Modern Rhetoric Research Articles

The XXV Años de Paz Española: the invention of a Francoist aesthetics of objectivity and the constitution of a new visual regime of history

ABSTRACT This article explores how the celebration of the XXV Años de Paz in 1964 served as the stage for a new national rhetoric of peace, progress and modernity that allowed the Francoist dictatorship to move away from its fascist past. Through its study of the exhibition España 64 and the movie Franco, ese hombre, this paper explores how the celebration put into circulation what I refer to as a Francoist aesthetics of objectivity – the visual strategies used by the state to create visible indices of progress through statistics and economics as signs of good governmental practice. I challenge this idea with my analysis of the curatorial narrative of the Spanish pavilion at the New York World’s Fair of 1964. Ultimately, this article argues that what took place during the year 1964 was a rearrangement of the national narrative surrounding the Spanish Civil War that allowed the dictatorship to fluctuate between its fascist ideological tenets and pseudo-liberal economic policies and combine them at will. Despite the alleged aperturismo of the 1960s, I propose that the values attached to the Civil War continued to be at the core of the ideology determining the creation and circulation of new national narratives that would constitute a new visual regime of history.

A Woman’s Optics: Margaret Cavendish, Sensory Mimesis, and Early Modern Rhetorics of Science

ABSTRACT Accounts of the rhetorical tradition in early modern England often focus on the Royal Society of London and the scientific epistemologies and visual pedagogies surrounding technologies like the microscope. One critic of the Royal Society, Margaret Cavendish, theorized her own optics to counter the increasing exclusivity of the scientific community. An analysis of this woman’s optics reveals how the rhetorical concept of mimesis brought a theory of embodied, material sight to a historical moment in which objectivity was emerging. This critically imaginative analysis thus brings forth an early rhetorics of science in which alternative epistemologies may critique mechanical, experimental processes and argue for more inclusive scientific methods.

The Language of Argumentation: A Book Review

The Language of Argumentation by Ronny Boogaart, Henrike Jansen, & Maarten van Leeuwen (Eds). Switzerland: Springer Nature Switzerland AG. 2021 aims to provide important theoretical insights to the international community of argumentation theorists by informing them of recent developments in the field. Some aspects of argumentative texts may emerge as a result of the argumentation process. This book covers different types of argumentative procedures and enthymematic argumentation, argumentation structures, argumentation schemes, and fallacies. Specifically, contributions are solicited from authors trained in informal or formal logic, modern or classical rhetoric, and discourse analysis or speech communication.

The wonders of the Planetarium: intents and pitfalls for the implementation of a scientific facility in the midst of educational debates in Brazil in the 1930s

This study aims to highlight some articulations the intent of which was to set up Brazil’s first Planetarium in Rio de Janeiro during the organization of the 4th National Education Conference and pedagogy exposition in 1931. The Conferences, promoted by the Brazilian Education Association (ABE), were founded on strategies for disseminating educational practices and producing material for Brazilian schools. This mechanism was a tool not only to provide visibility but also to promote the debate on the material conditions needed for public education. ABE developed actions aimed at directing and political organizing of the school education system in Brazil. Its work was marked by the holding of debates, surveys, research, exhibitions, libraries, publications, conferences and courses that contributed to the entire education process. However, its national prominence occurred through its organization of the National Education Conferences with effect from 1927. The Conferences were not only a way of giving visibility to modern and up to data schooling but also for fuelling the debate on material conditions needed for public education. The ABE Conferences served as a link between the federal government, the state government and civil society, as well as being an important strategy for disseminating ideas. They gave rise to a variety of themes, actions and proposals capable of disseminating educational causes on a national level, addressed at the Conferences and publicized by the press of that time. Among them, this text highlights the debate and the attempt to acquire Brazil’s first Planetarium which could have been part of the activities of the 4th National Education Conference scheduled for 1931. In addition, the debate could put the subject of planetariums into circulation – as a modern mechanism, a powerful instrument used not only by the population but also by science and education in other countries. This article addresses aspects of material school culture by exploring sources derived from the archives of the Brazilian Education Association and from the Brazilian periodical press, proposing relationships and analyses of the use of narrative of the rhetoric of modernity in education. The theoretical references to assist with analysis are linked to the perspective of studies on material school culture and cultural history.

