- The instrumental model of talking : how to talk about talk -- Open questions, confirmation questions, and how to choose -- Which sentence-type to use when asking them -- Quantifiers, wh-expressions, and manners of interpretation -- Syntactic structure -- On the questioning speech-acts and the kinds of ignorance they -- Address.