Brummett’s

Rhetoric of Style

for the 21st Century

Rhetorics

1. Handbook/Guide for Practice2. Theory of persuasion3. Critical method of analysis

Components

• Primacy of the Text• Imaginary Communities• Market Contexts• Aesthetic Rationales• Stylistic Homologies

Primacy of the Text

• 117: “Text is a set of signs related to each other insofar as their meanings all contribute to the same set of effects or functions.”

• 118: “The exigencies that draw rhetorical responses, especially in public rhetoric, are increasingly represented in texts rather than experienced directly.”

• 118: “Texts are primary sites for the construction of identity and social affiliation.”

Primacy of the Text

• Textual world• Bases for identity and community• Nodal texts • Convergence, redundancy, and triangulation

of meaning• Reading off of the text• Images and floating signs

http://my.barackobama.com/whatitmeans-EMS

Imaginary Communities

• 119: “The audience is an effect of rhetoric.”• 120: “We engage audiences, communities, and

groups by engaging their representations and styles.”

• 121: “By imagining who we are and who are the others to whom we want to speak through style, we construct the schemes of signs and images that present a representation of ourselves to others as we have image-ined them.”

Imaginary Communities

• Effects of discourse• Facilitation by new technology• Coherence around style• Representation and communication of

communities and subjects by texts• Calling forth of motives, actions, and values by

communities

Market Contexts

• 124: “Increasingly, commercial rhetoric is the rhetoric of politics, social interaction, and religion.”

• 125: “The market context is the frozen floor of meanings upon which rhetoric dances today. It is largely impervious to rhetorical means to change it.”

Market Contexts

• Insulation from change• Merger of state, culture, and market • Shift of signs and images to commodities• Uses of goods as language, systems of signs • Grounding of community an identity by

commodities • Pleasure and desire• Global rhetorical system

Aesthetic Rationales

• 127: “Distinctive rationales for how texts create their effects.”

• 127: “Manifested, first, in the primacy of aesthetic forms of expression and aesthetic criteria for judgments and decision.”

• 129: “People decide for or against propositions based on whether they are backed by a plausible narrative.”

Aesthetic Rationales

• 130: “Politics can be played out in quick flashes in the rhetoric of style, in aesthetics, and through today’s quick-cycling communication media.”

Aesthetic Rationales

• Aesthetic bases for decision and judgment• Culture of aesthetic engrossment• Aesthetic bases for identity and social

organization• Pleasure and desire• Narrative rationale• Performance• Images

Stylistic Homologies

• 131-2: “A homology is a formal resemblance across different texts, actions, objects, and other orders of experience.”

• 132: “A given style is a repertoire of signs as well as the homological glue that binds them together as a style.”

• 132: “It is in recognizing and participating in stylistic homologies that imaginary communities and their subjects cohere around texts.”

Stylistic Homologies

• Systems of signs and meanings• Unity of styles• Wide range of texts in system• Coherence of communities and subjects

around forms

Activity

1. Choose a culture to analyze2. List items for each rhetoric of style

component (p. 133)3. Find connections between the components

(pp. 134-148)4. Present findings