Rhetoric in Poland

Abstract

ABSTRACT The purpose of the article is to present a case study of the self-organization process within rhetorical studies in Poland, which has emerged as an independent area of research with the ambition to become a full-fledged discipline. The main research question concerns the impact of a single change-initiating event, namely, the first partially free elections in Poland in 1989, on adaptation processes at two levels of rhetorical agencies: those of citizens and rhetoricians. The ensuing socio-political changes allowed for the unrestricted development of rhetorical practices, which had been impossible in countries under the communist regime: advertising and marketing (also in politics), political debates, civic engagement, and academic freedom. The growing number of rhetorical scholars, writing in a different way and about something different than prior to 1989, contributed to the emergence of a modern and fairly compact area of rhetorical research. The article highlights the cultural specificity of Polish rhetorical studies, which include three main sources of inspiration: (a) Old Polish oratory and its contemporary literary analyses; (b) analysis of communist propaganda, including the media; and (c) contemporary concepts in the field of argumentation, rhetorical criticism, discourse analysis and media studies. The main goal is to demonstrate that after 1989, rhetorical research in Poland should no longer be reduced to the enumeration of relatively few, individual contributions, but instead it should be acknowledged as a self-organizing system – a complexity science – created by dense intertextual relations, professional networks and institutional frameworks. In order to advance the awareness of rhetorical endeavors in Poland among international scholars, we adopt here a descriptive methodology, focusing on five key aspects: (a) the process of internal differentiation of rhetorical studies; (b) rhetorical perspectives in language-and-text studies; (c) media studies; (d) politics; and (e), the internationalization processes within the rhetorical studies in Poland through the reception of the American research tradition of rhetorical criticism.