Approaching the audience: engagement markers in Longinus’ On the Sublime

2.1 Audience

The notion of audience rich in complexity and diversity is of great significance in rhetorical studies, which can be traced back to ancient Greece, at least to the work of Aristotle. In Aristotle’s Rhetoric, he does not define “audience” directly, but rather, emphasizes the importance of this notion by stating that “rhetoric falls into three divisions, determined by the three classes of listeners to speeches. For of the three elements in speech-making – speaker, subject, and person addressed – it is the last one, the hearer, that determines the speech’s end and object. The hearer must be either a judge, with a decision to make about things past or future, or an observer” (Aristotle 2004, p. 1358^b). To be more specific, it is the audience that determines and tailors the content of the speech. In addition, Book II of Aristotle’s Rhetoric has depicted a full picture of analyzing people in different ages, genders, characters, social backgrounds, and the like so as to make a better command of the audience’s psychology. Aristotle has fully shown us the significance of “audience” in rhetorical studies as being one of the determinable elements in speech-makings. Later on, scholars in ancient Rome, like Cicero and Quintilian, also believe that a successful orator must persuade his audience by gaining their trust and admiration. It can be concluded that “audience” had already gained considerable attention in ancient Greece and Rome.

With the passing of time, various forms of information exchange have arisen and interpretations of the “audience” proliferate, which refer at least not only to hearers, but to readers. During the 18th century, the Enlightenment leader, George Campbell, in his work Philosophy of Rhetoric (1963) gave a detailed classification of audience by dividing it into two types: “as such men in general and as such men in particular” (pp. 71–95), respectively. In this masterpiece, the type of “men in particular” has had particular emphasis lain on it, as he holds the view that “men in general” represents the exact truth and is of abstractness and uselessness. In modern ages, scholars are still trying to seek for the nature of the audience. Chaim Perelman is one of the representatives in studying audience. In his co-authored work The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, audience is defined as “the ensemble of those whom the speaker wishes to influence by his argumentation” (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969, p. 19). For Perelman, the audience can also be generally divided into two types: universal audience and particular audience. The former consists of all rational beings; while the latter consists mainly of one particular group or individual. Apart from Perelman, other scholars have also put forward their own understanding and definition of audience. Bitzer (1968) argues that a rhetorical audience “consists only of those persons who are capable of being influenced by discourse and of being mediators of change” (p. 8). Park (1982) holds the view that “the meanings of ‘audience’ … tend to diverge in two general directions: one toward actual people external to a text, the audience whom the writer must accommodate; the other toward the text itself and the audience implied there” (p. 249). Gracia (1994) defines audience as “the real or imaginary group of persons who are in fact acquainted, could be acquainted, or are meant to be acquainted with a given text” (p. 711). Babin and Harrison (1999) illustrate audience as a term that can refer to “a group of real readers to which the successful writer must adapt, that is to say, the writer needs to ingratiate with the audience” (p. 117). More recently, because of the presence of the Internet, speeches are not confined to be listened to on the spot either. “Audience” has turned out to be more of dynamic changes and is more of being fictional. Finlayson (2012) regards the audience as “being not a unitary or stable referent and being always in some measure a fictive creation around which rhetorical invention is built” (p. 763). In a word, no matter how the definition of the audience changes, it has always been an important element that the writer needs to consider.

Upon the major definitions presented above, it can be seen that “audience” is a significant and complicated notion. In this essay, Perelman’s definition of audience will be adopted, as it is classic and has been widely acknowledged. However, we would refine it as the ensemble of those whom the speaker or writer wishes to influence by his or her argumentation, with the added “writer” and “her”, to make the definition more inclusive. As “audience” is such a broad term and difficult to handle directly, the concept of “audience awareness” will be focused on to better analyze the writer’s consideration of the readers.

2.2 Audience awareness

Audience awareness is one important facet of studying the audience, showing the author’s consideration of the audience in his or her work. To be more specific, audience awareness can be reflected towards both actual and fictional audience. As for speech makings, this concept is more related with the actual hearers, while in book writings it is more likely to refer to the fictional readers in the author’s mind. As for the writer, the fictional readers are “invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent” (Freud 1922, p. 1) as they often fantasize about future exchanges, interact with large audiences, and communicate in mediated contexts in the writing procedure (Litt 2012). As for rhetoricians in ancient Rome, audience is the determinable factor of a work, which can be of great significance in tailoring the content. In order to show the importance of this notion, writers tend to show their audience awareness by considering the existence of the readers in their works. In this way, audience awareness contributes to explicitly illustrating the audience.

