New rhetorics is an

interdisciplinary field Interdisciplinarity or interdisciplinary studies involves the combination of multiple academic disciplines into one activity (e.g., a research project). It draws knowledge from several other fields like sociology, anthropology, psychology, ec ...

Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, ''Rhetorics: New Rhetorics'', in Wolfgang Donsbach (ed.), ''The International Encyclopedia of Communication'', approaching for the broadening of classical rhetorical canon.New and Alternative Rhetorics - William DeGenaro, ''Who says?: working-class rhetoric, class consciousness, and community'', Univ of Pittsburgh Press, 2007, p.5

Overview

The New Rhetoric is a result of various efforts of bringing back rhetorics from the marginal status it attained by its image and 'negative connotations of "political lies, corporate spin, long list of Greek and Roman terms for patterns of expression no one knowingly uses,

purple prose In literary criticism, purple prose is overly ornate prose text that may disrupt a narrative flow by drawing undesirable attention to its own extravagant style of writing, thereby diminishing the appreciation of the prose overall. Purple prose i ...

, boiler-plate arrangement schemas, unimaginative reproductions of bullshit and so on"George Pullman, ''Rhetorically Speaking, What's New?'', Georgia State University, What is the New Rhetoric? conference if not to its previous place of a discipline "associated with social and intellectual prestige" then at least to the level of the other contemporary fields in the social, cultural and linguistic studies. Notoriously the field emerged after the work of

Chaïm Perelman Chaïm Perelman (born Henio (or Henri) Perelman; sometimes referred to mistakenly as Charles Perelman) (20 May 1912, Warsaw – 22 January 1984, Brussels) was a Polish-born philosopher of law, who studied, taught, and lived most of his life in B ...

and

Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca (1899–1987) was a Belgian academic and longtime co-worker of the philosopher Chaïm Perelman. She volunteered in 1948 to support his work and developed several aspects of the ''New Rhetoric'' independently in later years. ...

in their book ''The New Rhetoric'' (1969)Thomas M. Carr, Jr. ''Some Consequences of The New Rhetoric: A Critical Study'', Argumentation 7: 475-479, 1993 but both the notion and the idea for the need of "new" rhetoric, different from the "old" one can be traced to the works of

Kenneth Burke Kenneth Duva Burke (May 5, 1897 – November 19, 1993) was an American literary theorist, as well as poet, essayist, and novelist, who wrote on 20th-century philosophy, aesthetics, criticism, and rhetorical theory. As a literary theorist, Burk ...

- ''A Rhetoric of Motives'' (1950) and ''Rhetoric - Old and New'' (1967). What helped the emergence of New rhetoric was the ideas of the epistemic status of rhetoric, the notion of a clearly definable rhetorical core, and others. An attempt to apply the New Rhetoric as a social philosophy was made by the Polish philosopher Mieczysław Maneli in his 1994 book ''Perelman's New Rhetoric as Philosophy and Methodology for the Next Century''. Maneli wrote: "The New Rhetoric is modern

humanism Humanism is a philosophy, philosophical stance that emphasizes the individual and social potential and Agency (philosophy), agency of Human, human beings. It considers human beings the starting point for serious moral and philosophical in ...

. The struggle for humanism never ends. The most essential features to a humanistic approach to life are: individuals should be given the chance to develop their personal talents and energies, they should be able to be creative and become happy...Their essence and value are creativity and self-determination...Once the New Rhetoric took as its basic proposition that nothing is absolutely good or sacred except human dignity, one must constantly search for new values, for better forms, and ways of life. There are three specific areas that is especially important for modern humanism: social and individual justice, freedom from oppression with a genuine opportunity for a decent life; and tolerance and privacy". New rhetorics attempts to preserve the original field but it also has tense relationship with it. For example, New Rhetoric attempts to break up with the formalistic and logocentric (i.e. patriarchal) Neo-Aristotelian analysis in favour of interplay between

text Text may refer to: Written word * Text (literary theory), any object that can be read, including: **Religious text, a writing that a religious tradition considers to be sacred **Text, a verse or passage from scripture used in expository preachin ...

and

context Context may refer to: * Context (language use), the relevant constraints of the communicative situation that influence language use, language variation, and discourse summary Computing * Context (computing), the virtual environment required to su ...

, but according to DeGenaro it does not succeed to place itself outside the "Western-patriarchal" tradition with being unable to departure from "elite backgrounds and scopes of study" to a diversity of voices, topics, etc. This probably makes New Rhetoric rather a ground for the postmodern rhetoricNot the rhetoric of postmodernism but postmodern theory and analysis in rhetorics. which "puts into question the identities of the speaker, the audience, and the messages that pass between them"Gary E. Aylesworth, ''Rhetoric, Postmodern'' ''The International Encyclopedia of Communication'', with evaluating the

intersubjective In philosophy, psychology, sociology, and anthropology, intersubjectivity is the relation or intersection between people's cognitive perspectives. Definition is a term coined by social scientists to refer to a variety of types of human inter ...

philosophyBarry Brummett, ''Some Implications of "Process" or "Intersubjectivity": Postmodern Rhetoric'', Philosophy & Rhetoric, Penn State University Press, 1976 because of the idea inherently accepted in postmodernistic philosophy that "differences cannot be overcome, in Hegelian fashion, by cancelling them under a higher-order synthesis, but must be eroded or defaced in the course of traversing them."Gary Aylesworth,
Postmodernism
', Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

References

{{Reflist, 30em Rhetoric Structuralism Formalism (philosophy)