E-Book Overview
Appeals in Modern Rhetoric: An Ordinary-Language Approach introduces students to current issues in rhetorical theory through an extended treatment of the rhetorical appeal, a frequently used but rarely discussed concept at the core of rhetorical analysis and criticism. Shunning the standard Aristotelian approach that treats ethos, pathos, and logos as modes of appeal, M. Jimmie Killingsworth uses common, accessible language to explain the concept of the rhetorical appeal— meaning the use of language to plead and to please. The result is a practical and innovative guide to understanding how persuasion works that is suitable for graduate and undergraduate courses yet still addresses topics of current interest to specialists.
Supplementing the volume are practical and theoretical approaches to the construction and analysis of rhetorical messages and brief and readable examples from popular culture, academic discourse, politics, and the verbal arts. Killingsworth draws on close readings of primary texts in the field, referencing theorists to clarify concepts, while he decodes many of the basic theoretical constructs common to an understanding of identification. Beginning with examples of the model of appeals in social criticism, popular film, and advertising, he covers in subsequent chapters appeals to time, place, the body, gender, and race. Additional chapters cover the use of common tropes and rhetorical narrative, and each chapter begins with definitions of key concepts.
E-Book Content
Appeals in Modern Rhetoric: Language Approach
An Ordinary-
M. Jimmie Killingsworth
Preface This book arises like all communications out of a particular situation. I found myself in a fix (as we say in the South) — as if I were walking in the woods and came to the end of the path before I had gone a hundred steps, or found so many paths that I couldn’t decide among them. Every path I tried took me some place I didn’t want to go — a dead end, a crowded town, a stinking landfill. I kept trying to teach a course in modern rhetoric to undergraduate students and finding no text they could understand and easily apply to their lives and work. I could barely coerce my graduate students to read the likes of Kenneth Burke and Wayne Booth, authors whom I dearly love but whose books are so drenched in tradition and erudition that you need a PhD to read them. There were plenty of good books that introduced ancient rhetoric, in the mold of Edward P.J. Corbett’s Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, but nothing with a title like “Modern Rhetoric for the Modern Student”. Judging from the textbooks available, it would be easy to think that no work had been done in rhetoric since the time of St. Augustine or that contemporary students ought to be able easily to comprehend the work written more recently. My experience said no to both suggestions. What I needed, then, was a place to start. Convinced that rhetoric remains relevant in our times, I came up with an idea that would allow me to introduce the subject in ordinary language for people with no background in the tradition and no patience for reading tomes like Bizzell and Hezberg’s The Rhetorical Tradition, which after a couple of thousand pages only gets the reader to the edge of the woods anyway. The idea I landed upon was to introduce the topic through the concept of the appeal. Everybody knows what appeal means in ordinary language, and we can build on that common knowledge and get quickly into the deep woods of rhetorical theory and practice. In an earlier work, I had defined rhetorical appeals as “efforts to overcome oppositions and divisions either by forming new solidarities, by reinforcing old ones, or by revealing distances and likenesses in order to transform attitudinal conflicts into [communal forms of] action” (Killingsworth and Palmer 17). I felt I could do b