A Woman’s Optics: Margaret Cavendish, Sensory Mimesis, and Early Modern Rhetorics of Science

ABSTRACT Accounts of the rhetorical tradition in early modern England often focus on the Royal Society of London and the scientific epistemologies and visual pedagogies surrounding technologies like the microscope. One critic of the Royal Society, Margaret Cavendish, theorized her own optics to counter the increasing exclusivity of the scientific community. An analysis of this woman’s optics reveals how the rhetorical concept of mimesis brought a theory of embodied, material sight to a historical moment in which objectivity was emerging. This critically imaginative analysis thus brings forth an early rhetorics of science in which alternative epistemologies may critique mechanical, experimental processes and argue for more inclusive scientific methods.

Modern Rhetoric and Marketing

Modern Rhetoric and Marketing

In Search of Progress: Caste and the Modernity of the Left in Manik Bandyopadhay’s Short Stories of the Bengal Famine of 1943

This paper aims to explore the crucial import of caste in defining the modernity of the left. By examining Manik Bandyopadhyay’s three short stories of the Bengal Famine of 1943, it argues that idioms of left modernity gained a definitive articulation through left political and left cultural movements during the Famine by reducing intricacies of caste struggle into just articulations of class conflict. The discourse of the Famine wrought by artistic and literary practices of the left intellectuals, articulated through realism, represented the Famine as a revolutionary time by formulating a critique of the classist politics of nationalist elites; thereby the discourse of the left recreated class hierarchy in a more complex way than nationalist politics. By constituting the lower castes as an ambiguous monolithic peasant class, however, the middle-class intelligentsia of the left reconfigured the rhetoric of modernity animated by their own caste position within the language of class.

The Arts of Disruption: Allegory and “Piers Plowman.” by Nicolette Zeeman

Reviewed by: The Arts of Disruption: Allegory and “Piers Plowman.” by Nicolette Zeeman Rebecca Davis Nicolette Zeeman. The Arts of Disruption: Allegory and “Piers Plowman.” Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xiii, 432. $90.00. Nicolette Zeeman’s ambitious new book is an apt sequel to her first, “Piers Plowman” and the Medieval Discourse of Desire (Cambridge, 2006). Here again Piers Plowman is the hub of a teeming intellectual and literary history that encompasses classical rhetoric and ethical writings, Latin pastoralia, and allegorical narratives in French and English. Also like the earlier book, Zeeman’s latest study uncovers the deep structural workings of the poem through careful attention to its recurrent forms and, crucially, by placing Langland’s poetic practice in a rich context of contemporary discourses. Piers Plowman, notoriously, challenges students and scholars alike to get a sense of their footing in the poem, to determine which of the poem’s numerous speakers are trustworthy, and which are suspect. More than any other study I have read, The Arts of Disruption explains how and why [End Page 360] Langland creates these peculiarly disorienting effects, and it is sure to change future conversations about the poem. Equally important, however, is its contribution to the wider field of medieval literary studies, for here Zeeman offers a theory of allegory as a “disruptive art” whose implications are by no means limited to Piers Plowman. Against the tendency even among sophisticated readers to understand allegory as a binary set with a “controlling discourse,” she defines allegory in more capacious terms as a contingent and dynamic relation, one that, as the ensuing chapters make clear, transcends genre. For Zeeman, allegory emerges at “the confluence of any two or more relatively distinct and mutually commenting discourses, each of which nuances, refigures and redirects, but may also unpack, critique, and even contradict, the others present” (7–8). Zeeman’s chief interest is personification and the associated genres of dialogue and debate; but as the later parts of the book demonstrate, Zeeman’s supple definition of allegory as a “disruptive art” encompasses a broad range of literary activities. “Qualification and even negation must be its mode,” she writes, “because all descriptions exclude even as they include, every formulation is capable of becoming a complacency, and words always demand more words. Allegory is a response to the contingency and multi-dimensionality of being in the world” (2). Setting out to locate these hallmarks of disruptive allegory, the book traces five “conflictual structures” that are marked by “some form of diegetic tension, conflict, or internal contradiction” (1). These five structures are found throughout the broader medieval allegorical tradition as well as in Piers Plowman. Intricately organized, the book is divided into five two-chapter parts that correspond to the five allegorical structures. The first three parts begin with a chapter devoted to the allegorical tradition and then, in a paired chapter, trace its presence in Piers Plowman. In the last two parts, Zeeman discusses Piers Plowman in each chapter, interweaving discussion of the poem with discussion of the larger allegorical tradition. In Part 1, Zeeman introduces the trope of paradiastole, a rhetorical technique in which vices are “redescribed” as virtues, and vice versa. Paradiastole developed in classical legal settings, and is known to have resur-faced in early modern rhetoric, but Zeeman presents ample evidence for its continued use in medieval allegory and pastoral and devotional writing: “What had originally been primarily a Classical rhetorical technique . . . became in the Middle Ages part of a wide-ranging body of psychological [End Page 361] and ethical thought about the subtler manifestations of hypocrisy and self-deception” (38). Chapter 1, “The Hypocritical Figure,” identifies a particular type of allegorical personification that arises from the practice of paradiastole. “The hypocritical figure,” Zeeman writes, “is marked by various forms of tension, discrepancy, or slippage so as to reveal hidden corruption, but also other more insidious problems of decline, formalism, or complacency” (3). The chapter ranges widely, tracing paradiastole from Latin pastoral and devotional texts such as Gregory the Great’s Regula pastoralis, to narrative allegory, from Prudentius’s Psychomachia, to Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pelerinage...

