International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

“The history of rhetoric is one of diminishing returns,” Ricoeur once argued (1996 , 319), offering an apt depiction for the trajectory of a discipline originally associated with social and intellectual prestige, and gradually demoted to a status described by rhetoricians themselves as marginal. Historically, new rhetorics have arisen as responses to challenges from emerging fields and existing disciplines or reactions to pressures from the social, cultural, or intellectual climate of a particular period. Such efforts have often gone beyond preserving the traditional core of the discipline, and frequently involved radical transformations of key classical concepts or ideas and excursions into other fields. New rhetorics are profoundly interdisciplinary and live in tense relationship with the original field they modified. Of the ideas that have helped the emergence of new rhetorics, the most important ones concern style as a repository of figures marking a departure from ordinary language; the epistemic status of rhetoric; the notion of a clearly definable rhetorical core, traceable to some historical origins; and the distinctiveness of a key set of figures who can legitimately be considered rhetorical theorists. By some accounts, classical rhetoric emerged as a general theory of →  Discourse predicated on the assumption that “discourse should be viewed as a function of the figurative ... log in or subscribe to read full text