ABSTRACT
The word ‘rhetoric’ comes up frequently in any analysis of advertising since it refers to those techniques, usually verbal, that are designed and employed to persuade and impress people. Rhetorical language also carries the implication of extravagance and artifice, not to mention a lack of information. In his influential essay ‘The rhetoric of the image’ (1964), Barthes not only discusses a semiotic of the publicity image but also suggests a rhetoric of the image or classification of the connotators of the image. Such a rhetoric, he argues, is general because rhetorical figures are never more than formal relations of elements; they vary in substance (sound, image, gesture, etc.) but not necessarily in form. This feature makes the rhetorical device a useful concept for the study of visual language as well as written/spoken language. I shall examine this argument in this chapter, although I have touched upon it in the two previous ones.