English immigration discourse in the scientific paradigm of critical research: review of the monograph by M.S. Matytsina

The reviewed work is the monograph written by M.S. Matytsina, the Associate Professor of Foreign Languages Department, Lipetsk State Technical University. In the book the author describes the development trends of the English immigration discourse in the scientific paradigm of critical research. The author focuses on establishing the relationship between discourse and society, and the connecting link in this interaction is cognitive structures, which are a subjective mental construct of participants in the communicative situation. The aim of the study is to analyze and systematize the existing knowledge about the problem of immigration in dynamically developing societies of Great Britain and the USA, assess the state of development of language processes that occur as a result of observed trends, and also identify the place and role of the language content of the discourse in social relations building. The study broadens and deepens the existing knowledge about various techniques of modern political rhetoric and discursive phenomena. The monograph is addressed to specialists in the field of discursive analysis, language theory, political linguistics, doctoral students, graduate students, applicants, teachers and students of institutes and departments of foreign languages.

POWER SHARING IN MEDICAL CONSULTATIONS

Objective: To examine the management of power by doctors in medical consultations. The power is defined here as a dialogic, egalitarian, and patient-centered.
 Study Design: Qualitative study.
 Place and Duration of Study: Out-patient departments of Mayo Hospital, Lahore, Pakistan, from Nov 2019 fortwo weeks.
 Methodology: The data were collected through in-depth interviews and observations from outpatient departments of Mayo Hospital. Bourdieu's Social Practice Theory and Fairclough’s theory of Power and Language were used as a theoretical framework in the community of practice, for the interpretation of the qualitative data sets.
 Results: The interpretations of relational power by doctors and patients surface three themes: Power, Powerand Solidarity, and Solidarity. Although power-sharing is the modern rhetoric, it is hardly conceptualized in theselected hospital.
 Conclusion: With a proliferation of patient-centered approach of the medical profession, power-sharing withpatients might perpetuate dissatisfaction among the participants.