Many scholars have tried to figure out and define the notion of “audience awareness.” Rubin (1984) regards audience awareness as “one significant component at various levels of the composing processes” (p. 214). In the meantime, Ede and Lunsford (1984) clarify audience awareness as “a kind of notion which comprehends the audience’s experiences and expectations and also helps readers to fit in the role writers imagined” (pp. 159–163). Later on, Rafoth (1985) defined audience awareness as “a writer’s or speaker’s focus of attention on readers or listeners irrespective of the communicator’s language behavior” (p. 237). Meanwhile, he also puts forward “audience adaptation” which “refers to the audience-conditioned language behavior resulting from this awareness” (ibid.). Then, as for Wong (2005), audience awareness refers to “the mental representation of the writers and also their abilities to maintain the flow of communication with readers through words” (pp. 31–32). More recently, Jarvela et al. (2015) redefine audience awareness as “the knowledge or perception of the audience” (p. 133), suggesting that the author needs to acquire the basic information of the readers in terms of their background knowledge and the social context they are in.

To summarize, audience awareness plays a pivotal role in making the real or imaginative readers clearer for the writers to consider in the writing process, and also in helping readers to understand writers’ intention in a more concrete way. Based on previous definitions, audience awareness in this essay is redefined as the writer’s awareness of the audience which aims to engage them, anticipate their needs and maintain the flow of communication with them so as to better fulfill the rhetorical objective. In terms of its identification, metadiscourse markers can well serve the purpose.

3.1 Interactional metadiscourse

Over the past decades, the academic discourse has no longer been regarded as being absolutely objective without any personal emotion, rather it has come to be seen as a persuasive endeavor involving interaction between writers and readers (Hyland 2005a). In other words, writers have begun to consider the presence of their audience, seeking to interact with them, and willing to accept alternative views which may even be opposed to them. The credibility of the content is not only determined by the scientific data, but also related with the mode of persuasion that the writer adopts.

The linguistic resources used to perform academic persuasion have been broadly described in terms of evaluation (Hunston and Thompson 2000) and appraisal (Martin and White 2005), and later on as stance and engagement (Biber and Finegan 1989; Hyland 2005b). Readers have their rights for making judgments and evaluations toward the written texts, and writers need to leave enough space for other views, even rebuttals.

Metadiscourse is an effective way for promoting writers’ credibility and persuasion, which adopts functional approach to give insights into the texts. Three linguistic functions put forward by Halliday (1994) turn out to be the theoretical cornerstone: the ideational function, interpersonal function, and textual function. Metadiscourse is most commonly divided into interactive and interactional. Compared with the former concerning logic structure of a persuasive appeal, it is the latter that “concerns more explicitly interpersonal and evaluative aspects of authorial presence” (Hyland 2004, p. 122), and has been shown to be a marked feature of overtly argumentative and persuasive genres such as research articles (Hyland 1998). One way for further dividing the interactional metadiscourse is put forward by Hyland (2005b), who divides it into stance and engagement:

Stance: They express a textual voice or community recognized personality. This can be seen as an attitudinal dimension, including features which refer to the ways writers present themselves and convey their judgments, opinions and commitments. It is the way that writers intrude to stamp their personal authority onto their arguments or step back and disguise their involvement.

Engagement: This is an alignment dimension where writers acknowledge and connect to others, recognizing the presence of their readers, pulling them along with their argument, focusing their attention, acknowledging their uncertainties, including them as discourse participants, and guiding them to interpretations (Hyland 2005b, p. 176).

The division of stance and engagement is shown in Figure 1. These two are just like two sides of a coin. They interpret different functions of interpersonal metadiscourse, which are attitudinal dimension and alignment dimension respectively. Stance refers to the way that writers organize their texts in accordance with the readers’ needs, express their personal attitudes and also leave out enough room for discussion, while engagement focuses more on the interaction between the writer and the reader. Each of the elements of engagement serves the interpersonal function of the language and plays a vital role in showing audience engagement. Compared with stance, engagement better shows the connection with the readers and helps the writer attach greater importance to the existence of the audience, which is more effective in helping the writer interact directly with and anticipate responses from the readers. Therefore, in this essay, conforming to the research objective, engagement of the interactional metadiscourse will be selected to better analyze the audience awareness in the text.

Figure 1:

The division of interactional metadiscourse (Hyland 2005b; Hyland and Jiang 2016).

One thing needs to be mentioned here is that two elements in engagement, that is, reader pronouns and shared knowledge would be adjusted into reader mentions and appeals to shared knowledge in the textual analysis. The adjustment is based on Hyland and Jiang’s model in 2016, which has further enriched these two concepts by broadening its scope.

