Rhetorica Scandinavica

Rhetoricians would call it kairos

Marie Lund — 2024-12-18

Anita Furu: Flygtige ord. Et essay om taleskrivning, sprog og statsministre. Gutkind 2024

Free and new places

Christina Pontoppidan — 2024-12-18

The article contributes with a theoretical foundation of the innovative as a normative measure for rhetorical argumentation. The author presents appropriate innovation as a normative ideal and shows how the topics facilitates a systematic search for arguments that both resonate with widespread thinking in a culture and allow the arguer to argue from new and surprising places. Based on the rhetorical-topical argument model, three places are identified for argumentative innovation – the standpoint, common ground, and support. The article, further, introduces a distinction between situational topical innovation, where the arguer takes the free place in a debate based on culturally recognized topoi, and historical topical innovation, where the arguer prophetically introduces new places in the cultural repertoire.

Rhetorical Adversarial Design

Christine Isager — 2024-12-18

Drastic containment measures by the Danish government during the Covid-19 pandemic encountered some resistance in material, curiously old-fashioned forms. In support of an NGO, a communications agency produced snow globes featuring three homeless Copenhagen citizens, exhibited in 3D-printed miniature form and synthetic Christmas snow to draw attention to their particularly vulnerable status under prevailing restrictions. A news medium designed a ‘Wax Museum of Power’, exhibiting life-size wax sculptures of ten government officials who were implicated in the unlawful decision to cull the Danish mink population. These material forms of rhetoric invited publics to pause, sense, and debate the exercise of political power in manners that illustrate the concept of rhetorical ethos as a dwelling place where communal virtues are formed. Specifically, we argue for an understanding of these artifacts as rhetorical adversarial design whose form is homological and creates unexpected, unsettling dwelling places where democratic ethos is challenged and negotiated.

The Metaphor Metaphor and the Self Analogy

Kristian Bjørkdahl — 2024-12-18

Rhetoricians often assume that one important task of rhetorical studies is to provide support for cultural change. It is not so clear, however, what the discipline has to show for in this area. For this reason, I suggest that rhetoric should take a greater interest in the work of Richard Rorty, who not only has an obvious affinity with the rhetorical discipline, but who also provides a sophisticated theory of cultural change. I focus first on Rorty’s metaphor metaphor, which insists that change is something strange, abnormal, and, strictly speaking, meaningless. The metaphor metaphor productively challenges some of the rhetorical discipline’s ideas about agency and control, but ultimately, it is troubled. Instead, the rhetorical discipline has more to gain by turning to Rorty’s self-analogy, where change happens gradually, through juxtaposition, comparison, and marginalization of the differences between ourselves and others.

How to do Things with Misunderstandings

Stefan Iversen — 2024-12-18

This article focuses on a specific form of rhetoric that uses misunderstandings strategically through experiments with fictionalization. The overall argument is twofold. First, I argue that such experiments create a unique form of reflexivity; second, I argue that this reflexivity can be termed metanoic. Theoretically, the article engages in dialogue with recent theories of fictionality and with ongoing revitalizations of the concept of metanoia. The article reads two case studies that both stage misunderstandings by inviting the audience to perceive them as factual and then revealing them to be fictionalized. The two cases are examples of hoaxes and deepfakes, two discourse types that the ideas of experimental fictionality and metanoic reflectivity can illuminate further. The article expands and sharpens the understanding of what metanoic processes are and how they work, and provides a precise set of concepts for discussing how experiments with fictionalization function in contemporary, innovative rhetoric.

The Value of Rhetoric

Alexander Stagnell — 2024-12-18

This article takes as its starting point the modern description of rhetoric as a threat to imagination in order to ask the question concerning rhetoric's ability to think the new. Against the modern fragmentation of the rhetorical tradition, the focus then turns to the structuralist reintegration of rhetoric, how this has been based on an obscure relationship between linguistic and economic value, and how in particular Ernesto Laclau has dealt with this issue. Through Laclau's concept of the empty signifier and Marx's concept of the general equivalent, three potential readings of Laclau's theory of rhetoric and linguistic creation are then explored. These readings reveal the danger of modelling an understanding of language and rhetoric on the value-form, not least since an insufficient recognition of this model also undermines Laclau's concept of rhetoric.

Creativity

Iben Brinch — 2024-12-18

About two decades ago some rhetoricians started paying attention to authenticity as a fourth dimension of ethos, in addition to Aristotle’s three dimensions: phronesis, areté and eunoia. In this article, the existence of a fifth dimension is considered: creativity. Where would such a dimension come from and what would it have to say for rhetorical criticism and the production of rhetorical discourse? An argument suggested in the article is that creativity as a separate dimension of ethos would clarify interpretations of ethos in the context of late modernity. This argument resonates with ideas put forward by the German cultural sociologist Andreas Reckwitz about late modernity in the Western world as a “society of singularities” (2020a) based on the “invention of creativity” (2017). The article ends with the suggestion that the creativity dimension consists of five qualities where differences (or différance) are practiced creating creative character or novelty.

Socially critical mememakers

Tina Thode Hougaard — 2024-12-18

Memes can be described as a humorous, sometimes satirical, post with intertextual or implied effects that work in conjunction with the visual appeal. Central to memes is the repetition and use of templates. Reading and producing memes is for many people an everyday practice, often mostly done for fun, but some memes also contribute with a politically socially critical commentary. The article examines how three Danish meme profiles started and developed their account into having special characteristics. In order to assess how they constitute a new voice in the public debate, selected memes are analyzed. By virtue of social media, meme makers gain a speaking position and thus rhetorical agency, whose scope and volume are unpredictable and accelerating because of social media.

Inventive Rhetoric

Stefan Iversen — 2024-12-18

Introduction to Special Issue on Inventive Rhetoric