ABSTRACT
Although the shift from persuasion to identifi cation defi nes out new rhetoric(s), recent discussions of audience do not focus on the concept of identifi cation. While acknowledging, sometimes implicitly, that this symbolic action must underlie the roles of reader and writer in any persuasive discourse, recent work most often makes the word audience confusingly cover the processes of both writing and reading. (See Ede and Lunsford; Roth.) My purpose here is to concentrate not on a “real” or “fi ctional” audience but on the levels of identifi cation made possible through ethos that enable the writer to create audience and, inversely, for the reader to re-create this audience. Consubstantiation-that is, presence-is necessary for the writer to become part of this creation and for the reader, in turn, to become the audience; thus through identifi cation, persuasion is effected. This symbolic action, this merging, is identifi cation in its fullest sense, identifi cation emerging from generative ethos. Furthermore, invention subsumes and makes possible these levels of identifi cation in ethical argument.
