What is Rhetoric?

From Harlot: Wiki

Plato said rhetoric is "the art of winning the soul by discourse."

Aristotle said it's "the faculty of discovering in any particular case all of the available means of persuasion."

For Cicero, "Rhetoric is one great art comprised of five lesser arts: inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and pronunciatio." Rhetoric is "speech designed to persuade."

For Quintillian, "Rhetoric is the art of speaking well."

I. A. Richards said rhetoric is the study of misunderstandings and their remedies.

Andrea Lunsford said rhetoric is "the art, practice, and study of human communication."

For Charles Bazerman, it is "The study of how people use language and other symbols to realize human goals and carry out human activities . . . ultimately a practical study offering people great control over their symbolic activity.

For Kenneth Burke, "The most characteristic concern of rhetoric [is] the manipulation of men's beliefs for political ends....the basic function of rhetoric [is] the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents." And, "Wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric, and wherever there is rhetoric, there is meaning."

Source: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/english/courses/sites/lunsford/pages/defs.htm

"Rhetoric appears as the connective tissue peculiar to civil society and to its proper finalities, happiness and political peace hic et nunc."

Marc Fumaroli

"[Rhetoric's central concern is] understanding how language and other symbolic systems provide frameworks through which we makes sense of experience, construct our collective identity, produce meaning, and prompt action in the world."

From Thomas Rosteck's introduction to At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies

"We see rhetoric as comprising three elements: ideology (assumptions about what human relations should be and how people should use symbol systems); practice (how people actually do constitute their relations through regularized symbolic or discursive activity); and method (tactics, procedures, heuristics, or tools that people use for inquiry).

From Patricia Sullivan and James Porter's book, Opening Spaces: Writing Technologies and Critical Research Practices

"In antiquity rhetoric was education, the leading out of the child from the private world of the family (and the family's responsibility for suitable training) to the social and political worlds. Learning to write well, which meant, on the one hand, a complicated technique, and, on the other hand, a discrete (primarily literary) body of knowledge, was the necessary preparation for what was seen as the only truly human existence: that of a participant in the social life of the community and the political life of the state."

~ Michael Holzman

"The mobilization of signs for the articulation of identities, ideologies, consciousnesses, communities, publics, and cultures."

~ Kevin Deluca

"[Rhetoric deals with] questions surrounding any study of language: the relation between language and the world, the relation between discourse and knowledge, the heuristic and communicative functions of verbal expression, the roles of situation and audience in shaping utterance, the social and ethical aspects of discourse" (27).

~ C.H. Knoblauch. "Modern Rhetorical Theory and its Future Directions." In Perspectives on Research and Scholarship in Composition. Ed. Ben W. McClelland and Timothy R. Donovan. New York: MLA, 1985. 26-44.

But as Kenneth Burke has taught us, rhetoric may be defined very broadly (e.g., I tell the students in my undergraduate rhetorical theory class that the study of rhetoric is the study of how we use language and how language uses us).

~ Krista Ratcliffe

"Milton, Swift, and Pope, for example, can be called 'rhetors' without apology in the sense that they invented works which they hoped would intervene in civic discourse, using topics, genres, conventions, and figures taught in school by rhetoricians."

~ Sharon Crowley, "Composition is not Rhetoric," Enculturation (5.1:2003)

"What rhetoric has always addressed: not the mastery and regulation of language so much as the ways in which language shapes, reflects, and changes practices among members of particular communities."

~ Christine Farris

"I use rhetoric broadly to mean the symbolic inducement of social cooperation." ~ Gerard Hauser, Vernacular Voices