La perspectiva descolonial en la encrucijada de la crítica

El trabajo se presenta como una réplica centrada en aquello que ha motivado las críticas a la perspectiva descolonial por parte de Ariel Petruccelli y Andrea Barriga. El propósito del trabajo está dirigido a recuperar sus cuestionamientos como excusa y motivo para repensar los límites y alcances de esta perspectiva a más de dos décadas de su emergencia. En primer lugar, reconstruyo someramente el contexto de emergencia y enunciación de la teoría de la colonialidad del poder de Aníbal Quijano. En segundo lugar, me centro en algunas de las criticas puntuales. A partir de trabajo de sistematización de las mismas, la réplica se organiza en cinco ejes orientados a dimensiones centrales de la perspectiva: el patrón de poder moderno/colonial, la periodización y caracterización histórica de la modernidad, la definición de episteme eurocentrada y de retórica de la modernidad, el uso histórico de la categoría de raza y la programática descolonial de desprendimiento.

The Factory of the Future? The Contradictory Restructuring of an Assembly Line in France

This paper studies how the introduction of new technologies and a new organiza-tion of work transforms the labour process at an assembly line of the PSA group in France. The firm presents the new organization as an innovative modernization bringing forward the "Factory of the Future" through concepts directly inspired by Industrie 4.0 and Industrie du futur. At the same time, this modernization also re-sponds to the need for the plant to become more competitive in order to face the consequences of the economic crisis of 2008. Drawing from data obtained through fieldwork (interviews with workers, union representatives and internal documents), the author shows that behind the rhetoric of modernization and industrial excel-lence, the firm intensifies work in assembly operations and workers lose autono-my.

Theory and Practice of the Long Novel

Abstract This article examines the promises and predicaments of May Fourth writers in their experimental writing of the “long novel” (changpian xiaoshuo 長篇小說) as a Chinese brand of the modern epic. May Fourth intellectuals showed a conscious effort to institute a new brand of fictional genre to enlighten the reading public. Yet their “education of the novel” was far from complete, as New Literature writers found fictional expressions primarily in the form of the short story, with strong undertones of individualism, subjective lyricism, and elitism. By focusing on Mao Dun's 茅盾 (1896–1981) Ziye 子夜 (Midnight; 1933), the article examines his call for the establishment of the long novel and his strenuous efforts to “take over” the modern novel as an ideological form to narrate a teleological progression of history. How do Mao Dun's fictional narratives illuminate the representational problems between fiction, locality, and modernity? For Mao Dun and his May Fourth contemporaries, modernity at large was expressed in a teleological mode of time and progress, both in the rhetoric of modernity and in fiction writing. The article reflects on Mao Dun's creative and ideological impasse by teasing out the narrative loopholes of traditional voices and popular fictional registers in the modern epic.

ASPECTOS RETÓRICOS NO GÊNERO TEXTUAL MEME NA INTERNET

Este estudo tem por finalidade analisar especificidades retóricas no gênero textual meme, notadamente as funções retóricas e a ironia como uma figura retórica, em memes da internet. A metodologia adotada para o estudo dos memes é de cunho qualitativo, descrevendo e interpretando as idiossincrasias linguísticas que fazem o referido gênero acontecer, no que diz respeito às funções retóricas e à figura retórica ironia, bem como tornando a análise qualitativa um processo contínuo de construção de versões da realidade (FLICK, 2009). A amostragem para as análises é composta por memes disponíveis na web. Os pressupostos teóricos baseiam-se na Retórica Moderna, a partir de Meyer (2007), Perelman, Olbrechts-Tyteca (1996), Reboul (1998), Sousa (2001), entre outros, bem como se alicerçam nos estudos de Barreto (2015), Horta (2015) e Calixto (2017), os quais trazem discussões acerca do gênero textual meme. Os resultados apontam que os memes apresentam mecanismos retóricos, com vistas a discutir problemas sociais controversos, por meio da sustentação de opiniões ou refutação de tomadas de posição pelos retores enquanto sujeitos das práticas sociais de linguagem. A relevância da temática dá-se por trazer uma abordagem argumentativa do gênero meme na internet, com fundamento na perspectiva da Retórica Moderna.
 
