Toward a new rhetoric

These extremely negative views toward rhetoric prevailed until the 1930s, when attention to the importance of studying how language is used was stimulated by Logical Positivism, the philosophical movement that insists that all statements be verifiable by observation or experiment, and that movement had ironically been stimulated in turn by the very scientism that had earlier disparaged rhetoric. Substantial attempts were made, particularly in the United States, to develop an art of discourse suitable for teaching in schools and universities.

In the opening decades of the 20th century, an attempt was made in American universities to restore rhetoric to the serious study of communication (that is, of creating discourse). Teachers of public speaking were the first to turn to rhetorical traditions for help, followed by teachers of writing. (The teaching of speaking had been divorced from the teaching of writing in America since the third quarter of the 19th century—a divorce that has been recognized by modern universities but challenged by the temper of modern life.) Appropriately, considering the impetus of Logical Positivism, the restored rhetoric was largely Aristotelian, an Aristotelianism that was filtered through centuries of faculty psychology, that was becoming part of a doctrinaire stance against the Romantics and the elocutionists, and that was interpreted in terms of lingering presuppositions of a typographical age. Nonetheless, the rhetoric offered through the tenets of a restored Aristotelianism was potentially more comprehensive—more inclusive of all the offices of rhetoric—than any in Western education since the Renaissance. The political facts of modern life, however, made the Rationalist proclivity of this rhetoric appear naïve. The new media—films, radio, and television—and the new orality of modern life was felt by those interested in rhetoric as a challenge to older linguistic notions, not simply those of the print-oriented teachers of written or spoken composition but those of the Aristotelian Positivists as well.

Moreover, the restoration of traditional rhetoric was at first—within speech departments and then later within English departments—an attempt to serve as an emphasis upon training students in how to communicate. When modern rhetoricians shifted their emphasis to interpretation and shifted their concerns from the speaker or writer to the auditor or reader, traditional rhetoric was seen in a new perspective and the subject itself was given its strongest modern impetus and relevance. As noted earlier, the latter effect was the combined result of the work of modern philosophers and literary critics as well as educators.

The 20th century witnessed the publication of some highly provocative works on rhetoric, which potentially carry the subject beyond its Aristotelian confines and give it new relevance to an age dissatisfied with older epistemologies (or theories of knowledge) and their curious, divisive assumptions about truth and verbal expression or about oral and written discourse. Particular attention must be called to the work of the American critic and philosopher Kenneth Burke. A controversial writer, partly because of his extension of rhetoric into the study of nonverbal transactions and sensations, he has perhaps done more than anyone else to create a theoretical basis for the use of rhetoric in interpretation.

As noted at the opening of this article, modern literary critics have helped to free rhetoric from its traditional emphasis by proving its instrumentality in literary analysis—“practical criticism,” as the English critic I.A. Richards called his 1929 book on the subject. But in turn the practical critic has helped preserve traditional rhetoric for the analyses of traditional literature, and through his work on modern literature, he has stimulated the demand for a new rhetoric.

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