Rhetoric Research Articles

Jews in the Society of Jesus: Claudio Acquaviva and his critics

The Spanish origins of the Society of Jesus entailed a sensitivity about the Jewish ancestry of many of its members. This article examines the decision taken by the Fifth General Congregation of the Society (1593–1594) to exclude persons of Jewish descent (conversos), in light of strong criticism voiced by three leading Jesuits: Robert Persons (1546–1610), superior of the English mission, Diego de Guzmán (c.1522–1606), a noted Spanish preacher and catechist, and Antonio Possevino (1533–1611), an Italian Jesuit involved in high-level diplomacy. This article analyses selected correspondence in which they confronted the superior general, Claudio Acquaviva (1543–1615, in office 1580–1615), questioning the argument that conversos inhibited the work of the Society. The writers’ rhetorical strategies include logical argument and practical demonstration as well as appeals to ethos and pathos through personal experience and dramatised precedent, hoping to shame the general into moderating the policy. Acquaviva’s resistance to their persuasion is explained by his need to retain the support of the Spanish royal court in asserting his authority over dissident Jesuits in Spain as well as to sustain his project to increase the effectiveness of the Society through internal coherence and tight organisation.Contribution: The article illustrates the use of rhetorical strategies to reinforce the biblical principle of racial equality within the Society of Jesus in the Reformation era.

A French Parnassus for the Danes


 
 Benefitting from a taste for everything French in the Danish-Norwegian absolute monarchy, La Beaumelle circulated in Copenhagen news and ideas from the French Enlightenment in a handwritten journal which content has never been studied before. The ideas and rhetorical strategies of his journalistic input are analysed and contextualised in the Danish political agenda and in the larger frame of the circulation of semi-private news and the intellectual history of the Enlightenment. Brilliant and irreverent, the author discussed moderate and subversive ideas along with much gossip from Paris. This article is the first study of what was written in the Gazette and connects intellectual networks and the history of the press, by focusing on the relationship between French thinkers and the kingdom of Denmark-Norway. 
 

A RHETORIC OF CHINA’S EXPLOITATION OF RELIGION IN WEST AFRICA

This paper attempts to deconstruct Chinese business agents’ exploitation of religion as an economic resource in West Africa. Focusing on three cases from Ghana sampled on YouTube, the paper argues that China’s religion project in Africa involves three rhetorical strategies. These are reverse proselytization, repackaging of African/Ghanaian Christian gospel songs, and enstoolment of Chinese as African chiefs. The analysis reveals that Chinese foreign workers employ this capitalist model based on the working hypothesis that the average African of the postcolonial/neocolonial epoch is economically vulnerable and yet passionately religious, and, thus, would look to religion for solutions. Implications of the findings are reported in the paper.

Menacing the Gods in Ancient Magical Practice

This article examines the phenomenon of “menacing the gods,” also called Götterbedrohung or Götterzwang. This is a well-attested feature of the formulae preserved in the Greek and Demotic magical papyri (PGM/PDM, c. 3rd–4th century CE), but is also known from earlier Egyptian, notably the New Kingdom (1550–1070 BCE) and Late Antique traditions. In these texts, the magical practitioners threaten the gods, e.g., that they will burn them alive or bring down heaven, should the gods not comply with their wishes or with those of their clients. I analyse the communicative situation between clients, gods, and magical practitioners, investigating what perceived power allowed the practitioners to utter such provocations against the divinities; and how the practitioners interacted as intermediaries between clients and gods, especially with regard to the phenomenon of blame-shifting. I also examine which rhetorical strategies the practitioners used to persuade the gods to do their bidding. The examples I analyse deal with healing of, e.g., diseases and snakebites. A close-reading of the narratives in the spells, as well as other parts of speech, facilitates the delineation of the emotions, agendas and rhetoric applied in the spells, leading in turn to a tentative detection of the life situations that lay behind—and prompted—their formulaic magical language.

