What is rhetoric?
I feel like I've been asked this question a dozen times*, and I never have a clear-cut answer for it. The basic, Aristotle-lite/Wikipedia definition is easily enough understood: identifying and using the available means of persuasion for any given context. But even though it's an easy answer on the surface, for me the longer I've studied rhetoric the harder it's become to define.
Typically, when trying to define rhetoric I use an approach given to me by a professor at SCSU: dividing it into two broader categories: little rhetoric and Big Rhetoric. Little rhetoric, or the techne, is centered on studying rhetoric as more of a craft or a skill--where we look at things like rhetorical appeals, effective writing or composition strategies, rhetorical moves and choices, etc. When I think about Big Rhetoric is when I have a more difficult time trying to define the term.
Big Rhetoric, in my mind, is looking at how we form these approaches to techne, and involve more complicated discussions in relation to ideologies, social relations, power dynamics, epistemology, and meaning-making processes. Big Rhetoric involves not only just looking at why Oxford commas are needed for sentence clarity, but a broader discussion on who enforced the Oxford comma, why most English majors have an Intense Opinion on the Oxford comma, how the Oxford comma is applied in different social territories, etc. Big Rhetoric is inclusive of both intrinsic and extrinsic processes; process and product.
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* usually in the vein of "What are you going to school for?" which is usually answered by me making dramatic hand movements and giving up
What is the history and theory of rhetoric?**
I guess here is where I out myself as a Sophist fangirl (too soon!). For me, rhetoric begins with the Sophists, and rhetoricians (or, I guess, pre-rhetoricians) such as Protagoras, Gorgias, and the anonymous author of Dissoi Logoi (which is not the best piece of composition ever, but the ideas are nifty enough). The concept of relativism, or subjective truths and knowledge, is vital to the heart of rhetoric in my opinion (I am a big fan of relativism + more anthropologically-based approaches to wisdom).
With the sophists came what I mentally picture as the Toga Turf War, or philosophers such as Plato who were not the biggest fans of sophistry (Wikipedia has this awesome quote on Plato re: the sophists: "Plato described Sophists as paid hunters after the young and wealthy, as merchants of knowledge, as athletes*** in a contest of words, and purgers of souls") introducing the broader, philosophical debate of opinion vs. The Truth, and introducing the stigma of rhetoric being a tool of deception and manipulation. Plato argued that only Capital-T-Truth was what mattered, and compared rhetoric to cookery (in Gorgias if I recall correctly), or a falsehood art, providing false nourishment but no substance. (Though he seemed to come around a little in Phaedrus, where he admitted rhetoric had potential in the hands of an Enlightened Philosopher).
A contemporary (and rival) of Plato, Isocrates, is generally credited with running the first school of rhetoric (and I guess made considerable bank doing so) and established what he called philosophia, which was something of a bridge between rhetoric (then more narrowly defined as the art of public speaking/craft/techne) and philosophy--Isocrates stressed kairos, which oversimplified is the idea of having the right message in the right place at the right time. Isocrates also heavily applied rhetoric to politics + law.
After Plato came Aristotle, who introduced more concrete applications and taxonomies of rhetoric in On Rhetoric (which is mainly from one of his student's lecture notes). Aristotle I think is the foundation of most of our contemporary theory-- the basics like ethos/pathos/logos, the five canons, etc. Aristotle saw rhetoric as an essential part of philosophy, and gave it more scholarly credibility. After Aristotle came Roman rhetoricians, such as Quintilian and Cicero, who further made rhetoric more of an applied, skill-based subject.
So far, I've mostly studied Classical Rhetoric, so I'm eager to learn more about how it transformed in more contemporary periods.
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**Disclaimer: this is all drawn from memory of my History of Rhetoric class a year and a half ago, which means it's probably not super reliable
***Plato was an Olympic wrestler (Plato's a nickname meaning "Broad Shoulders" I guess!), which has nothing to do with rhetoric, but I thought it was cool.
What do you want to do with the content from this course?
I want to know more about composition theory, especially theories formed after the Classical period. I want to learn about contemporary theories on rhetoric and composition as they relate to pedagogy, and develop a more thorough understanding of what Writing Studies looks like today, as well as where it might be going in the future. I'm also really interested in the applied assignments, especially researching a writing program and developing a syllabus.
Mainly, I want to be able to take the content from this course and use it to form a more concrete version of my own teaching philosophy + philosophy of writing.
You summed up in just three short paragraphs the same ideas and experiences that I've sprawled across my whole adult life (and still don't know how to talk about it). I had never heard of approaching rhetoric as little rhetoric and big rhetoric, but that makes it so much easier to talk about and understand.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I'm very glad that you differentiated between process (techne) and product. I tried to express a similar idea, but I described it in terms of means and ends. I'm glad that I'm not way out in left field. Sometimes I feel like a mad scientist after reading and writing about these ideas for so long in isolation. That can be fun and all, but the greater community tends to frown upon Frankensteins who create "working" ideas from mangled pieces of theory.
yeah I hear you--rhetoric is such a nebulous term to me, especially since I've studied it through the lenses of a few different fields (I took a lot of philosophy + political science classes in my undergrad, and both fields had their own methods of interpretation for the word). Splitting it up helps me visualize it a little bit better too--there's the more practical aspect, and then the aspect that causes more headaches.
DeletePersonally, I'm #TeamFrankenstein!
Excellent post, very thorough. You should pick up a copy of Bizzell and Herzberg, and perhaps take a course in the history of rhetoric. I'd love to hear your ideas about ways in which rhetoric can be useful today, of course, in composition and other types of teaching you may do, perhaps even other workplaces. Great research here with your ideas here.
ReplyDeleteThanks! I think I might have a copy (The Rhetorical Tradition?) of it buried somewhere in the boxes I haven't unpacked yet from moving-- it was a really helpful book while I did my undergrad/first year of grad work. Hoping I can find it again.
DeleteThank you, again. I hope to study more about Neo-Sophistic pedagogy while I complete my PhD coursework--definite an area of interest for me.