ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces rhetoric as a situated discursive act within a larger public context of deliberation about controversial and pressing issues. It expands the notion of “public speaking” beyond the walls of the classroom to encompass one’s larger social and historical environment. The rhetorical situation is divided into rhetorical background, which provides the broader historical and social context of the speech and its audience, and rhetorical foreground, which represents those aspects that stand out significantly to specific audiences in the immediate present. The rhetorical background includes components such as the public, public opinion, public memory, social knowledge, counterpublics, and the state, while the rhetorical foreground includes the components of exigence, audience, constraints, motive, practical judgment, and occasion. The most important of these concepts for rhetorical public speaking is attention to exigence, which focuses rhetorical public speaking on the shared problems that an audience wishes will be addressed in a timely manner.
