ENGL 5010: Week Five/Tuesday Slide Deck

ENGL 5010
Week Five:
The Rhetorical
Situation
Part 1

Bitzer 4
Let us regard rhetorical situation as a natural context of
persons, events, objects, relations, and an exigence which
strongly invites utterance; this invited utterance
participates naturally in the situation, is in many instances
necessary to the completion of situational activity, and by
means of its participation with situation obtains its meaning
and its rhetorical character.

Bitzer 5-6
(1) rhetorical discourse comes into
existence as a response to a
situation
(1) a speech is given rhetorical
significance by the situation
(2) a rhetorical situation must exist as a
necessary condition of rhetorical
discourse
(3) many rhetorical situations mature
and decay without giving birth to
rhetorical utterance
(4) a situation is rhetorical insofar as it
needs and invites discourse
capable of participating with
situation and thereby altering its
reality
(5) discourse is rhetorical insofar as it
functions (or seeks to function) as
a fitting response to a situation
which needs and invites it
(6) the situation controls the
rhetorical response

Bitzer 8
@chiahuiliu: Could we talk about this in class?
There are two main classes of constraints: (1) those
originated or managed by the rhetor and his
method (Aristotle called these “artistic proofs”),
and (2) those other constraints, in the situation,
which may be operative (Aristotle's “inartistic
proofs”).

Bitzer 6
Not the rhetor and not
persuasive intent, but the
situation is the source
and ground of rhetorical
activity.

Vatz 154
No situation can have a nature
independent of the perception
of its interpreter or independent
of the rhetoric with which he
chooses to characterize it.

Vatz 158
To view rhetoric as a creation of reality or salience rather than a
reflector of reality clearly increases the rhetor's moral responsibility. We
do not just have the academic exercise of determining whether the rhetor
understood the “situation" correctly. Instead, he must assume
responsibility for the salience he has created. The potential culpability of
John F. Kennedy in the "missile crisis" is thus much greater. The journalists
who choose not to investigate corruption in government or the health
needs of the elderly are also potentially more culpable. In short, the rhetor
is responsible for what he chooses to make salient.

Vatz 159
Thus rhetoric is a cause not an effect of meaning. It
is antecedent, not subsequent, to a situation’s impact.
Rhetors choose or do not choose to make salient
situations, facts, events, etc. This may be the sine qua
non of rhetoric: the art of linguistically or symbolically
creating salience.

consigney 180
integrity demands that rhetoric as an art
provide the rhetor with a “universal”
capacity such that the rhetor can function
in all kinds of indeterminate and
particular situations as they arise.

consigney 181
the condition of receptivity, allowing that
rhetor to become engaged in individual
situations without simply inventing and
thereby predetermining which problem is
going to find in them.

consigney 182
The topic is thus construed as an
essential instrument for discovery or
invention. But the topic has a second
important role in the theory of
rhetoric: that is the function of topic as
a realm in which the rhetor thinks
and acts.