ABSTRACT
The art of persuasion. Rhetoric is the putting to work of language in order to influence other people, either in terms of their future actions or their beliefs. ‘Rhetoric’ also signified the formal study of persuasion. In the medieval period this was a branch of academic learning akin in status to the study of grammar, mathematics or logic. In the Renaissance, rhetoric was regarded as a practical field of study for those interested in politics and law (and handbooks of rhetoric were included in Erasmus’s De copia (1521)). A new interest in rhetoric has been developed in the post-war period by figures associated with post-structuralism, such as Paul de Man (1919-83). De Man, who developed a form of deconstruction, analysed linguistic tropes and their functions, paying paticular attention to rhetorical language in critical and philosophical texts.
