ABSTRACT
Rhetoric is the science of persuasion, involving both an aesthetic and a pragmatic agenda. Rhetoric persuades people to believe or to suspend disbelief, to accept the claims for verisimilitude as lvell as political claims; literally to be heard, understood and accepted (Silverstone 1999). Different contemporary approaches to rhetoric stress its various functions: as persuasion (Burke 1962), as argument (Billig 1987) and as the structuring of knolvledge (AlcKeon 1987). Roger Silverstone (1999) outlines ho\v rhetoric is comprised of different elements: invention, arrangement, expression, memory and delivery; forms of argumentation: figures and tropes and its mechanisms of engagement. Rhetoric, he demonstrates, has been divined in: the perambulatory rhetorics of everyday life (de Certeau 1988; 1998); the homological narratives that link the literal-): and personal and that structure time (Ricoeur 1980; 1983); and the metaphors of everyday life. Rhetoric involves appeals that are both coqnitive and critical, intellectual and emotional - for attention, for assent
and, in the sharing of communication and understanding, for both common sense and community (Billig 1987). Rhetoric is one of the mechanisms through which class struggle occurs and can be identified. This book has already explored historical classifications and academic perspectives; the next t\vo chapters turn to other sites of symbolic production -political rhetoric and popular representations - to explore ho\v value becomes attributed and attached to particular cultures, selves and classes.
