An Animated Primer on Contemporary Rhetorical Theory

With Accompanying Notes

NeoAristotelianism

Rhetoric as Persuasive Rhetoric as Constitutive

Argumentation

Epistemic Move

Narrative Paradigm

Public SphereMove

Identity and Subjectivity Move

PowerMove

Dramatism Ideological Criticism

Social Movements

Rhet

oric

al

Reso

urce

sPr

oduc

esTh

eory

Tool

s

Public Moral Argument

Stories

Myths

Cultural Memory

Public Values

Evaluative Criteria (fidelity, coherence,

good reasons)

Convincingness

Models

Universal Audience

Claims of Fact and Logic

Warrants

Dialectic

Equipment for Living

Accounts & Motives

Substances of Identification

The Pentad

Tropes, Frames, Dramatistic Cycle and other techniques to change perspective

Order / Classes / Hierarchy

Rhetoric as Epistemic

Autonomy/Control

Ideographs

Synchronic CritiqueDiachronic Critique

1

2

3

4 5

6

7

8

Oratorical Technique

Canons (invention, arrangement, style, memory, delivery)

Appeals (logos, pathos,

ethos)

Forms (enthymeme)

Decentering of the Speaker

Contingency of time, place, and relationships

Participatory and Constructivist

9

New Knowledge

Knowledge Claims

Truth Claims

Social Knowledge

Fields

Inquiry

A

B

O

GF

IH

ED

C

Any narrative form … in its necessary progression from one episode to the next is like the stages from A to I along the arc. But as regards the principle of internal consistency, any point along the arc is as though generated from center O. And the various steps from A to I can be considered as radiating from generative principle O, regardless of their particular position along the arc of the narrative sequence.

Kenneth Burke, “Dramatistic Form—And: Tracking Down Implications,” Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 4 (Summer 1966), 59-60.

Figure: Howard Nemerov, “Everything, Preferably All at Once: Coming to Terms with Kenneth Burke.” In Landmark Essays on Kenneth Burke, edited by Barry Brummett, 63-70. Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1993.

Geo-stories can be constructed and compared in the same manner as any narrative account

Dis

pers

ive

Inte

grat

ive

Analytical Synthetic

Formism

Mechanism

Contextualism

Organicism

Essential or universal forms (of action and experience) are instantiated in particular situations.

Particulars are related to each other because they exemplify the same form.

Analytic process: Look for correspondence across contexts or situations.

Discovery: Occurs through comparison and selection of exemplars. Identify elements or patterns that will appear regardless of context, and how experience is shaped.

Accounts (what has happened in the past, is happening in the present, will happen in the future).

Accounts have quality (scope, change, coherence; an intuitive sense of something) and texture (strands, entry into and through context, connections, thick description).

Analytic process: Look for causality. Discovery: Occurs through process of

interpretation; judges whether interpretation leads to an appropriate response (pragmatism).

The machine is mechanism’s root metaphor. Particulars are related by laws (motion,

momentum, gravity, balance, primacy), which can extend to laws of human behavior (Maslow, prospect theory, balance theory).

Analytic process: Experimental method. Break things into their parts, and those parts into parts, then reassemble in new ways according to an alternative law.

Discovery: Whether and to what extent predictions correspond to observations.

Fragments of experience and their contradictory implications.

Analytic process: Look for contradictions and place them in productive tension. Resolved through process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.

Discovery: The resulting synthesis changes how fragments are interpreted or understood.

Ways of Knowing

Derived from World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence, by Stephen C. Pepper. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970 (original copyright 1942)

For further information …

M. Karen Walker, Ph.D

m.karen@rhetoricalens.info