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
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
