Rhetoric in Detail: Discourse analyses of rhetorical talk and text (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture)
By Barbara Johnstone, Christopher Eisenhart
* Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
* Number Of Pages: 341
* Publication Date: 2008-10-29
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 9027206198
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9789027206190
chapter 1
Discourse analysis and rhetorical studies
Christopher Eisenhart and Barbara Johnstone
University ofMassachusetts, Dartmouth / Carnegie Mellon University
Overview
This book brings together twelve studies, all written by scholars who identify
themselves primarily as rhetoricians, that employ theory and/or method fromlinguistic
discourse analysis. The studies make use of a variety of discourse analytic
resources, including those of critical discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics,
narrative analysis, and computer-aided corpus analysis. They illustrate the
utility of discourse analysis in research in a variety of rhetorical sites, including
discourses of public memory and collective identity, rhetoric of science and technology,
vernacular argumentation,media discourse, and immigration studies. The
method these projects share begins in close attention to the linguistic details of
records of discourse, be they written texts or transcripts of talk. The authors take a
mostly qualitative, interpretive approach, but one that differs from the approaches
often taken in rhetorical studies in being data-driven rather than theory-driven.
Working upward from particular, situated instances of text and talk rather than
downwards from abstract models of discourse, they take systematic approaches
to exploring why particular utterances take the particular shapes they do. The
approach involves beginning with an attitude attuned to multiple sources of contextual
constraint, rather than beginning with theory and seeking evidence for it.
While the studies in these chapters deal with various rhetorical issues in a variety
of ways, they all share three methodological characteristics: They are empirical, in
the sense that they are based in observation rather than introspection alone; they
are ethnographic, in that they seek to understand the rhetorical workings of discourse
and context through the eyes and minds of those engaged in them; and
they are grounded, returning again and again to their data as they build theory to
account for it.
Originating in an analytical heuristic rather than in a pre-chosen theoretical
framework, these studies illustrate the potential of discourse-based,
observation-driven theory building for rhetorical studies and criticism. As the
focus of rhetoric widens from the planned to the spontaneous and from the public
to the private, rhetoricians acknowledge the need for new methods, and they
will find some illustrated here. Discourse analystsmay likewise discover some new
tools. The first theorists of discourse in the Greco-Roman intellectual tradition
were the philosophers and sophists who described and taught public speaking
to those citizens whose voices mattered in a newly democratic fifth-century BCE
Athens, and the authors whose work appears here represent the reinvigoration of
this tradition, particularly in North America, in the “new rhetoric” of the later
twentieth century. In new ways,many of these studies draw on the traditional analytical
tools of rhetoric – figures of speech, topoi, lines of argument; invention and
style; ethos, logos, and pathos – showing how they can inform and be informed
by discourse analysts’ attention to how lexicon and syntax can evoke styles, genres,
and prior texts and speakers, and thereby create social relations and experiential
worlds in talk and writing.
Methods and issues in North American rhetorical studies
Rhetoricians have always taken an inclusive approach to analytic method. In addition
to using the analytic vocabulary of classical rhetoric, practitioners have
borrowed and adapted methods fromother disciplines, taking intuition-based reasoning
from philosophy, for example, and explication de texte techniques and a
variety of critical-theoretical lenses from literary and sociological theory. These
tools were developed to answer questions about the carefully planned, often institutional
genres that were the primary object of rhetorical critique. The focus of
rhetoricians’ attention is widening, however, from public to private spheres, from
official to vernacular rhetoric, from oratory to written and multimedia discourse,
fromthe carefully crafted to spontaneous discourse emerging from fleeting everyday
rhetorical situations. Now we are asking not just about the rhetoric of politics,
but also about the rhetoric of history and the rhetoric of popular culture; not just
about the rhetoric of the public sphere but about rhetoric on the street, in the
hair salon, or online; not just about the rhetoricity of formal argument but also
about the rhetoricity of personal identity. To address these new concerns and sites,
we need to continue to supplement traditional modes of work with new techniques
for analyzing the language of text and talk and with ways of describing the
sociocultural and material contexts of discourse.
Since at least as long ago as the Wingspread conference in 1970, evaluations
of the health of rhetoric as a discipline have stressed the widening, deepening
object of rhetorical study and the need for appropriate methods and conceptual
frameworks for exploring this object. In the proceedings of that conference
(Bitzer & Black 1971), particularly in articles by Becker, Brockriede, and Henry
Johnstone discussing trends in the field, the momentum in rhetoric was observed
to be moving out from a speaker-audience dyadic, text-bounded model of study
toward studies of communication processes and interactions, situated and constituted
in rich, real-world settings. Rhetorical analysis and criticism were no longer
being applied only to historical works, but also to contemporary communication.
Rhetorical scholarship no longer focused only on institutionalized speech situations,
but was increasingly turning to experiments, to interactive and everyday
speech genres, and to other studies of meaning-making as situated activity.
As Brockriede (1971) observed, this trajectory would require the conceptual
and methodological flexibility needed to “let the transaction [under study]
itself suggest its own analytic categories,” while maintaining lively connections
with established theoretical inquiry so as not to become isolated and trivial. This
trajectory in the discipline, acknowledged again in more recent reflections (cf.
Benson 1993; Enos & McNabb 1996; Gross & Keith 1997; Cherwitz & Hikins
2000; Schiappa et al. 2002; Simons 2003), has demanded the development of conceptual
and methodological frameworks beyond, while not wholly independent
from, those already institutionalized, such as the Burkean and Neo-Aristotelian.
Where these traditional approaches to rhetorical criticism have been discussed as
heuristics for invention and interpretation as much as they are methods for systematic
analysis (Nothstine et al. 1994), some rhetoricians have turned to linguistic
discourse analysis for that sought-after conceptual and methodological flexibility.
Tracy (2001) describes the connections that have emerged between communication
studies and discourse analysis. Scholars in rhetoric and composition studies
have also issued calls for the inclusion of discourse analytic methods. MacDonald
has termed discourse studies “the interconnected fields of rhetoric and composition
and applied linguistics” (2002). Barton (2002) has suggested that composition
studies can benefit from discourse analytic approaches particularly in “connections
between texts and contexts, with a focus on the repeated use of linguistic
features ... and the associated conventions that establish their meaning and significance
in context” (285).
One way of describing the contribution this volume makes is in terms of a set
of general issues that are both current and fertile for rhetorical theory-building:
context, agency, and the relationship between style and argument. In the following
discussion, we sketch trajectories within these issues toward grounded analyses
of discourse, demonstrating how rhetoricians have and can further benefit from
discourse analytic approaches.................................... |
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