The poet always listens to himself or herself as part of the expressive act that is the poem, and that listening becomes an essential part of the completed poem. The listening is never fused into the expressiveness of the poem's making, however, but continues in a dramatic relationship with that expressiveness. The difficulty of poetry stems from…

Rhetorical theorists since Socrates have advocated a rhetoric that reveals truth and avoids concealment. This tradition rests, however on the questionable epistemological assumptions that data exist prior to the linguistic formualtion of them and that such data can be articulated in objectively verifiable discourse. In opposition to this point of…

The purpose of this essay is to examine philosophy, history, sociology, and rhetoric with an eye toward demonstrating that the rhetorician is at least as well equipped to deal with the concept "movement" as other writers with different training. Rhetoricians have been preoccupied with moving men and not societies. A…

Literally defined, topoi are places in the mind where items of information (ideas, arguments, etc.) may be stored. The purpose of this paper is to conduct a critical analysis of a number of studies which have appeared in communication literature on the concept of topoi and to discuss the function of topoi in communication. Utilizing the…

The purpose of this paper is to extend Gage Chapel's application of Kenneth Burke's dramatistic pentad to the persuasive aspects of television programs and to examine its relevance to television criticism. The five concepts underlying a Burkeian analysis are discussed: act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose, and the elements within Burke's…

Several schools of thought regarding media criticism, derived from diverse disciplines and literary sources, have emerged during the last decade. To examine their application to the visual communication media arts such as film and television, this paper: (1) reviews the literature of media criticism; (2) discusses various approaches to visual…

Using exercises based on the stacked mattresses image from the tale of "The Princess and the Pea," combined with Ecker and Kaelin's Aesthetic Inquiry ladder schematic, will help art educators schematize their thinking and talking about art in the classroom. Whether by selecting phenomenology or another philosophical method for navigating…

The discussion of the critical analysis of instructional design is framed within Habermas' three fundamental human interests: technical, practical, and emancipatory. The primary goal of this paper is to explore alternative approaches for instructional designers' reflection and critique. Ultimately, this reflection and critique should shed light on…

Argumentation is fundamentally exhortative: arguments can be understood as invitations to emulate the lives of those who make the arguments. The human exemplar of an argument's substance, e.g. Jesus Christ as exemplar of Christianity, is the paradigm for this theory in which the arguer's identity is seen both as equal in importance to and…

This paper discusses the mixing of theories that make up the theoretical framework the researcher uses to apply the systematic method of narrative analysis called the Listening Guide (L. Brown and others, 1991). The Listening Guide, a voice-centered relational method was developed to uncover how girls and women talk about themselves through their…

A reply to "Beyond Rhetorical Relativism," a 1982 article written by E. Croasmun and R. A. Cherwitz, this paper suggests that that article suffers from a poor choice and unclear usage of language, a weak line of argument, and a faulty conceptualization of the issues. The first section of the paper reviews the arguments presented by…

The focus of this paper is on Michael Polanyi, a contemporary scientist and philosopher, and on some general features which are embedded in rhetorical theory's traditional bases and contemporary manifestations and which are seen from Polanyi's vantage point. The author discusses the basic features which undergird rhetorical theories and are…

The perception of literary value is a function of the reader's interpretation of literary structures in relation to other creative works in that reader's repertoire and of the "deep structure" of literary imagination within the individual unconscious. This critical model suggests, therefore, that unique experiences with literature and with life…

Richard Whately's imprecise description of the concept "presumption" and the brevity of his treatment of it have led to confusion in applying the concept within the realm of argumentation. In proposing a theory to eliminate such confusion, it is argued that any dispute concerning the concept of presumption and its attendant burden of proof ("onus…

In analyzing literary works within a conceptual framework, the student needs the freedom to choose from a variety of critical standpoints and to discover for himself various approaches to the literary symbol. To illustrate the necessity of movement from one theory to another, the theories are arranged in the following order: transcendental theory…