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 BARRETO, Krícia Helena. Os memes e as interações sociais na internet: uma interface entre práticas rituais e estudos de face. 2015. 147 f. Tese (Doutorado em Linguística) – Faculdade de Letras, Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, Juiz de Fora, 2015.
 
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Methodology of Modern Rhetorical Education: Russian Scientific Schools

The article is devoted to the description of the activities of Russian scientific schools in theoretical and pedagogical understanding of rhetoric as a science of the laws and rules of effective and appropriate speech. The process of restoration of rhetoric in Russia from the 70-80s of the last century is considered - a classical discipline dealing with the problems of speech and the culture of speech communication. It is shown that the result of this process was the creation in various universities of Russia of original scientific and pedagogical concepts, which today cover the whole range of general territorial rules for constructing prosaic speech and particular issues of professional communication in various fields of activity. It is noted that each described scientific school offers independent ways and methods of teaching good and correct, convincing and decorated, perfect speech. Rhetoric is defined as the central philological discipline that deals with the problems of public speech practice and dictates, with its recommendations, a certain style of thought and lifestyle. It is emphasized that this science is correlated with all “speech professions”, since each competent specialist expresses himself in a word and organizes his activity through communication and the creation of effective influencing texts.

Publicidade persuasiva. Revisão bibliográfica

The present work emphasizes an exploration focused on the persuasion of communication, as well as the means to which they can be extended. In a search for a bibliographic review with the greatest possible timeliness, a focus was found on the rhetorical part that comes from the famous Aristotle (384-322 BC). The Greek philosopher wanted during the classical Greek period to understand a model of communication that is still used today. Even though communication today is more media, through the media and in turn in advertising, the analysis of speeches, argumentation techniques and figures of style is promoted, in order to transmit relevant information and adopt appropriate behaviors. Currently there is an evolution as modern rhetoric predominates, with greater sophistication. It should be noted that persuasion still has limitations due to the subjects’ beliefs. The literature tells us that the psychosociological causes of advertising occur due to conformism and social imitation, also due to the culture in which we operate and often even unconsciously.

The Architectural Production of India’s Everyday Modernism: Middle-class Housing in Pune, (1960-1980)

The large-scale appropriation of modernist architectural features in everyday housing projects in postcolonial India is remarkable. This article examines how regional architects adapted their engagement with architectural modernism to the evolving circumstances of architectural production within the context of the developing world. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s “field theory”, it presents a detailed case study of two decades of residential work by Architects United, a medium-scale architectural practice founded in the Indian city of Pune in 1961. While the architects’ earliest projects demonstrated an opportunity and desire for architectural innovation, this approach became increasingly restricted as new patterns for housing provision emerged, resulting in a more subdued and hybrid form of modernist architecture. The paper makes use of the architects’ previously undisclosed archive and oral history to demonstrate that these architectural adaptations were the indirect result of governance practices and societal change, particularly the government’s stimulation of co-operative housing initiatives and the emergence of a postcolonial middle class with distinct housing expectations. As such, this “peripheral” case exposes some of the processes that have been overlooked in the rhetoric of Architectural Modernism as a Western import in India, which is primarily centered around the discussion of exceptional public building commissions by “global experts” or their Indian disciples. The paper further highlights the need to investigate the processes of architectural production, in addition to the built product itself, so that a pluralistic rather than romanticized understanding of architectural practice may emerge.