British Political Rhetoric in the Perspective of Cultural Specificity

Existing research in the field of political communication and rhetoric often focuses on general principles and strategies of the speech, leaving aside cultural-specific considerations. This study is aimed at analyzing the discursive characteristics of British public political rhetoric, which will fill this gap and expand knowledge about the relationship between language, culture, and politics. The work aims to identify the discursive features of the British public political speech from the perspective of its cultural specificity. The results of the study show that, despite the universal nature of the public political rhetoric, British public political speeches differ in certain specifics. The speeches of British politicians are marked by features characteristic of each type in the structure of the text, the use of vivid rhetorical techniques, strict adherence to the protocol, emphasis on the sense of national pride, as well as some unique attributes. This study provides a deeper understanding of the role of language and cultural factors in political communication, and it is also able to expand the theoretical foundations in the field of linguistics and political science.
 The article is intended for researchers and specialists in the field of linguistics, rhetoric, and political communication. It can also serve as a useful resource for students, postgraduates, and teachers interested in a detailed analysis of the discursive characteristics of British political rhetoric.

‘Property of the Nation’ - Resource Nationalism to Become a Political Doctrine in Contemporary Mongolia?

The proposed paper is a study of resource nationalism. Resource nationalism appeared in Mongolia in the post-Socialist period. In this paper, we understand resource nationalism as a wide spectrum of strategies domestic elites employ in order to increase their control of natural resources - definition by Paul Domjan and Matt Stone. After an analysis of legal materials, mass media articles and political rhetoric, the author of this paper concludes that the sources of resource nationalism should be searched in the texts that date back to the Socialist era. Also, the sources of resource nationalism can be found in the ideas about justice of those times. The idea that natural resources belong to the people has been fixed in mass opinion, while contemporary nationalists justify this idea from the standpoint of “blood and soil”. That creates serious problems for Mongolia, a country with resource economy. The matter is that economic growth driven with foreign investments has caused a deep social stratification. In its turn, social stratification gave birth to a social demand for fair profit distribution from natural resource extraction. In the political sphere, this social demand quickly received a reaction - in the form of resource nationalism rhetoric. In the paper, we notice that resource nationalism in Mongolia has not been formed as a vivid legal or political doctrine. Today, it is a set of populist rhetoric of current interest which are used both for lobbying future political decisions in mining and for legitimizing the decisions already made.

Infinite Judgment

The article uses the idea of “infinite judgment” (borrowed from the field of logic) to reflect on the narrative techniques employed in Ádám Bodor later works, with a special focus on the novel The Birds of Verhovina (2011) and the collection Nowhere (Sehol, 2019). In a formal sense, the idea of infinite judgment breaks down the duality of the so-called positive and negative qualities of logical judgments (assertion and negation) by introducing a negative predicate into the structure of a positive proposition. Applying the same logic to Bodor’s prose, we can also grasp it as a poetic principle: the process of fictional world-creation does not follow the logic of either negation or affirmation and, through a subtle logical negation, opens up a series of infinite possibilities. This rhetorical strategy, in turn, becomes the appropriate vehicle for the articulation of a specific type of historical experience that we could designate as “potential history” (in opposition to the “actual” history of Eastern European dictatorships in the second half of the twentieth century). Bodor’s prose forces a confrontation with this potential history through narratives of transience and historical transformation whose ultimate horizon is human extinction.

“We have to lie low … that sort of poisons me more and more”: A qualitative study of violent political rhetoric and health implications for Spanish and Chinese speaking immigrants

BackgroundIn recent years, the historical legacy of anti-immigrant sentiment in the US has resurfaced, fueled by a new wave of anti-immigrant political rhetoric. Violent political rhetoric, defined as either explicit or metaphorically targeted language to dehumanize targeted groups, can incite discriminatory treatment of immigrants at both interpersonal and institutional levels, shaping their health and healthcare experiences. This qualitative study explores and compares how Spanish- and Chinese-speaking immigrant populations in Chicago make sense of violent political rhetoric against their racial and ethnic identities, utilize coping strategies to maintain their sense of belonging, and experience downstream health consequences. MethodsIn 2019, 14 semi-structured focus groups were conducted among immigrants to the U.S. (n = 79). Participants were recruited from four community sites in either Hispanic/Latino or Chinese neighborhoods in Chicago. Focus groups were conducted by racially- and linguistically concordant interviewers in Spanish, Mandarin, or Cantonese. The research team developed a codebook iteratively and analyzed transcripts using grounded theory and the constant comparison method. ResultsParticipants included Chinese (61%) and Spanish-speaking immigrants (39%), with an average age of 61.4 years (sd = 13); the majority were female (62%), unemployed (68%), and attained less than a high school diploma (53%). Self-reported stress due to political rhetoric was more pronounced among Spanish-speaking participants (93%) than Chinese participants (39.6%). Immigrants responded to manifestations of violent political rhetoric in numerous ways including mobilizing the model minority myth with internalized racism, anticipatory stress, and “high effort” coping mechanisms (John Henryism), all with downstream health effects. ConclusionViolent political rhetoric is one of the mechanisms by which racism and xenophobia exacerbate a toll on the health of racialized immigrant groups. These processes have implications for both interpersonal and institutional experiences, as well as health and healthcare interactions. We propose a conceptual model that outlines these mechanisms and points to potential areas of intervention to ameliorate immigrant health inequities.

