Framing Issues

Framing Issues

1. Theory of Rhetoric and Its Elements

   • Rhetoric
     • domain, e.g., encompasses the rhetoric/dialectic issue, as well as the issue of invention
   • Rhetor
     • subjectivity, epistemology, ontology, literacy, ethics, community (including disciplinarity: (1) domain, (2) history, (3) methodologies/modes of inquiry, (4) epistemic courts)
       • Subjectivity
         • Locke’s knower is the subject whose mind is a tabula rasa when he or she is born.
         • Giambattista Vico discusses subjectivity in terms of orators “who know all the loci, i.e., the lines of argument to be used, are able (by an operation not unlike reading the printed characters on a page) to grasp extemporaneously the elements of persuasion inherent in any question or case” (869)
         • In the period of the Enlightenment, the individual or subject was constructed as rational, self-determined, unified, and autonomous. (Helen Foster 71)
         • But structuralists rejected humanism, and in their approach the subject “was dismissed, or radically decentered, as merely an effect of language, culture, or the unconscious, and [was] denied causal or creative efficacy” (71-2 Foster)

2. Theory of Rhetoric and its Elements

   • Interlocutor
     • audience, ethics, epistemology, ontology, literacy, community (including disciplinarity)
   • Language
     • discourse, genre, epistemological (or merely representational?), techne/pedagogy ​
   • Reality
     • epistemological, ontological