Some Definitions of Rhetoric
Plato: Rhetoric is "the art of winning the soul by discourse."
Aristotle: Rhetoric is "the faculty of discovering in any particular case all of the available
means of persuasion.
Cicero: "Rhetoric is one great art comprised of five lesser arts: inventio, dispositio,
elocutio, memoria, and pronunciatio." Rhetoric is "speech designed to
persuade."
Quintillian: "Rhetoric is the art of speaking well."
Francis Bacon: Rhetoric is the application of reason to imagination "for the better
moving of the will."
George Campbell: [Rhetoric] is that art or talent by which discourse is adapted to its
end. The four ends of discourse are to enlighten the understanding, please
the imagination, move the passion, and influence the will.
A. Richards: Rhetoric is the study of misunderstandings and their remedies.
function that is wholly realistic and continually born anew: the use of
language as a symbolic means of indjcing cooperation in beings
that by nature respond to symbols."
"Wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric, and wherever there is
rhetoric, there is meaning."
Richard Weaver: Rhetoric is that "which creates an informed appetition for the good."
Erika Lindemann: "Rhetoric is a form of reasoning about probabilities, based on
Assumptions people share as members of a commununity."
Andrea Lunsford: "Rhetoric is the art, practice, and study of human communication."
Francis Christensen: "Grammar maps out the possible; rhetoric narrows the possible
down to the desirable or effective." "The key question for rhetoric is how
to know what is desirable."
Sonja and Karen Foss: "Rhetoric is an action human beings perform when they use
symbols for the purpose of communicating with one another . . , [and
it] is a perspective humans take that involves focusing on symbolic
processes."
1. Boethius: Confessions
(Howell's translation)
Rhetoric treats of and
discourses upon hypotheses, that is, questions with a multitude of surroundings
in time and place, and if at any time it brings up a thesis, it uses it in
connection with its hyposthesis. These are its surroundings: Who? What? Where?
By whose help? Why? In what manner? At what time?
2. James J. Murphy: "One Thousand Neglected Authors"
A rhetorician is someone who
provides his fellows with useful precepts or directions for organizing and
presenting his ideas or feeling to them. (20)
3. Marc Fumaroli: "Rhetoric, Politics and Society"
Rhetoric appears as the
connective tissue peculiar to civil society and to its proper finalities,
happiness and political peace hic et nunc. (253-4)
4. Kenneth Burke: A Rhetoric of Motives
The most characteristic concern
of rhetoric [is] the manipulation of men's beliefs for political ends....the
basic function of rhetoric [is] the use of words by human agents to form
attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents. (41)
From <http://campus.northpark.edu/english/rhetdef.htm>:
5. Covino and Joliffe: Rhetoric: Concepts,
Definitions, Boundaries (1995)
Rhetoric is primarily a verbal,
situationally contingent, epistemic art that is both philosophical and
practical and gives rise to potentially active texts.
6. Paolo
Valesio: Novantiqua (1980)
I specify now that rhetoric is the
functional organization of discourse, within its social and cultural context,
in all its aspects, exception made for its realization as a strictly formal
metalanguage--in formal logic, mathematics, and in the sciences whose
metalanguages share the same features. In other words: rhetoric is all of language, in its realization as discourse.
7. George Kennedy: "A Hoot in the Dark" (1992)
Rhetoric in the most general sense
may perhaps be identified with the energy inherent in communication: the
emotional energy that impels the speaker to speak, the physical energy expanded
in the utterance, the energy level coded in the message, and the energy
experienced by the recipient in decoding the message.
From <http://english.ttu.edu/smith/rhetoric/definitions.asp>:
8. Francis Bacon (1561-1626): Advancement of Learning
The duty and office of rhetoric is
to apply reason to imagination for the better moving of the will.
9. Bender and Wellbery:
...that sea of communicative
transactionsÉthe impersonal drama of what occurs among us, unnoticed and
without deliberation or grandeurÉthe dense tangle of our triviality.
10. Lloyd Bitzer: "The Rhetorical Situation" (1968)
In short, rhetoric is a mode of
altering reality, not by the direct application of energy to objects, but by
the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of
thought and action.
11. Edward T. Channing: Lectures Read to the Seniors at Harvard College (c.
1856)
[Rhetoric is] a body of rules
derived from experience and observation, extending to all communication by
language and designed to make it efficient. It does not ask whether a man is to
be a speaker or writer, --a poet, philosopher, or debater; but simply,--is it
his wish to be put in the right way of communicating his mind with power to
others, by words spoken or written. If so, rhetoric undertakes to show him
rules or principles which will help to make the expression of his thoughts
effective.
12. Douglas Ehninger (1972):
[Rhetoric is] that discipline
which studies all of the ways in which men may influence each other's thinking
and behavior through the strategic use of symbols.
13. Gerard A. Hauser: Introduction to Rhetorical Theory (1986)
Rhetoric is an instrumental use of languageÉ. One person engages another person in an
exchange of symbols to accomplish some goal. It is not communication for
communication's sake. Rhetoric is communication that attempts to coordinate
social action. For this reason, rhetorical communication is explicitly
pragmatic. Its goal is to influence human choices on specific matters that
require immediate attention.
14. C. H. Knoblauch: "Modern Rhetorical Theory and Its Future
Directions" (1985)
...rhetoric is the process of
using language to organize experience and communicate it to others. It is also
the study of how people use language to organize and communicate experience.
The word denotesÉboth distinctive human activity and the "science"
concerned with understanding that activity.
15. John Locke: Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)
[Rhetoric,] that powerful
instrument of error and deceit.
16. McCloskey:
...merely speech with designs on
the reader.
From <http://www.gsu.edu/~wwwrnc/rhetdef.htm>:
17. Anonymous:
Rhetoric is the science which
refreshes the hungry, renders the mute articulate, makes the blind to see, and
teaches one to avoid every lingual ineptitude.
Rhetoric published at Memmingen, 1490 - 1495, quoted from Harry
Caplan "Classical Rhetoric and the Mediaeval Theory of Preaching" Of
Eloquence: Studies in Ancient and Mediaeval Rhetoric. Ed. Anne King and Helen North. Ithaca: Cornell UP,
1970. 109.
18. Bazerman, Charles:
The study of how people use
language and other symbols to realize human goals and carry out human
activities . . . ultimately a practical study offering people great control
over their symbolic activity.
Shaping Written Knowledge:
The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science. Madison U of Wisconsin P, 1988. 6.
19. Hyde, Michael and Craig
Smith
The primordial function of
rhetoric is to "make-known" meaning both to oneself and to others.
Meaning is derived by a human being in and through the interpretive understanding
of reality. Rhetoric is the process of making known that meaning. Is not
rhetoric defined as pragmatic communication, more concerned with the
contemporary audiences and specific questions than with universal audiences and
general questions (360)?
"Hermeneutics and Rhetoric:
A Seen but Unobserved Relationship." Quarterly Journal of Speech 65 4 (1979): 347.
20. Sappho
Persuasion is Aphrodite's
daughter: it is she who beguiles our mortal hearts (frg 90).
Poems and Fragments. Trans. Josephine Balmer. Seacaucus: Meadowland 1984.