An Epidemic of Transphobia on French Turf

On September 22, 2022, a one-day international symposium took place in Rio de Janeiro: Epidemia de transfobia. This was actually a counter-event organized in response to another international event, Congresso Brazileiro de Transsexualidade, whose opening lecture, planned on the same day in Belo Horizonte, was entitled: A epidemia transgênero. This four- day conference was to close exactly a week before the Presidential election in Brazil, on October 2nd. Four years earlier, Jair Bolsonaro had used the homophobic fake news of a ‘gay kit’ allegedly distributed in schools to prevail over his opponent from the Workers’ Party, and anti-trans political rhetoric had since played an important role in his campaign against ‘gender ideology’. However, the transphobic conference was soon cancelled – probably due to widespread opposition, starting with that of the National Association of Travestis and Transsexuals (ANTRA). Still, the counter-event was maintained.

Cultural Dimensions as Guidelines in Handling Language Problems for Effective Written Communication Across Cultures

This research explores potential problems that might occur in the use of language for cross-cultural written communication. It uses corpus-based study as methodology and cultural dimensional theory by Geert Hofstede as guidelines and identifies potential problems in language use in areas such as word choices, syntaxis, textual organization, translation, and rhetorical strategies. These findings will help cross-cultural communicators avoid unnecessary misunderstandings, misleading information, and cultural blunders and create effective written information for successful business and technical exchanges internationally. In this sense, the research makes a good contribution to international business and technical communication and enriches the education in cross-cultural communication.

A case study on the COVID-19 discourse in politicians’ speeches: Investigations into the speeches of former Iranian President Hassan Rouhani

This paper aims to analyze former Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s thirty speeches on COVID-19 delivered between February 2, 2020 and April 27, 2020. We apply Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of discourse analysis to investigate and analyze Rouhani’s rhetorical and discursive strategies in making meaning of COVID-19. Findings showed that COVID-19 discourse in Rouhani’s speeches has mainly revolved around three nodal points: “the country”, “the enemy”, and “the state of exception”. Thus, the structural articulation of COVID-19 discourse resembles the hegemonic discourse in Iran. Our results also explain how Rouhani used COVID-19 as an empty signifier to reinforce the hegemonic discourse in Iran while trying to redefine his relations with the state-leaning organizations. Furthermore, we analyzed the rhetorical practices that Rouhani employed to articulate the COVID-19 discourse. This paper contributes to a growing body of literature into discursive aspects and implications of a global pandemic by providing empirical evidence form an understudied context: Iran.

'Can you play that?'

This essay explores the migration of witchcraft language from the rural environs in which we typically find it to the urban space of London in Dekker and Middleton’s The Roaring Girl. The play’s characters repeatedly turn to the language of witchcraft to describe Moll’s disruptive presence in the play, a rhetorical strategy that I argue seeks to fix Moll in place in response to her unruly movement within the social, spatial, and acoustic horizons of the city, and to ostracize her from London by reimagining her as a figure that only makes sense in the rural environs beyond its walls.

The Mechanism of Identification in the External Dissemination of the Discourse of “Community of a Shared Future for Mankind”

The “Community of a Shared Future for Mankind” has emerged as a pivotal notion in contemporary international relations and global governance. Drawing from President Xi Jinping’s public speeches concerning the topic, this article explores the rhetorical strategies by using Kenneth Burke’s Identification Theory. With the help of word cloud API and the Doccano text annotation tool, the research conducts a systematic analysis to delve into the application and tangible impacts of the identification mechanism in the external dissemination of the discourse. It is founded that the strategies of identification by sympathy and inaccuracy are predominant in the discourse, with identification by antithesis as a supplementary method.

