Rhetorical Audience Research Articles

Barnbiblioteket Saga och den unga läsaren

Barnbiblioteket Saga and the Young Reader: The Rhetoric of Editing in Children’s Literature Publishing
 In this article, I explore the archive of the publishing company Svensk läraretidnings förlag and the children’s book series Barnbiblioteket Saga (The Children’s Library Saga). Instead of considering the published Saga texts as the products of individual creativity, this article emphasizes the editorial process as an aesthetic-pedagogical function and literary production as an editorial art form. The article addresses two central questions: What editorial practices can be identified in the preserved manuscripts, and what principles guiding the editors can be discerned from these practices? In connection with this, I present two models to describe the publisher’s manuscript practices, which can be employed to gain a broader understanding of the importance of editorial manuscript work in publishing. The archival material shows that the editorial process was continually influenced by a rhetorical audience. To a significant extent, the various stages of manuscript handling were driven by pedagogical concerns and rooted in how children’s needs, interests, and resources were perceived. However, the editorial work was also strongly motivated by aesthetic considerations, which were closely intertwined with the pedagogical aspects.

”Tänk om Egon tar min cykel”

Concentrating on Doris drar (Doris Leaves, 2015), Pudlar och pommes (Poodles and Fries, 2016), and Vitvivan och Gullsippan (Vitvivan and Gullsippan, 2021), this article explores how Pija Lindenbaum utilizes the artistic possibilities of the picturebook medium to communicate with the child reader. Following James Phelan, my investigation goes beyond a static and universal understanding of narratives to seeing them as context-determined and composed in relation to a rhetorical audience. Mike Cadden points out that this rhetorical turn is particularly striking when it comes to children’s literature, as the targeted reader by definition is a child and narratives for children often use specific strategies for more or less well-defined purposes. Taking my cue from rhetorical approaches to literature, I argue that a focus on plots and conflicts enhances our understanding of reading as ethical meaning-making. Conflicts in modern children’s literature are regularly perceived from the child’s point of view in ways that are essential for the transaction of meaning. In my terminology, the conflict constitutes an aesthetic-pedagogical node connecting the reader with the evaluative perspective of the narrative. Addressing the dynamics between text, image, and medium in Lindenbaum’s picturebooks, this article argues that plots and conflicts are pivotal for the reader’s involvement, directing interest and emotional engagement. The plot not only invites the reader to the fictional world, but it also stimulates a context-bound meaning-making involving thoughts, feelings, and values.

Church Talks on Peace Talks

Abstract This article studies the rhetoric of a traditional Protestant denomination, the United Church of Christ in the Philippines (UCCP), in advocating the resumption of peace talks during the Duterte administration. The church believes that the peace negotiations between the Philippine government and communist revolutionary groups will solve the fifty-year conflict that has claimed thousands of lives of combatants and civilians in the countryside. At the beginning of Duterte’s term, the UCCP extended support for his administration. This was based on the alignment between the church and the President’s goals of purging of systemic sins in Philippine society through peacemaking. Using the theological rhetoric of the social gospel as framework, the UCCP first considered President Duterte as the ideal rhetorical audience who can address urgent needs through the resumption of peace talks. However, after two years of Duterte’s broken campaign promises, the church began to address its own constituents as the rhetorical audience they need to persuade in order to purge the systemic sins of Philippine society. Church members must be in solidarity with their leaders in opposing President Duterte’s policies. Through a shift from a rhetoric of transcendence to that of resistance, the church persuades its audiences of the sacredness of political support or opposition, giving religious justification to the mission of social reform.

Strategic Communication with Multiple Audiences: Polyphony, Text Stakeholders, and Argumentation

ABSTRACT In today’s complex and hyper-digital environments, organizations and social actors need to deal with multiple audiences when designing public messages. This makes strategic communication markedly polyphonic as various voices, corresponding to different stakeholders, must be managed within a single communication. This article develops a conceptual framework combining linguistic theories of discourse polyphony with a stakeholder-based model of rhetorical audiences (the Text Stakeholder Model). The proposed approach allows to reconstruct micro-level communication strategies consisting in arguments adapted to a multiple audience demand. To showcase the proposed method, the article examines, as a case study, an open letter to CEO, which represents a polyphonic genre of financial communication, as the authors formally direct their discourse to the addressed CEO while conveying arguments to other text stakeholders, who participate as unaddressed audiences. The case study identifies patterns of argumentative strategies signaled by polyphony markers such as negations, pronouns, and concessive clauses. These strategies are not necessarily based on ambiguity, suggesting that the presence of multiple audiences can accommodate a variety of discursive strategic resources. The study contributes to current research in strategic communication that focuses on the analysis and assessement of message strategy and on the micro-level dynamics of strategic communication.

