Rhetorical Studies

Rhetorical studies (RS) provide an answer to the question of how to live together and deal with power. Historically, rhetoric has been considered as a way of teaching, acting, and playing, but above all, as the technique of persuasive communication. The main goal of RS is to understand how communication works and connects with people, the power of words (or the power of other types of materials, such as images) to persuade or achieve identification with the addressees. They are interpretative and empirical, and, based on an inductive approach, work on texts and interactions. As a metalanguage, RS deals with the speaker's credibility, the impact of the speech, and the sense of opportunity ( kairos ). They are produced under conditions that are common in certain approaches or theories developed during the twentieth century, especially from the post‐war years, when the question about the persuasive ability of communication and reasoned emotional argumentation became crucial. Interested in contemporary social issues, RS apply nowadays, for instance, to the mediatization of social relations, and the struggles of different groups, such as feminists or the LGTBIQ communities.

Argumentation theory · Communication studies · Identification (biology) · Persuasion · Power (physics) · Rhetoric · Rhetorical device · Rhetorical question