In arguing for a functional rather than contextual definition of rhetoric, this paper explains that an addressed audience and not a public setting is what makes the concept of "rhetorical quality" meaningful. The paper then notes that the defining characteristics of rhetorical quality are goal orientation and strategy, and it reasons that…

This paper speculates about whether a literary canon exists in contemporary Latin American literature, particularly in the prose genre. The paper points to Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa as the three authors who might form this traditional and liberal canon with their works "La Muerte de Artemio Cruz"…

To examine the rhetorical vision of nuclear war presented in the television show "The Day After," it is necessary to consider (1) the motives of those involved in producing the film, (2) the debate over the film that preceded its presentation, (3) the effect of the film's message, and (4) how the film's rhetorical structure contributed…

To examine the relationship between the literary responses and the moral responses of 11-year-old children to selected literary works, a study was conducted involving 28 mature sixth-grade readers. The subjects participated in eight lessons where widely recognized literary works containing moral dilemmas were read. Their responses were given in…

In pursuit of quality education in Bhutan there has been a desire to shift from teacher-dominant class teaching to students taking initiative in their own learning. This paper investigated the issue of moving teaching and learning from teacher-centered classes to independent learning of students. The research was carried out at Samtse College of…

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…

To help students develop a broadly generative approach to reading and writing about literature, teachers of literature should employ not only systematic procedures, but also the eclectic and utilitarian spirit of rhetorical invention. A semiotic perspective offers the most solid theoretical foundation for establishing a genuinely heuristic…

The teaching-questioning strategy developed in this paper, based on reader-response criticism and Kenneth Burke's pentad, can be used by teachers to elicit responses to any literary work and is designed to help students participate in a work's dramatic context, discover meaning as they read, and assure that their critical essays are based on an…

Reports on a study of picture books by and about Asian Americans that identified Asian groups in the literature; determined the literature's authenticity; determined literary and visual quality; and identified ethnicity of authors and illustrators and whether ethnicity affected authenticity or quality. A list of the books sampled is appended. (28…

Silence has often been treated as simply a negative phenomenon rather than as a communicative device. Four aspects of silence include: (1) negative silence, which is the experience of silence as having no positive value; (2) primordial silence, the phenomenon out of which utterance arises; (3) silence as a mode of being; and (4) silence as a…

Interest in the sophists has recently intensified among rhetorical theorists, culminating in the notion that rhetoric is epistemic. Epistemic rhetoric has its first and deepest roots in sophistic epistemological and rhetorical traditions, so that the view of rhetoric as epistemic is now being dubbed "neo-sophistic." In epistemic…

This paper argues that, while Kenneth Burke may be placed by some writers squarely in either the modern or the postmodern tradition, Burke participates in both but is marginal to each, and thus "beyond" them. The first section briefly traces the outline of Burke's philosophy of rhetoric. With that framework as a backdrop, the second…

Audience and situational context, the latter defined as a pairing of time and place coordinates, have passed through stages of union, separation, and identification in the history of rhetoric. From Aristotle through Cicero and Quintilian to Hugh Blair and George Campbell, audience was a synecdoche for the situations of utterance that defined…

The views of three prominent figures concerning the current state of the book world are presented in the three separate essays in this booklet. The first essay, by critic and educator Alfred Kazin, addresses the state of literature in the United States, focusing upon financial pressures and the failure of current writers to see beyond today in…

Ten recent articles and books are cited in this paper as examples of a continuing antifeminist bias in literary criticism. Several forms of this bias are discussed, including an imperviousness to the feminist awareness, a refusal to recognize it, and open irritation by some critics that women are now finding a voice in literary criticism. A…