ДІАЛОГІЧНА ВЗАЄМОДІЯ КУЛЬТУР ЯК ЧИННИК ФОРМУВАННЯ ПОЛІМОВНОЇ ОСОБИСТОСТІ

In the context of conceptual statements of intercultural communication and modern rhetoric the phenomenon of dialogue as a unit of intercultural and rhetorical communication is defined. Rhetorical dialogue should be considered in the prospect of the relativistic aspect of modern rhetoric, emphasizing attention on the pragmatic sense of the influence of communicators on each other in the process of harmonizing dialogue, effective and optimal communication. That’s why intercultural dialogue in the process of forming of multilingual personality is defined as rhetorical. The main purpose of the article is to highlight the relevance of intercultural dialogue as a rhetorical in foreign language lessons in the establishments of secondary education, to clarify the main aspects of dialogic interaction of contacting cultures. Considering the intercultural dialogue as rhetorical in the process of teaching pupils foreign languages, it is necessary to build the educational process on the conditions of realization of value-variable model of the educational choice, which according to conclusions of A.Kondakov, provides: 1) personality orientation of education; 2) value orientation of education (values harmonizes on the basis of the principle of complementarity in this way that dominate value surely reinforced by opposite); 3) principle possibility of modeling of educational programs with concrete number of variants with the aim of satisfaction of different educational needs. We consider the proposed concept as innovative and complement the principal position. We consider values and value orientations of the native speaker as sociocultural characteristics of personality, which appearing in speech become the pragmatic basis of the rhetorical texts of communicators and organizational basis of speech influence in the process of intercultural dialogue as rhetorical. The implementation of dialogic interaction of contacting cultures on foreign language lessons in the establishments of secondary education is socially necessary. At school foreign language teaching it is necessary to take into account the contacts of languages and cultures which are the reality of life. The necessary condition of the culture dialogue is comparative analysis of ethnoculturological lexics; compilation of the register of ethnoculturological lexical units in several languages. Key words: dialogue, intercultural dialogue, rhetorical dialogue, multilingual personality, intercultural thinking, intercultural communication, rhetorical communication.

Interpretations of sustainability beyond the middle class

AbstractCritical discourses of sustainability challenge modern rhetoric of economic growth and challenge current modes of social development. Yet sustainability discourses are shaped predominantly by the perspectives and interests of middle-class, tertiary-educated urban policy makers or environmentalists, and have insufficiently engaged people beyond these cohorts, even in the advanced capitalist societies where they have originated. This article shares findings from a study that investigated how people who are not strongly engaged with sustainability discourses understand and engage with many of the underlying concerns that animate these discourses from the context of their situated, everyday experiences. This is important information for sustainability educators, because it challenges dominant ideas of what sustainabilityisand offers new and alternate ways of engaging different groups of people in actions for sustainability. Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, field and capital were used to inform the research design that employed focus groups and interviews with people from a range of socio-economic and cultural backgrounds and life stages in Tasmania, Australia. The findings provide insight into the ways in which people who are disengaged from discourses of sustainability may be actively engaged in practices of sustainability that may provide practical guidance for environmentalists and policy makers concerning how current discourses of sustainability reflect specific social contexts and experiences.

THE ART OF PERSUASION: PATHETIC APPEAL VIS-À-VIS ETHICAL AND LOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

ABSTRACT
 Short story writing is a literary art whose creativity heavily depends upon the interplay between the writer and his influence upon the reader. There are four modes of discourse employed in creative writing: exposition, description, narration and persuasion. Exposition is concerned with the layout, style and organisation of events and the actors within them. It is the immediate revelation to the readers of the setting and other background information that is necessary for understanding the plot. Description employs the use of language terms in ‘graphical’ or picturesque representation of something or someone through detailed characterisation of colour, motion, sound, taste, smell and touch. Narration is the telling of a story in fiction, non-fiction, poetry or drama. Persuasion is a form of argumentation where the language employed is intended to convince, principally through appeals to reason or to emotion. This study is focalized on the mode of persuasion with the rhetorical and classical theories as the point of reference. The Greek philosopher Aristotle upheld the view that narration, whose essential purpose is to become persuasive, could only enjoy viability if it possessed the following appeals: ethos, logos, pathos and kairos. This study was a confirmation of Aristotle’s contention across first language and second language English readers; this was underscored by an annexed anthology within the study, depicting divergent fictional settings and all emanating from the same writer, to which reading subjects from these variegated contexts were exposed. Thereafter comprehensive questionnaire covering various dimensions of ethos, logos, pathos and kairos was used to elicit the reader responses in regard to their appreciation and understanding of story. The study is useful not only in cementing the classical tradition, but also as an indication that even in modern rhetoric, logos and kairos must be regarded as basic in any communication while ethos and pathos are mainly appellative, although of relative importance.