Rhetoric and audience reception: An analysis of Theresa May’s vision of Britain and Britishness after Brexit

This article demonstrates the value of rhetorical audience studies for analysing constructions of ‘the nation’ and national identity. A key strength of this approach is its recognition of the interplay between the rhetorical situation, the text of the speech, and the audience’s responses to that rhetoric. Using the historical method for investigating rhetoric and its reception, the article examines Theresa May’s efforts to bring the nation together after the 2016 referendum and to offer an inspiring vision of post-Brexit Britain. A textual analysis shows that her rhetoric of Britishness was constructed around an imagined audience of Leave voters, and thus excluded Remainers from her conceptions of Britain and ‘the British people’. The audience reception study supports this finding, as it reveals two competing myths of ‘the nation’ which in turn constituted rival subject positions. In short, May’s epideictic failed to unite the country behind her conception of a strong, cohesive Global Britain.

Rhetoric beyond Arguments: Thinking about the Role of Fictional Audiences in Plato’s Gorgias

Abstract In this piece, I propose a reading of Plato’s Gorgias that pays special attention to the role that the fictional audience plays in the unfolding of the dialogue. To this end, I use some of the insights that Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts–Tyteca conveyed in their seminal work, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation in order to argue that thinking about the way in which Socrates’ arguments are shaped by the different audiences that Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles aim to address and represent provides us with a new hermeneutical understanding of what is at stake in each of the different interactions Socrates engages in throughout the dialogue. In unpacking the way in which Socrates appropriates Gorgias’ particular audience, transforms Polus’ universal audience, and challenges Callicles’ elite audience, I provide an outline of the difficulties that Plato’s Socrates has to overcome in order to achieve the ‘community of minds’ that Perelman and Olbrechts–Tyteca identify as the bedrock of fruitful argumentation. Having done this, in the last section I turn to Plato’s Phaedrus, for the purpose of making evident that thinking about Plato’s deployment of rhetorical audiences is a crucial step in the effort to expose the implicit continuity that links the discussion of rhetoric delivered by the Gorgias to that of the Phaedrus.

Deliberative Drifting: A Rhetorical Field Method for Audience Studies on Social Media

Abstract Recent studies of online audiences point to a continuing need to develop methods for studying emergent media and its actual audience engagement. This article proposes that studies of online audiences can strengthen their approaches by employing elements of rhetorical fieldwork. Advocating for the digital field’s place amongst rhetorical fieldwork, this article introduces a method called deliberative drifting designed for researching the digital fields of live-streaming videos and their online audience engagement. Through a case study of three moments of democratic deliberation live-streamed on social media, this article shows how rhetorical field methods designed for digital fields can produce findings—especially for rhetorical audience studies—as robust as those found in traditional fields.

“I tremble with my whole heart”: Cicero on the anxieties of eloquence

Cicero’s rhetorical theory offers an important critique of efforts to systematize persuasion. His resistance to this systematization is grounded in his reconception of the orator’s virtus, which, amidst the crisis of the late Roman Republic, he reimagines as a capacity to endure risk in confrontation with an unruly public. In order to stress this risk, he must at the same time valorize the uncertainties of language: the absence of predictable, manipulable links between speech and audience response. Because this model of eloquence implies that the rhetorical audience cannot and should not be systematized, it places surprising pressures on Cicero’s elitism. This article examines Cicero’s antipathy toward the routinization of rhetoric, contrasts it with the more rationalized model of speech in De analogia, Julius Caesar’s fragmentary work on style, and considers how Cicero’s stress on the autonomy of the rhetorical audience can be recovered as a resource for democratic theory.

Studying Rhetorical Audiences – a Call for Qualitative Reception Studies in Argumentation and Rhetoric

In rhetoric and argumentation research studies of empirical audiences are rare. Most studies are speaker- or text focussed. However, new media and new forms of communication make it harder to distinguish between speaker and audience. The active involvement of users and audiences is more important than ever before. Therefore, this paper argues that rhetorical research should reconsider the understanding, conceptualization and examination of the rhetorical audience. From mostly understanding audiences as theoretical constructions that are examined textually and speculatively, we should give more attention to empirical explorations of actual audiences and users.

The Chorus as Rhetorical Audience: A Sophoklean Agōn Pattern

The dynamics of some Sophoklean agōn scenes depend on the presence of an atypically non-marginal chorus of free, Greek males. In Aias, Antigone , and Oidipous at Kolonos , characters perform their conflicts with each other toward the chorus as a socio-politically authoritative audience. Their interactions are, in part, negotiations of the chorus' authority, involving varied attempts to ap-propriate or marginalize it. In these agōn scenes, the marked influence of the choral presence expands the thematic scope of the characters' conflicts onto larger communities.

A theory of the rhetorical audience: Reflections on Chaim Perelman

Perelman has a complete and coherent theory of a rhetorical audience as a concept constructed by the speaker. This audience is of two kinds, universal and particular. Universal audiences consist of all rational beings; persuasive discourse addressed to these thematizes facts and truths. Particular audiences consist of one segment or another of humanity: Americans, Republicans, Elks, Medicare recipients; discourse addressed to them thematizes values. Discourse inpublic arenas is rarely addressed simply to particular audiences or to a universal audience; it rarely has its goal either adherence to facts and truths or adherence to values. Usually, public address represents a mixture of goals, and therefore of rhetorical audiences. Finally, the concept of audience with which speakers start differs from the concept with which speakers end the discourse. By means of the discourse, step by step, speakers bring their rhetorical audience to the desired adherence; at the same time, they hope that their discourse brings their actual audience to the same point.

