[PDF] A Pragmatic Theory Of Rhetoric eBook

Author : Walter H. Beale
Publisher : SIU Press
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 43,79 MB
Release : 1987
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780809313006

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Walter H. Beale offers the most coherent treatment of the aims and modes of discourse to be presented in more than a decade. His development of a semiotic “grammar of motives” that re­lates the problems of meaning in discourse both to linguistic structure and ways of construct­ing reality stands as a pro­vocative new theory of rhetoric sharply focused on writing. He includes a comprehensive treatment of rhetoric, its classes and varieties, modes, and stra­tegies. In addition, he demon­strates the importance of the purpose, substance, and social context of discourse, at a time when scholarly attention has be­come preoccupied with process. He fortifies and extends the Aristotelian approach to rhetoric and discourse at a time when much theory and pedagogy have yielded to modernist assump­tions and methods. And finally, he develops a theoretical framework that illuminates the relationship between rhetoric, the language arts, and the hu­man sciences in general.

Author : Ralph H. Johnson
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 408 pages
File Size : 30,24 MB
Release : 2012-11-12
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 1135691207

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This book works through some of the theoretical issues that have been accumulating in informal logic over the past 20 years. At the same time, it defines a core position in the theory of argument in which those issues can be further explored. The underlying concern that motivates this work is the health of practice of argumentation as an important cultural artifact. A further concern is for logic as a discipline. Argumentative and dialectical in nature, this book presupposes some awareness of the theory of argument in recent history, and some familiarity with the positions that have been advanced. It will be of interest to academics, researchers, and advanced undergraduate and graduate students in the disciplines of logic, rhetoric, linguistics, speech communication, English composition, and psychology.

Author : Richard A. Cherwitz
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 335 pages
File Size : 17,47 MB
Release : 2014-06-03
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 1136696164

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This important volume explores alternative ways in which those involved in the field of speech communication have attempted to find a philosophical grounding for rhetoric. Recognizing that rhetoric can be supported in a wide variety of ways, this text examines eight different philosophies of rhetoric: realism, relativism, rationalism, idealism, materialism, existentialism, deconstructionism, and pragmatism. The value of this book lies in its pluralistic and comparative approach to rhetorical theory. Although rhetoric may be the more difficult road to philosophy, the fact that it is being traversed by a group of authors largely from speech communication demonstrates important growth in this field. Ultimately, there is recognition that if different thinkers can have solid reasons to adhere to disparate philosophies, serious communication problems can be eliminated. Rhetoric and Philosophy will assist scholars in choosing from among the many philosphical starting places for rhetoric.

Author : Steven Mailloux
Publisher : Penn State Press
Page : 229 pages
File Size : 48,40 MB
Release : 2017-05-26
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0271079991

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For over thirty years, Steven Mailloux has championed and advanced the field of rhetorical hermeneutics, a historically and theoretically informed approach to textual interpretation. This volume collects fourteen of his most recent influential essays on the methodology, plus an interview. Following from the proposition that rhetorical hermeneutics uses rhetoric to practice theory by doing history, this book examines a diverse range of texts from literature, history, law, religion, and cultural studies. Through four sections, Mailloux explores the theoretical writings of Heidegger, Burke, and Rorty, among others; Jesuit educational treatises; and products of popular culture such as Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and Star Trek: The Next Generation. In doing so, he shows how rhetorical perspectives and pragmatist traditions work together as two mutually supportive modes of understanding, and he demonstrates how the combination of rhetoric and interpretation works both in theory and in practice. Theoretically, rhetorical hermeneutics can be understood as a form of neopragmatism. Practically, it focuses on the production, circulation, and reception of written and performed communication. A thought-provoking collection from a preeminent literary critic and rhetorician, Rhetoric’s Pragmatism assesses the practice and value of rhetorical hermeneutics today and the directions in which it might head. Scholars and students of rhetoric and communication studies, critical theory, literature, law, religion, and American studies will find Mailloux’s arguments enlightening and essential.