3.2 Refined model of engagement

Hyland and Jiang’s (2016) model of engagement is to be refined in this essay, in which the personal asides (briefly interrupting the argument to offer a comment) is omitted as it is not suitable for the data we are to analyze. So here, reader mentions, directives, questions, and appeals to shared knowledge are taken for interpreting the audience awareness, with reader mentions amplified and questions specified. Reader mentions can directly engage the readers and bring them into the discourse “normally through second person pronouns, particularly inclusive we which identifies the reader as someone who shares similar ways of seeing to the writer” (Hyland and Jiang 2016, p. 91). But in On the Sublime, apart from appealing to readers with pronouns, “Terentianus” – a person’s name is also repeatedly and remarkably mentioned. Therefore, it is of great necessity for us to innovatively add “apostrophe” – “an emotional figure of someone addressing an absent person or a personified abstraction” (Corbett and Connors 1999, p. 443) which contains the “most ardent expressions of perturbation in the speaker” (Campbell 1963, p. 94). Directives are mainly expressed through modal verbs (e.g., “should” and “must”) and imperatives (e.g., “suppose that” and “let us”) to make instructions to the readers both for helping them understand the text and for persuading them to act in reality. Previously, questions are broadly regarded as a way to “invite direct collusion and interaction with the readers by addressing them as someone with an interest in the issue and the good sense to follow the writer’s response” (Hyland and Jiang 2016, p. 31). In this essay, we try to specify questions with particular types, i.e., Erotema and Rogatio. Erotema corresponds to the rhetorical question that “requires no answer other than the readers’ agreement” (Fahnestock 2011, p. 298). Rogatio is a question that “writers ask but then answer themselves” (Quintilian 1921, p. 383). Appeals to shared knowledge are “explicit signals asking readers to recognize something as familiar or accepted” (Hyland and Jiang 2016, p. 91). In this essay, they are further classified with comment clauses (e.g., “as you know”) and emphasizers (e.g., “obviously”, “of course”) in light of grammatical terms clarified in A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Quirk et al. 1985).

Based on what has been mentioned above, the refined engagement model with its dimensions and elements is presented in Figure 2.

Figure 2:

Refined model of engagement.

4.1 Introduction of On the Sublime

On the Sublime is one of the Roman-era Greek classics (it was written in Greek), which has received great attention in rhetorical, aesthetic, and literary studies. However, the issues of author and composing time have still remained a matter of debated controversy. The only evidence of these questions is a single manuscript from the 10th century AD (De Jonge 2020). Based on the writing styles and general approaches of this book, Cassius Longinus has turned out to be a more appropriate answer. At the beginning of this book, Longinus tries to venture an opinion about Caecilius, a critic who taught in Rome at the end of the 1st century BC, and wrote the only other attested ancient work on sublimity (now lost). As is shown in the outset, his own treatise was evoked by the inadequacies of Caecilius’s treatment, which was “lowlier” than the subject required. The definitions of real “sublimity” and the ways to realize it are displayed and illustrated in this work. Its core lies in five sources of sublimity: the two “innate” sources (grand conceptions and vehement emotion) and the three “technical” sources (figures, diction, and arrangement). Because of the author’s own endeavor to make it a work of real sublimity, it turns out to be sublime with strong audience awareness reflected in it. The eloquence of this book has always continued to earn it enthusiastic readers and enduring influence.

What still needs to be mentioned here is that the addressee of this work seems to be very concrete at first sight, that is, Postumius Terentianus, to whom the author has made an appeal many times. The identity of Terentianus has not been determined. He may, of course, be the Terentianus who served in Egypt (AD 85/6), or the man whose name is “on a lead water pipe of the second century” (Russell 1995, p. 148). But generally speaking, he is regarded as a young Roman of some standing, for whom the author writes and wishes to influence. In this work, Longinus himself tends to describe the sublime in terms of its effect on the audience, suggesting a certain relationship of the inspired author, the sublime text, and the ecstatic audience. Furthermore, it is actually a great work of real sublimity outstanding in diction, arrangement and audience awareness. The following will investigate how Longinus in this work interacts with his audience and finally actualizes the goal of audience awareness.

4.2 Engagement markers in On the Sublime

As for counting the number of each engagement marker used in this work, we have counted several times for accuracy. The general picture of the engagement used in On the Sublime is shown as Table 1, in which reader mentions are used most frequently followed by directives, questions, and appeals to shared knowledge. The detailed analysis of each dimension would be displayed in the following sections.