Brummett’s Rhetoric of Style for the 21 st Century

1. Brummett’sRhetoric of Stylefor the 21st Century

2. Rhetorics • Handbook/Guide for Practice • Theory of persuasion • Critical method of analysis

3. Components • Primacy of the Text • Imaginary Communities • Market Contexts • Aesthetic Rationales • Stylistic Homologies

4. Primacy of the Text • 117: “Text is a set of signs related to each other insofar as their meanings all contribute to the same set of effects or functions.” • 118: “The exigencies that draw rhetorical responses, especially in public rhetoric, are increasingly represented in texts rather than experienced directly.” • 118: “Texts are primary sites for the construction of identity and social affiliation.”

5. Primacy of the Text • Textual world • Bases for identity and community • Nodal texts • Convergence, redundancy, and triangulation of meaning • Reading off of the text • Images and floating signs

8. Imaginary Communities • 119: “The audience is an effect of rhetoric.” • 120: “We engage audiences, communities, and groups by engaging their representations and styles.” • 121: “By imagining who we are and who are the others to whom we want to speak through style, we construct the schemes of signs and images that present a representation of ourselves to others as we have image-ined them.”

9. Imaginary Communities • Effects of discourse • Facilitation by new technology • Coherence around style • Representation and communication of communities and subjects by texts • Calling forth of motives, actions, and values by communities

12. Market Contexts • 124: “Increasingly, commercial rhetoric is the rhetoric of politics, social interaction, and religion.” • 125: “The market context is the frozen floor of meanings upon which rhetoric dances today. It is largely impervious to rhetorical means to change it.”

13. Market Contexts • Insulation from change • Merger of state, culture, and market • Shift of signs and images to commodities • Uses of goods as language, systems of signs • Grounding of community an identity by commodities • Pleasure and desire • Global rhetorical system

16. Aesthetic Rationales • 127: “Distinctive rationales for how texts create their effects.” • 127: “Manifested, first, in the primacy of aesthetic forms of expression and aesthetic criteria for judgments and decision.” • 129: “People decide for or against propositions based on whether they are backed by a plausible narrative.”

17. Aesthetic Rationales • 130: “Politics can be played out in quick flashes in the rhetoric of style, in aesthetics, and through today’s quick-cycling communication media.”

18. Aesthetic Rationales • Aesthetic bases for decision and judgment • Culture of aesthetic engrossment • Aesthetic bases for identity and social organization • Pleasure and desire • Narrative rationale • Performance • Images

20. Stylistic Homologies • 131-2: “A homology is a formal resemblance across different texts, actions, objects, and other orders of experience.” • 132: “A given style is a repertoire of signs as well as the homological glue that binds them together as a style.” • 132: “It is in recognizing and participating in stylistic homologies that imaginary communities and their subjects cohere around texts.”

21. Stylistic Homologies • Systems of signs and meanings • Unity of styles • Wide range of texts in system • Coherence of communities and subjects around forms

23. Activity • Choose a culture to analyze • List items for each rhetoric of style component (p. 133) • Find connections between the components (pp. 134-148) • Present findings