Author : Robert Danisch
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
Page : 220 pages
File Size : 44,79 MB
Release : 2007
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781570036903

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In Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Necessity of Rhetoric, Robert Danisch examines the search by America's first generation of pragmatists for a unique set of rhetorics that would serve the needs of a developing democracy. Digging deep into pragmatism's historical development, Danisch sheds light on its association with an alternative but significant and often overlooked tradition. He draws parallels between the rhetorics of such American pragmatists as John Dewey and Jane Addams and those of the ancient Greek tradition. Danisch contends that, while building upon a classical foundation, pragmatism sought to determine rhetorical responses to contemporary irresolutions. rhetoric, including pragmatism's rejection of philosophy with its traditional assumptions and practices. Grounding his argument on an

Author : Douglas Walton
Publisher : Studies in Rhetoric and Commun
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 25,16 MB
Release : 2003-08
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780817350475

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Takes a new analytical look at the concept of fallacy and presents an up-to-date analysis of its usefulness for argumentation studies Although fallacies have been common since Aristotle, until recently little attention has been devoted to identifying and defining them. Furthermore, the concept of fallacy itself has lacked a sufficiently clear meaning to make it a useful tool for evaluating arguments. Douglas Walton takes a new analytical look at the concept of fallacy and presents an up-to-date analysis of its usefulness for argumentation studies. Walton uses case studies illustrating familiar arguments and tricky deceptions in everyday conversation where the charge of fallaciousness is at issue. The numerous case studies show in concrete terms many practical aspects of how to use textual evidence to identify and analyze fallacies and to evaluate arguments as fallacious. Walton looks at how an argument is used in the context of conversation. He defines a fallacy as a conversational move, or sequence of moves, that is supposed to be an argument that contributes to the purpose of the conversation but in reality interferes with it. The view is a pragmatic one, based on the assumption that when people argue, they do so in a context of dialogue, a conventionalized normative framework that is goal-directed. Such a contextual framework is shown to be crucial in determining whether an argument has been used correctly. Walton also shows how examples of fallacies given in the logic textbooks characteristically turn out to be variants of reasonable, even if defeasible or questionable arguments, based on presumptive reasoning. This is the essence of the evaluation problem. A key thesis of the book, which must not be taken for granted as previous textbooks have so often done, is that you can spot a fallacy from how it was used in a context of dialogue. This is an innovative and even, as Walton notes, "a radical and controversial" theory of fallacy.

Author : Justin Morrius Pehoski
Publisher :
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 35,53 MB
Release : 2020
Category :
ISBN :

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Rhetorical scholars are drawing on the philosophy of John Dewey to construct a pragmatist theory of rhetoric. That scholarship has primarily used Dewey’s philosophy of communication, democracy, and aesthetics to develop a distinctively Deweyan rhetorical theory. However, while these scholars have made some explicit and implicit connections between rhetoric and emotion, I argue these are not to the extent warranted by the importance Dewey gave to emotion-affect in all human affairs, especially communication and democratic life. Furthermore, in the field of rhetoric at large, there has been increasing interest in affect, partly as a return to rhetoric’s historic interest in emotion, feeling, and pathos; and partly in response to an overall “affective turn” in the humanities and social sciences. I argue that Deweyan pragmatist rhetorical theory, enhanced by the theory of affect developed in my thesis, can engage productively with current affect theory in two ways. First, I use my enhanced Deweyan theory to clarify conceptual difficulties in current affect theory and to resolve a problematic dualism in one of the leading theories about affect and emotion, which has greatly influenced rhetorical studies. This dualism causes ruptures in what I argue, drawing on Dewey, are the basic continuities between the body, emotion, thought, language, social interaction, and community building that comprise rhetoric. Second, the engagement between pragmatist and affect theories in my thesis also yields better articulations of a Deweyan theory of rhetoric. In particular, there is in Dewey’s philosophy an implicit notion of affective rhetorical ecologies. This concept has also been developing in the field of rhetoric at large, and putting the two lines of scholarship together extends both. Extending a pragmatic, affective, ecological view of rhetoric has the potential to help scholars better theorize and citizens better practice rhetoric(s) that meet the demands of an increasingly complex world challenged by globalism and pluralism, as well as large-scale technological and environmental change

