Rhetorik-Forschungen

The book offers insight into the classical rhetorical strategies of elaboration for researchers interested in rhetoric as well as for designers and artists. The process of elaboration is governed by the tension between the perfect and imperfect, polish and rawness, and by the realization of an ideal or departure from it. The book illustrates this process with regard to the history of graphic design and based on two case studies.

The notion of ó, of “persuasion” or “credulousness,” is only applicable to humans, as the sole life form capable of rhetoric. However, there has been little academic attention to the idea of persuasion. Starting from this observation, the papers collected in this volume validate the view of rhetoric as a kind of “pithanology,” a potentially fruitful theme for modern research on rhetoric.

Rhetorical thinking is located at the chiasmus between philosophy and rhetoric. In keeping with the double disciplinary nature of rhetorical thinking, the essays in this volume exemplify both the philosophy of rhetoric and the rhetoric of philosophy.

The articles in this compendium take an interdisciplinary and international look at the broad academic concept and educational tradition of rhetoric, both as it was developed and transmitted historically and as it has been transformed in contemporary discourse in collaboration with other disciplines of the humanities and social sciences.

It is only through communication that physical activity becomes sport. Sport as an activity becomes a meaningful event through the interplay of dramaturgical rules and rhetorical patterns. Working from this point of departure, this study reveals how the sports report serves to realize the possibilities of sport. The sports report tells stories, and these stories are the actual reason why sports exist. Particularly in elite sports communicated by mass media, this leads to illuminating, amusing, or moving dramas in the arena of physical and mental achievement.

Appropriateness is the key to persuasion: a speech can only be convincing when it takes into account the opinions of the audience and the concrete situation. But how can rhetorical theory – which like any other theory has to abstract – grasp appropriateness as a phenomenon? What concepts did it develop in order to achieve this? The central thesis of the volume is that although it has hardly been analysed in the past, appropriateness always plays a central role in rhetoric.

Up to now, Johann Gottfried Herder has been seen as a symbolic figure for overcoming "classical" rhetoric in German Storm and Stress. This view is however at variance both with Herder’s own rhetorical practice and with his intensive study of the discipline and his objection to Kant’s condemnation of it. Björn Hambsch bases his study on Herder’s complete works and numerous manuscript sources and provides the first analysis of Herder’s engagement with classical and modern rhetoric; he illuminates the complex interplay of critique, application and transformation of knowledge of rhetorical theory and practice in Herder’s life’s work.

The discrepancy between the organized war-veteran culture and the development of overall German culture since the 1970s at the latest, the closely-defined ideological framework involved, and the static nature of the values, attitudes, and guiding principles upheld within that framework provide ideal conditions for the reconstruction of a form of cultural memory associated with a clearly defined group of language users. The analysis of speeches held on Commemoration Day (Volkstrauertag) and of interviews with the writers of those speeches indicates the almost total uniformity of the communicative patterns employed in them. Those patterns are discussed here from the perspective of research on strategies for coming to terms with wartime experiences.

»Auto-communication«. Strictly speaking, the title should be provided with a question mark: »Auto-communication«? Is there such a thing? Can people address linguistic signs to themselves? Of course they can. We talk to ourselves, we keep diaries, we write shopping lists. But can these phenomena be covered by a theory of communication? After all, communication means saying something to someone else. Or doesn't it? Even within the paradigm of autopoietic systems of consciousness and social intercourse, questions remain. Is auto-communication a cognitive operation because it takes place in one person's mind? Or is it a communicative operation, as the name suggests?

In the 18th century rhetoric was ousted from its prominent status as an essential part of the educational system, thus losing ground over and against philosophy and forfeiting its significance for poetry. And yet it still proved to be indispensable. Friedrich Schlegel's engagement with rhetoric was intensive and critical. The first part of this study examines the concept of rhetoric in Romanticism. Schlegel's knowledge and reception of the canon is described, showing that in his approach rhetoric is poeticized, thus losing some of its concrete intentionality. But this Romantic view does not confirm the theory that rhetoric disappeared for good around 1800. The second part of the book looks at the divergent course taken by the history of rhetoric (with special reference to Romanticism) and discusses the different concepts underlying the conflicting departures involved.

The volume brings together contributions by internationally renowned experts on the question of topos, a legacy of classical rhetoric used and studied in a broad variety of areas. As such the collection is a cross-section of ongoing research on this subject, some of it historical (antiquity, Middle Ages, modern age), some of it systems oriented (law, communication theory).

This study of Campbell's "Philosophy of Rhetoric" (published 1776) is a historical and text-immanent interpretation setting out to substantiate the hypothesis that Campbell's rationale for explaining rhetorical impact is determined by the spirit of English empiricism. Campbell interprets David Hume's concept of 'vivacity' in terms of the idea of evidentia taken from Classical rhetoric theory. The study shows that evidentia is the category underlying not only ethos, logos and pathos but also embellishment and actio.

This study traces the history of the term Reinheit (purity) in German-speaking parts of Europe from Luther to Adelung with reference to its etymology, semantics and the impact it had in that period. The study proceeds from the realization that the crucial problem of Sprachreinheit (language purity) can only be appropriately discussed by going beyond the narrow limits of the so-called Fremdwort approach. Instead, the author develops a more complex view of the subject by situating the rhetorical category of puritas in the theological, language-philosophical, political and social context of the period in question, thus revealing the full rhetorical significance of the term and with it the rich aesthetic and pragmatic implications it had.

This study examines statements on the topic of persuasion (in Greek: peithein) in extant texts from the late fifth century BC - drama, hisotiography, judicial oratory - in order to gain insights into the development of rhetoric in Athens at this early stage. The texts abound with comments on the credibility of the speaker, audience psychology and references to emotional and rational techniques of persuasion, thus showing that in the late fifth century persuasion was already regarded as a process that can be analysed and influenced.

This work provides a detailed introduction to the theories put forward by the founder-fathers of the 'New Rhetoric', represented here by I.A. Richards, the champions of the New Semantics, Richard M. Weaver and Kenneth Burke. The author outlines the basic tenets and pinpoints an impulse common to the entire 'New Rhetoric' movement in its early stages destined to become a major influence in the development of rhetorics as an academic discipline in the United States. What these theories all have in common, the author suggests, is their claim to establish and entrench the status of rhetoric as a root discipline fundamental to all others.

Die Studie beschreibt die Validierung der Rhetorik durch die Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus am Beispiel dreier ihrer größten Vertreter und fördert drei deutlich unterschiedene Positionen zutage. Den Leitfaden der Untersuchung bilden die von Platon formulierten und von Kant, Fichte und Hegel jeweils unterschiedlich ausgedeuteten zentralen Gesichtspunkte philosophischer Rhetorikreflexion: die logisch-methodologische, die ästhetische und die politisch-moralische Kritik sowie die Kritik des Rhetorischen als Korruption der Philosophie selbst.