Plato, Phaedrus
(Trans. R. Hackforth)
SOCRATES: Must not
the art of rhetoric, taken as a whole, be a kind of influencing of the mind [psychagogia] by means of words [logon], not
only in courts of law and other public gatherings, but in private places also?
(261A)
Aristotle, The
“Art” of Rhetoric (Trans. J. H. Freese)
Rhetoric . . . may
be defined as the faculty [dynamis] of
discovering the possible means of persuasion [pithanón,
making probable] in reference to any subject whatever. (I.II.1)
John Locke, An
Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)
. . . if we would
speak of Things as they are, we must allow, that all the Art of Rhetorick, besides Order and Clearness, all the
artificial and figurative application of Words Eloquence hath invented, are
for nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the Passions, and thereby
mislead the Judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheats . . . . (Bk.III, ch. 10, § 34 )
I. A. Richards, The
Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936)
Rhetoric, I shall
urge, should be a study of misunderstanding and its remedies.
Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (1950):
[Rhetoric] is rooted in an essential
function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic, and is
continually born anew; the use of language as symbolic means of inducing
cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols. (43)
Wayne Booth “The Rhetorical Stance,” College
Composition and Communication 14 (1963)
The common ingredient
that I find in all of the writing I admire — excluding for now novels, plays,
and poems — is something that I shall reluctantly call the rhetorical stance,
a stance which depends on discovering and maintaining in any writing
situation a proper balance among the three elements that are at work in any
communicative effort: the available arguments about the subject itself, the
interests and peculiarities of the audience, and the voice, the implied
character, of the speaker. I should like to suggest that it is this balance,
this rhetorical stance, difficult as it is to describe, that is our main goal
as teachers of rhetoric. (141)
S. Michael Halloran
As an art, rhetoric stands somewhere
between a purely intuitive knack and an exact science; it provides techniques
together with principles to govern their use, but it cannot say with total
confidence that a given technique will achieve a desired effect. As an art of communication, rhetoric deals
with the symbols—chiefly words—through which humans make and exchange
meaning. As an art of effective
communication, rhetoric focuses on the adaptation of symbols to the demands
of particular audiences, purposes, and situations.
Willian Covino and
David Jolliffe, from Rhetoric: Concepts, Definitions, Boundaries
Rhetoric is a primarily verbal,
situationally contingent, epistemic art that is both philosophical and
practical and gives rise to potentially active texts.
C. H. Knoblauch,
“Modern Rhetorical Theory and Its Future Directions,” in Perspectives on
Research and Scholarship in Composition
.
. . rhetoric is the process of using language to
organize experience and communicate it to others. It is also the study of how
people use language to organize and communicate experience. The word denotes,
as I use it, both a distinctive human activity and the “science” concerned
with understanding that activity. All human beings are “rhetors”
because they naturally conceive as well as share their knowledge of the world
by means of discourse. Certain individuals are also “rhetoricians” because
they study the nature, operations, and purposes of discourse. (29)
A humble
and utterly general definition
The
strategic and intentional use of signs to create, discover, and, communicate
meaning, the history of those meanings, intentions, and modes of
communication, the study of the purposes, means, and effects of such
communication, and the history of our conversations about the means, effects,
and uses of such symbolic exchange.
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