Rhetoric in literature 
The nature and scope of rhetoric 
Traditional and modern rhetoric 
The traditional rhetoric is limited to the insights and terms developed by
rhetors, or rhetoricians, in the Classical period of ancient Greece, about the
5th century BC, to teach the art of public speaking to their fellow citizens in
the Greek republics and, later, to the children of the wealthy under the Roman
Empire. Public performance was regarded as the highest reach of education
proper, and rhetoric was at the centre of the educational process in western
Europe for some 2,000 years. Institutio oratoria (before AD 96;  The Training
of an Orator ), by the Roman rhetorician Quintilian, perhaps the most
influential textbook on education ever written, was in fact a book about
rhetoric. Inevitably, there were minor shifts of emphasis in so long a
tradition, and for a long time even letter writing fell within the purview of
rhetoric; but it has consistently maintained its emphasis upon creation, upon
instructing those wishing to initiate communication with other people.

Modern rhetoric has shifted its focus to the auditor or reader. Literary
criticism always borrowed from rhetoric stylistic terms such as antithesis and
metaphor were invented by Classical rhetoricians. When language became a
subject of sustained scholarly concern, it was inevitable that scholars would
turn back to Classical theories of rhetoric for help. But modern rhetoric is
far more than a collection of terms. The perspective from which it views a text
is different from that of other disciplines. History, philosophy, literary
criticism, and the social sciences are apt to view a text as though it were a
kind of map of the author's mind on a particular subject. Rhetoricians,
accustomed by their traditional discipline to look at communication from
the communicator's point of view, regard the text as the embodiment of an
intention, not as a map. They know that that intention in its formulation
is affected by its audience. They know also that the structure of a piece
of discourse is a result of its intention. A concern for audience, for
intention, and for structure is, then, the mark of modern rhetoric. It is
as involved with the process of interpretation, or analysis, as it is with
the process of creation, or genesis.

Rhetorical analysis is actually an analogue of traditional rhetorical
genesis:
both view a message through the situation of the auditor or reader as well as
the situation of the speaker or writer. Both view the message as compounded of
elements of time and place, motivation and response. An emphasis on the context
automatically makes a rhetorician of the literary critic or interpreter and
distinguishes that approach from the other kinds of verbal analysis.  Critics
who have insisted upon isolating, or abstracting, the literary text from the
mind of its creator and from the milieu of its creation have found themselves
unable to abstract it from the situation of its reader. Certain modern critics
have joined with rhetoricians in denouncing the folly of all such attempts at
abstraction. In interpreting any text say a speech by Elizabeth I of England at
Tilbury, Essex, or a play by the great Hindu poet of the 5th century, Kalidasa
the rhetorician must imaginatively re-create the original situation of that
text as well as endeavour to understand those factors that condition a present
understanding.

All discourse now falls within the rhetorician's purview. Modern rhetoricians
identify rhetoric more with critical perspective than with artistic product.
They justify expanding their concerns into other literary provinces on the
basis of a change in thinking about the nature of human reason. Modern
philosophers of the Existentialist and Phenomenologist schools have strongly
challenged the assumptions whereby such dualities as knowledge and opinion,
persuasion and conviction, reason and emotion, rhetoric and poetry, and
even rhetoric and philosophy have in the past been distinguished. The old
line between the demonstrable and the probable has become blurred.
According to these modern philosophers, a person's basic method of judgment
is argumentation, whether in dialogue with others or with a text, and the
results are necessarily relative and temporal. Such modern philosophers use
legal battles in a courtroom as basic models of the process every person
goes through in acquiring knowledge or opinion. For some, philosophy and
rhetoric have become conflated, with rhetoric itself being a further
conflation of the subject matter Aristotle discusses not only in his
Rhetoric but also in his Topics, which he had designed for dialectics, for
disputation among experts.  According to this view, philosophers engage in
a rhetorical transaction that seeks to persuade through a dialogic process
first themselves and then, by means of their utterances, others. It is in
this  argumentative  light that a rhetorically trained reader or auditor
interprets all texts and justifies their inclusion within the province of
rhetoric.

