A Pragmatic Theory of Rhetoric
Author | : Walter H. Beale |
Publisher | : SIU Press |
Total Pages | : 208 |
Release | : 1987 |
ISBN-10 | : 0809313006 |
ISBN-13 | : 9780809313006 |
Rating | : 4/5 (06 Downloads) |
Book excerpt: Walter H. Beale offers the most coherent treatment of the aims and modes of discourse to be presented in more than a decade. His development of a semiotic “grammar of motives” that relates the problems of meaning in discourse both to linguistic structure and ways of constructing reality stands as a provocative new theory of rhetoric sharply focused on writing. He includes a comprehensive treatment of rhetoric, its classes and varieties, modes, and strategies. In addition, he demonstrates the importance of the purpose, substance, and social context of discourse, at a time when scholarly attention has become preoccupied with process. He fortifies and extends the Aristotelian approach to rhetoric and discourse at a time when much theory and pedagogy have yielded to modernist assumptions and methods. And finally, he develops a theoretical framework that illuminates the relationship between rhetoric, the language arts, and the human sciences in general.