With communication and mediation playing an increasingly important role in post modern society, rhetoric has gained in influence and importance. Historically, the role of rhetoric was to enable the speaker to convince (and persuade) the listener. Nowadays, in a society of ever increasing amounts of information, the significance of rhetoric as a tool for helping communicators appeal to listeners or readers in a credible, understandable and convincing way is being acknowledged.
This recognition has resulted in a vast body of theoretical discussions on the relation between rhetoric, argumentation and discourse as well as in the emergence of several approaches to the three disciplines for the analysis of different kinds of empirical material, from public relations texts and advertisements to political discourse, mediated discourse and scientific texts.
Regarded as a discipline as well as a tool for analysis, rhetoric is often associated with related disciplines such as discourse analysis, text linguistics, cognition as well as communication and information theory. In other words, rhetoric is engaged in building up communication, its constituent parts and genres while at the same time playing an important role for the ways in which we perceive contextual aspects, including culture and the relations between interactants.
The conference Rhetoric in Society aims at presenting and discussing different approaches to rhetoric and the applications of rhetoric. The conference welcomes contributions within a wide range of approaches to rhetoric, from the historical, traditional approach to new rhetoric and rhetorical criticism.
The conference is arranged within the areas of:
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Rhetoric in Political Discourse
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Rhetoric in Organisational Discourse
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Rhetoric in Journalistic Discourse
We welcome contributions on the role of rhetoric in written and oral discourse and genres, on topics such as:
Public deliberation, controversies, decision-making, spin, social change, political campaigning, social movements, public relations, publicity, advertising, management, corporate internal communication, computer-mediated communication, public media discourse, etc.
Contributions are accepted in English only.
Deadlines
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Please send your abstract max. 300 words edited in MS Word to the conference secretary Bente Vestergaard. She will then make it anonymous and reforward it to the academic committee for review.
Plenaries