Rhetorical analysis

First, let's see what's typical of classical rhetoric:

1. Public: there is a space (agora) for adopting a stance together on general questions. Directed towards the citizens with the power to act.
2. Doxical: Can support arguments on listeners' doxa
3. Agonistic: confrontative. Not that much in genus demonstrativum, but even there, the praised's virtues are contrasted with others' flaws, the specter of the cultural outsider seen as bad.
4. Authoritative: the speaker typically appears as a role model showing the way forward
5. Closed: there is a preset thesis
6. Monological: speaks to listeners, not with conversants. When not monologuing, the ancients were into dialectics, a style of debate that pits two viewpoints against each other to see which one "wins", and the purpose then is to find truth, not to convince.
7. Persuasive

The anti-rhetorical style Karlyn Kohr Campbell observed inside women's groups (Rhetoric of Women: an Oxymoron):

1. Private
2. Not doxical: can't support arguments with shared doxa because no such thing
3. No antagonism: to speak in the group is to realize a sisterhood. Any antagonism is directed outwards.
4. Non-authoritative: the only authority is held by someone speaking of their own experiences in their own domain, but none in the group has the power to say what's the best way forward, nor are they trying to win it
5. Open: participants have no aim except to question what they already think of their situation, by joining a group where all speak with equal agency. Joining the group is to ``risk your very self'' in a rhetoric that doesn't wrap a fixed program.
6. Non-monological: nobody is standing on a podium
7. No persuasion: The goal is a process, not a final belief. You serve up your insights and questions, and leave it to others to see any lessons in your words.

• First observed in women's rhetoric.
• A classic trope used by women persuading men: the antistrephon, generally useful when you're in a lower position
• Classical rhetoric is useful for a society with many internally conflicting interests, then there is a need for one unifying force that decides what's what

• Women's rhetoric is forced to revolt against the ruling patriarchal system. "The choice to be moderate and reformist doesn't exist for those who propose the liberation of woman". Here it must develop an antagonistic and confrontative strategy. But it cannot support itself on a counter-doxa, because whatever such a counter-doxa may say, it has been corrupted by the current system that outwardly supports the same values as the women's movement (democracy, equality, personal independence) but in practice betrays them.
  • Therefore, women's rhetoric must work with a more intentional method that reveals the contradiction in male-dominated society between its principally democratic ideas and its unfair treatment of people who happen to be women.
  • It may be done through incongruous perspectives ("Is God a black woman?") or symbolic reversals (filling a term like "whore" with positive meaning). As Campbell says, the purpose is to "do violence against the structure of reality". It's a demonstrative genre that dissolves doxa instead of confirming it.
  • How would a social structure look, where the women's group discussion rhetoric could be a pattern for the public discourse? We can suppose that on each point it must differ from the patriarchal system, leaving it entirely in splinters. It would mean a social order where the struggle between groups has been replaced by a peaceful cooperation (presupposing that systemic injustice and all other objective reasons for conflict have disappeared), where a general equality and respect for others has spread and where traditional positions of authority has been destroyed, where the preference for dogmatic and ideological thinking has been destroyed and a free search for truth and value is encouraged and respected in everyone, where opinions don't spread from centers of power via megaphones but are always forming and being aired in small and large groups that stand in a dialogical cooperation and where, finally, the desire to convince others about one's own opinon has been replaced with a curiosity for other perspectives, to try other positions and to recgnize their situational-bound value.
    • Which tendencies in current society have an effect towards that social structure and which have an effect in the opposite? This becomes important to recognize for whoever would like to see this form of rhetoric in political discourse.

1. Exigence, En tvingande omständighet som inbjuder till retorisk handling
2. Audience. En publik som äger förmågan att förmedla den retoriska handlingen och därmed upphäva den kritiska omständigheten
3. Constraints. Alla de restriktioner eller tvingande begränsningar som talaren har att ta hänsyn till om hon eller han vill kunna övertyga publiken att betrakta eller gripa sig an omständigheten på det sätt som talaren önskar.

Den man egentligen riktar sig mot, som uppfyller Bitzers punkt om audience.

Ullen: Åkessons retoriska publik var alla framtida väljare .

• No situation is objective. Situations exist on the basis of a description of them that builds on our subjective experience of them.
• The way we choose to characterize a situation always affects how we experience it. So rhetoric helps determine what the situation even is.
• Situational rhetoric is a myth
• ☑ Creating salience

• ☑ Says that Bitzer and Vatz are best seen as completing each other.
• Bitzer has the approach of the analyzing rhetorician
• Vatz has the approach of the speaker
• ☑ Bitzer views the rhetoric as an answer on the situation in a similar way that an answer answers a question.
• Bitzer says that the rhetor chooses a response dependent on how they perceive the situation, althoug he also says the situation basically prescribes only one correct response, and it is on the speaker to decode the situation accurately.
• ☑ Koppling mellan ideologi och dåd. När någon begår terrordåd inspirerad av ideolog, delar andra med samma ideologi ansvar för detta dåd?

• Trovärdigheten som författare bygger på en djup och bred kunskap om fandomen.

The best style is the one that doesn't get noticed.

Tegners sentens: det dunkelt sagda är det dunkelt tänkta. Isokrates skriver: Förmågan att tala väl och att tänka väl går hand i hand, och det är stilen som förenar de två.

Eva Östlund-Stjärnegårdh har studerat sambandet mellan stil och betyg i gymnasisters nationella prov i svenska. Det visade sig att varierad meningslängd och varierade fundament var viktigast, alltså att ha både långa och korta meningar, och att ha få meningar som börjar med "Det är…".

Standarddef av ironi är att säga en sak men mena det motsatta. Men detta är inte en bra def. Det kan sägas bygga på ett psykolingvisktiskt missförstånd om hur språkförståelse går till. Föreställnigen: att vi först uppfattar en bokstavlig betydelse och därefter börajr vi söka efter en annan, avsedd betydelse.

The biggest reason this def is not good is it excludes many linguistic actions.