Rhetoric has come to be understood less as a body of theory or as certain types
of artificial techniques and more as an integral component of all human
discourse. As a body of discursive theory, rhetoric has traditionally offered
rules that are merely articulations of contemporary attitudes toward certain
kinds of prose and has tended to be identified with orations in which the
specific intent to persuade is most obvious. But modern rhetoric is limited
neither to the offering of rules nor to studying topical and transient products
of controversy. Rather, having linked its traditional focus upon creation with
a focus upon interpretation, modern rhetoric offers a perspective for
discovering the suffusion of text and content inhering within any discourse.
And for its twin tasks, analysis and genesis, it offers a methodology as well:
the uncovering of those strategies whereby the interest, values, or emotions of
an audience are engaged by any speaker or writer through his discourse.  The
perspective has been denoted with the term situation; the methodology, after
the manner of certain modern philosophers, may be denoted by the term
argumentation. It should be noted at the outset that one may study not only the
intent, audience, and structure of a discursive act but also the shaping
effects of the medium itself on both the communicator and the communicant.
Those rhetorical instruments that potentially work upon an audience in a
certain way, it must be assumed, produce somewhat analogous effects within the
writer or speaker as well, directing and shaping his discourse.


Elements of rhetoric 
For the tasks imposed by the rhetorical approach some of the most important
tools inherited from antiquity are the figures of speech: for example, the
metaphor, or comparison between two ostensibly dissimilar phenomena, as in the
famous comparison by the 17th-century English poet John Donne of his soul and
his mistress's to the legs on a geometer's compass in his  A Valediction:
Forbidding Mourning ; another is the allegory, the extended metaphor, as in
John Bunyan's classic of English prose Pilgrim's Progress (1678, 1684), wherein
man's method of earning Christian salvation is compared to a road on which he
journeys, and the comparison is maintained to such an extent that it becomes
the central structural principle of the entire work. Such figures may be said
to pertain either to the texture of the discourse, the local colour or details,
or to the structure, the shape of the total argument. Ancient rhetoricians made
a functional distinction between trope (like metaphor, a textural effect) and
scheme (like allegory, a structural principle). To the former category belong
such figures as metaphor, simile (a comparison announced by  like  or  as),
personification (attributing human qualities to a nonhuman being or object),
irony (a discrepancy between a speaker's literal statement and his attitude or
intent), hyperbole (overstatement or exaggeration) or understatement, and
metonymy (substituting one word for another which it suggests or to which it is
in some way related as part to whole, sometimesestion ), congeries (an
accumulation of statements or phrases that say essentially the same thing),
apostrophe (a turning from one's immediate audience to address another, who may
be present only in the imagination), enthymeme (a loosely syllogistic form of
reasoning in which the speaker assumes that any missing premises will be
supplied by the audience), interrogatio (the rhetorical  question, which is
posed for argumentative effect and requires no answer), and gradatio (a
progressive advance from one statement to another until a climax is achieved).
However, a certain slippage in the categories trope and scheme became
inevitable, not simply because rhetoricians were inconsistent in their use of
terms but because well-constructed discourse reflects a fusion of structure and
texture. One is virtually indistinguishable from the other. Donne's compass
comparison, for example, creates a texture that is not isolable from other
effects in the poem; rather, it is consonant with a structural principle that
makes the comparison both appropriate and coherent.  Above all, a modern
rhetorician would insist that the figures, like all elements of rhetoric,
reflect and determine not only the conceptualizing processes of the speaker's
mind but also an audience's potential response.  For all these reasons figures
of speech are crucial means of examining the transactional nature of discourse.



Copyright   1994-2002 Encyclop�dia Britannica, Inc.