What is Rhetoric?
Michel Meyer
Abstract
What Is Rhetoric? offers a new synthesis of the principles and functioning of rhetoric. In everyday life, questions are often debated or simply discussed. Rhetoric is the way we answer questions in an interpersonal context, in which we want to have an effect on our interlocutors. These interlocutors can be convinced or charmed, persuaded or influenced, and the language used can range from reasoning to the use of narratives, whether literary or not. This book purports to be a breakthrough in the field by offering a systematic and unified view of rhetoric. It combines the social aspects of negot ... More
What Is Rhetoric? offers a new synthesis of the principles and functioning of rhetoric. In everyday life, questions are often debated or simply discussed. Rhetoric is the way we answer questions in an interpersonal context, in which we want to have an effect on our interlocutors. These interlocutors can be convinced or charmed, persuaded or influenced, and the language used can range from reasoning to the use of narratives, whether literary or not. This book purports to be a breakthrough in the field by offering a systematic and unified view of rhetoric. It combines the social aspects of negotiation and interpersonal distance with the theory of emotions. All principal authors from Plato and Aristotle to contemporary theorists are integrated in what is here called the “problematological” conception of rhetoric, based on the primacy of questioning and answering in language and thought.
Keywords:
questioning,
argumentation,
rhetoric,
audience,
emotions,
negotiation,
aesthetics,
literature,
law,
politics
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2017 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199691821 |
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2017 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780199691821.001.0001 |