In-group Unity in Anglophone Cameroon's Separatist Discourse. Strategies and Means of Realization

The present paper is the result of a scientific venture into the discursive construction of separatism in Cameroon’s English-speakingregions, which separatists refer to as Southern Cameroons or Ambazonia. My study aims specifically at identifying the linguistic and rhetorical strategies separatist leaders use in order to create a sense of unity amongst all English-speaking Cameroonians and make them join the fight for independence. To achieve this aim, I have analysed speeches authored between 2010 and 2015 by two Anglophone Cameroonian separatist leaders. The analysis of the speeches, which followed the Discourse Historical Approach (Wodak et al. 2009), reveals that Southern Cameroonian nationalists try to achieve unity by resorting to strategies such as nomination, predication, and argumentation through topoi. These strategies were realised by means of linguistic resources including lexicon, imperatives, deontic and epistemic modals.

Elections, Political Rhetorics and Governance in Africa

Elections, Political Rhetorics and Governance in Africa

Identities in the “posthuman” condition: locality of war and global world

“Posthuman” is considered now to be one of the most important concepts in contemporary political philosophy, cultural studies, theory of literature and art, sociology of the body and identity, etc., which keeps in focus a detailed discourse regarding the knowledge of the “posthumanity” condition (R. Braidotti, N. Gane, N.K. Hayles, F. Fukuyama, and others). This concept is no longer necessarily confined to the image of a “cyborg” as an ironic political fiction that skillfully reinvents social reality and everyday life in the context of eroding boundaries between nature and culture, or a metaphor that remains symbolically significant due to the ethical impulse and social commitment of its author (D. Haraway). Even a fragmentary involvement in the “posthuman” discourse cannot but encourage reflection on the structure of our common identity as people in the modern global world of high technology and local wars, complex interactions between science and technology, commodification of the natural world, as well as politics and international priorities; this cannot but promote rethinking the imperatives of anthropocentrism. In the case of identities, whether individual or collective, we are talking about partial, contradictory and always open constructions, about their impossibility of relying upon a single essentialist foundation, which can be skillfully intercepted by ideological and political rhetoric but not recognize obvious social and cultural differences; however, such a foundation is unlikely to lose the image of possible unifications in future, effective attraction and solidarity-driven identifications. Depending on the degree of subjects’ involvement in the transitional states of interaction between nature and culture, identities are fragmented and “denaturalized” in various ways; and it is precisely these transitional states, flows that cross borders, whether they are defined metaphorically or instrumentally, that become, first of all, the objects of control strategies, not without activating the mechanisms of informatics of domination, ignoring local knowledge in a military context, which takes into account the status of partial explanation but does not insist on the total substantiation of statements, conclusions and perspectives.

Preaching the “Traditional Family” in the Romanian Parliament: The Political Stakes and Meanings of a Hegemonic Narrative

In this article, we examine a decade of parliamentary debates related to the topic of family to understand the reasons and the rhetorical strategies that drive the support of Romanian MPs for the traditional family. Starting from four themes identified in the literature as relevant for the topic of family—national identity, religion, heteronormativity, and children—we identify the dominant definition of the “traditional family” as that of the Christian Romanian family founded and defended by ancestors—that is, union between a man and a woman for the purpose of reproduction—as the only place that can guarantee that children will grow up in a healthy and moral environment. This hegemonic narrative is enhanced by the anti-gender campaign repertoire and strengthened by populist logic, aiming to restore true Romanian values—Christian, ancestral, and national—in opposition to contemporary Western relativism and the alleged colonial cultural project of gender equality+ politics. The decadent present, threatening national identity, the continuity of the people, Christian values, the natural gender order, or the safety of children, can be saved only by returning to the traditional family, which functions as a hegemonic signifier re-imposing, in the logic of the narrative of return, a nationalist, conservative, and religious definition of the family, based on biological and natural foundations and necessarily heteronormative and chauvinist.