Author : Geoffrey N. Leech
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 40,81 MB
Release : 2016-02-17
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 1317869486

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Over the years, pragmatics - the study of the use and meaning of utterances to their situations - has become a more and more important branch of linguistics, as the inadequacies of a purely formalist, abstract approach to the study of language have become more evident. This book presents a rhetorical model of pragmatics: that is, a model which studies linguistic communication in terms of communicative goals and principles of 'good communicative behaviour'. In this respect, Geoffrey Leech argues for a rapprochement between linguistics and the traditional discipline of rhetoric. He does not reject the Chomskvan revolution of linguistics, but rather maintains that the language system in the abstract - i.e. the 'grammar' broadly in Chomsky's sense - must be studied in relation to a fully developed theory of language use. There is therefore a division of labour between grammar and rhetoric, or (in the study of meaning) between semantics and pragmatics. The book's main focus is thus on the development of a model of pragmatics within an overall functional model of language. In this it builds on the speech avct theory of Austin and Searle, and the theory of conversational implicature of Grice, but at the same time enlarges pragmatics to include politeness, irony, phatic communion, and other social principles of linguistic behaviour.

Author : Ellen Susan Peel
Publisher : Ohio State University Press
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 40,65 MB
Release : 2002
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780814209103

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An addition to the Theory and Interpretation of Narrative series, Peel's book addresses how feminist utopian narratives attempt to persuade readers to adopt certain beliefs. Using three feminist utopian novels as her main examples, The Marriages between Zones Three, Four, and Five by Doris Lessing; The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin; and Les Guérillères by Monique Wittig, Peel examines how belief-bridging and protean metaphor in these works persuade readers. Literary persuasion, often dismissed as propaganda, in fact works in subtle and profound ways. The book presents major techniques by which narrative literature exercises this sophisticated influence on beliefs. Ultimately concluding that the pragmatic works better than the static in utopian feminism, Peel shows how, in novels such as those under discussion, the narrative techniques support pragmatism. Inquiring how narrative form can shape political belief by affecting readers' responses, the author integrates topics that are rarely combined. The book investigates three theoretical issues: utopian belief, distinguishing the perfectionism of the static from the vitality of the pragmatic and showing how the latter creates narrative energy; the persuasive process, tracing narrative form and asking how implied readers match real ones and how readers are swayed by belief-bridging and protean metaphor; and feminist belief, a nuanced definition that accounts both for what links feminists and what makes them diverse. Politics, Persuasion, and Pragmatism explores the rhetorical and ethical power of narrative literature.

Author : Clayton L. Terry
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 43,49 MB
Release : 2022
Category :
ISBN :

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This dissertation offers a reimagined interpretive field for the study of rhetorical pragmatism. Working at the intersections of rhetorical pragmatism, rhetorical agency, African American public intellectualism, and the narrative histories of pragmatism and rhetoric, this project challenges, revises, and advances the scholarly understanding of rhetorical pragmatism in the effort to further attune its commitments to pluralism, lived experience, and meliorism. In so doing, this dissertation begins the work of tracing a rhetorical history of the pragmatist tradition marked by rhetorics of lived experience. I argue this pluralistic strain of rhetorical pragmatism has been ignored due to disciplinary dependence on pragmatism’s dominant origin story and a reliance on its hegemonic classical figures. Likewise, I argue this strain has been ignored in the rhetorical pragmatism scholarship due to its foundational reliance on classical Greek rhetorical theory for disciplinary certainty and validation. In this dissertation, I examine the rhetorical pragmatist practices of three African American public intellectuals typically considered ancillary to the pragmatist tradition and often considered overlooked by the subfield of pragmatism and rhetoric: Anna Julia Cooper, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Cornel West. The rhetorical history this project traces centers rhetorical practices rather than foundational theories, figures, or philosophical works. Rather than attempting to include this project’s case studies within a dominant canon, I instead analyze the various ways these figures deploy rhetorics of lived experience to equip their audiences with various forms of rhetorical agency to ameliorate social suffering and build pragmatic publics