Three Metaphors for a New Conception of Law: The Frontier, the Baroque, and the South

are entering a period of paradigmatic transition. From the paradigm of modernity we have come to a new paradigm which by now can only be defined inadequately. The inevitability of such inadequacy lends to the name of postmodernity its grain of truth. Periods of paradigmatic transition are periods of fierce competition among rival epistemologies and knowledges. They are, therefore, periods of radical thinking-both deconstructive and reconstructive thinking. When viewed from the old outgoing paradigm, they are periods of unthinking or of utopia. When viewed from the new, incoming paradigm, they are periods of temporary and fragile scaffoldings, emergent ruins sustaining nothing but themselves, witnessing nothing but the future. In periods of paradigmatic transition, all competing knowledges reveal themselves as rhetorical in nature, bundles of arguments and of premises of argumentation which circulate inside rhetorical audiences. Indeed, what distinguishes the audiences are the specific arguments and premises of argumentation that they consider valid and convincing or persuasive. In the specific paradigmatic transition we are now entering, any given discipline, be it sociology of law or archeology, tends to be constituted by a larger or smaller number of rival rhetorical audiences. The level of real

Frames of Folklore, Frames of Fiction: The Narrative Frames in "El kacuy" and "Marta Riquelme"

Frames of Folklore, Frames of Fiction: The Narrative Frames in "El kacuy" and "Marta Riquelme" Bonnie Frederick Washington State University During the period from about 1860 to about 1930, many Hispanic American writers used a narrative frame to give the appearance of oral narrative to their written folkloric sketches and short stories. By feigning orality, the narrative frame evokes an underlying relationship of references, imitations, and contrasts between the oral narrative and the written text. In addition, the frame defines the values and language shared between storytellers and their rhetorical audience; this common bond is manipulated to determine the degree of ideological distance from which the audience is to regard the narrated folkloric events. The congruity or incongruity of the values embodied in the frame relationship with the values embodied in the folkloric event produces different narrative texts. In order to study these differences, three Argentine narratives have been chosen that concern the same folkloric motif: the kacuy bird whose cries are said to be the cries of an abandoned woman. The narratives include the anthropologist Robert Lehmann-Nitsche's catalogued report of the tale (1928), the folkloric sketch "El kacuy" (1925) by Ricardo Rojas, and the short story "Marta Riquelme" (1902) by William Henry Hudson. In all three, the original oral tradition exists as an implied subtext, continuing in various ways to influence the written version. The original story ofthe kacuy was an oral tale, told by a storyteller to an audience that held the same cultural beliefs as the storyteller and communicated with the same system of linguistic signs. Studies of oral narrative reveal a typical storytelling pattern of orientation, complicating action, suspension before resolution, resolution, and coda (Labov 369). The orientation and coda form the narrative frame. The frame signals to the hearers that the story is about to begin, and that they must listen in the manner appropriate to such a story. For example, "once upon a time" is the formulaic signal that the events about to be told are ruled by the logic of the magic world, not that ofthe world ofeveryday experience. The frame also closes the narrative with ending formulas that signal to the hearer that the special narrative is over, and ordinary discourse may proceed. Though each narrative performance is unique, the storytellers "must draw 8 Rocky Mountain Review upon past language, symbols, events, and forms which they share with their audience for their narrations to be both comprehensible and meaningful" (Oring 123). These narrative conventions form the metanarrative, that is, the communication between the speaker and the audience that is maintained during the time in which the narrator tells the events. Thus, the frame in an oral tale confirms the common values and language ofthe speaker and audience; the narrative itself is congruent with the audience's general set of beliefs and customs. Disruption of this congruence of language and customs could break the metanarrative relationship, as when the hearer of a joke says "I don't get it" or when the audience laughs at what was meant to be serious. Anthropologists who collect oral tales usually remove the oral narrative frame from the written report of the oral tale, thus forcing the reader's attention away from the storytelling apparatus and focusing instead on the morphology or "deep structure" ofthe story's events. As Claude Lévi-Strauss insisted, the value of the myth "does not lie in its style, its original music, or its syntax, but in the story which it tells" (210). Without a narrative frame, a folkloric motif in written form generally looks like this Indian legend, collected by the folklorist Robert Lehmann-Nitsche and published in 1928: Dos hermanos, varón y mujer, pasaban el tiempo juntando "balas". Ella era muy mezquina. El en desquite la invitó entonces a subir a un árbol muy alto y se bajó cortando todos los gajos que le servían de apoyo, y se fue a la casa. La hermana que quedó arriba, lloró desesperadamente sin poderse bajar, y siempre llamándolo. Así pasó el tiempo y de tanto llorar se hizo pájaro que siempre grita: Kacuy. (282) This condensed version is a far cry from the original oral...