Branding a Nation: A Case Study on South Africa, Social Media, and the 2010 FIFA World Cup

In 2004, South Africa was awarded the opportunity to host the 2010 FIFA World Cup. The opportunity to reshape their national identity in the spotlight of the World Cup came at a particularly useful time for South Africa. Despite the country’s seemingly miraculous transition from apartheid to democracy—a transition lauded around the world—the country’s reputation was soon dragged down by concerns about crime, unemployment, and a rising rate of HIV infections. Although a number of scholars have looked at the long- and short-term effects of South Africa’s effort at creating a national identity during the 2010 FIFA World Cup, questions of process remain to be explored. What rhetorical strategies were employed to build this national image? What role did developing social media platforms play in the World Cup campaign? What were the communication tactics that led to a successful World Cup campaign? Using the theory of dialectical vernacular, I argue that South Africa was able to use the stage and emotional setting of the World Cup, in combination with a unique moment in time in branding and social media, to cultivate and deploy user-generated content to create a sense of authenticity that successfully sold a positive image of South Africa to the world. Essentially, South Africa was able to take digital material that was submitted by citizens around the country, and around the world, and use it to build a campaign that was vernacular, transnational, and embodied in nature. This allowed them to manufacture a national identity that effectively (at least in the short term) redirected conversations away from the more complicated issues affecting the country to, instead, showcase South Africa as a successful democratic nation.

COMPARING THE USE OF RHETORICAL APPEALS BY TWO MALAYSIAN POLITICIANS IN THEIR SOCIAL MEDIA COMMUNICATION

Drawing upon Aristotle’s rhetorical appeal theory, the study was conducted to compare the use of rhetorical strategies by two Malaysian politicians namely Syed Saddiq [P1] and Hannah Yeoh [P2] in their social media communication. Two research questions were formulated for the study: (a) What were the rhetorical strategies used by the two politicians? (b) Which type of rhetorical appeals were used the most among the two politicians? This study employs a qualitative content analysis approach and the data for the study were social media postings collected from the target politicians’ social media platforms (Facebook and Twitter) related to the Taman Sri Muda flood crisis dated from the 17th of December 2021 to the 10th of January 2022. The data were analysed and classified based on Aristotle’s rhetorical appeals of ethos, pathos, and logos. It was found that both politicians adopted different types of rhetorical strategies depending on the message they intended to convey. Syed Saddiq [P1] used more pathos while Hannah Yeoh [P2] utilised more ethos. It can be concluded based on the findings that Syed Saddiq and Hannah Yeoh had utilised Aristotle’s rhetorical appeals of ethos, pathos, and logos in their social media posts during the Taman Sri Muda flood crisis to establish their credibility as politicians, to appeal to the public’s emotion and sympathy as well as to provide evidence to back up their arguments and claims. This study contributes to the literature on persuasive strategies used by politicians and political communication. Keyword(s) : Rhetorical appeals; communicative practices; social media interaction; ethos, pathos; logos.

Features of the use of critical thinking skills in countering manipulation in modern communication.

The subject of the study is critical thinking. The article is devoted to the study of the role of critical thinking in modern communication conditions. Particular attention is paid to the peculiarities of using critical thinking skills in countering manipulative influences both in the professional sphere and in personal communicative interaction. The article substantiates that critical thinking is one of the most important skills in the modern world; the importance of critical thinking skills for effectively processing large amounts of incoming information, as well as for building successful communication, is clarified; the specifics and features of the application of critical thinking skills in the context of communicative interaction are considered; the role of logical as well as rhetorical components in communication is substantiated; options for countering communicative manipulations and incorrect communicative influences are proposed. The article uses methods of comparative analysis, contextual analysis, synthesis, generalization, classification, as well as the logical method. The article proposes a division of communicative goals according to the type of statements. Particular attention is focused on analyzing the situation of the motivating communicative goal. The article clarifies the meaning of the following concepts: communication, 4K competencies, critical thinking, non-critical thinking, manipulation, logical, psychological and rhetorical argumentation strategies, communicative purpose, rhetoric, ad hominem arguments, ad rem arguments, deductive inferences, inductive inferences. The article proposes methods and tools for strengthening the skills of building effective communicative interaction. Methods of countering manipulative communicative influences are also analyzed both from the point of view of logical science and rhetorical skill. The article will be useful for both undergraduate and graduate students studying rhetoric, argumentation theory, communication techniques, and a wide range of readers.