ABSTRACT
Rhetoric is an ancient discipline that was fundamental to Western thought for over 2,000 years. Rather suddenly, it began to wither as the scientific revolution took root in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By 1900, rhetoric had almost disappeared from the canon (Bender and Welberry 1990). Today in the twenty-first century, for reasons as yet poorly understood, rhetoric is flourishing once more. Practitioners have spread across a variety of humanities and social sciences disciplines, including consumer research (Deighton 1985), so that by the early 1990s, conceptual and empirical pieces applying rhetorical ideas to advertising had begun to appear with some regularity (e.g., McQuarrie and Mick 1992; Scott 1994).
