Approaches to rhetoric

Core idea

Rhetoric has been studied as many different objects: a set of pedagogical exercises, a category of literary ornament, a window onto power, a symbolic system that constitutes social reality. Toye walks through the major approaches and shows that each one captures something real and misses something else. There is no single correct way to analyse a speech, but there are productive and unproductive moves, and knowing the landscape of approaches lets you pick the right tool for the question you are asking.

The classical and Renaissance tradition treated rhetoric pedagogically — a curriculum of figures and exercises designed to produce a competent civic speaker. The early twentieth century, under the influence of literary New Criticism, treated rhetorical texts as self-contained artefacts whose meaning could be uncovered by close reading. Kenneth Burke's mid-century dramatism reframed rhetoric as symbolic action — language as a way of identifying with others, not just persuading them. Chaïm Perelman's New Rhetoric (with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca) recovered argumentation as a serious subject for philosophy, drawing on legal reasoning to show that non-formal argument is rigorous in its own way. Late twentieth-century discourse analysis embedded rhetoric in social, political, and ideological context, tracing how language constructs the world it claims merely to describe.

Why it matters

A method is also a commitment. If you treat a speech as a self-contained literary text, you will find patterns of imagery and figure but miss the political stakes. If you treat it only as ideology, you will explain its effects without explaining how the words actually do their work. The mature rhetorical critic moves between approaches as the question demands.

Intention, interpretation, and the limits of close reading

Toye revisits the long argument about whether the author's intention is recoverable. The New Critics said no — the text shows what it does. Poststructuralists like Barthes said meaning is made by the reader. Toye's position is more pragmatic: authors are not infallible guides to their own meaning, but context — biographical, social, political — is rarely irrelevant. The reader-only and the author-only positions are both too pure to survive contact with actual speech.

Key takeaways

Mental model

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Practical application

When you analyse a piece of rhetoric, pick your approach to fit the question.

If you want to teach the move, take the classical-pedagogical line: name the figure, identify the appeal, mark the canon. If you want to understand the text as a verbal object, use close reading: trace metaphors, follow ambiguities, look at structure independent of biography. If you want to ask what the speech does in the world — what identifications it builds, what enemies it creates — reach for Burke. If you want to test whether the argument is good, work in the spirit of Perelman: identify the premises, the audience the speaker assumes, the warrants left implicit. If you want to ask what the speech reveals about the system that produced it, use discourse analysis.

The strongest analyses move between modes. You can identify a tricolon (pedagogy), notice it builds an in-group/out-group binary (Burke), check whether the argument under it would survive scrutiny (Perelman), and ask whose interests the binary serves (discourse analysis) — all in one paragraph.

Example

Take a corporate CEO's all-hands speech announcing layoffs. A pedagogical reading lists the figures: the inevitable tricolon, the antithesis between "the company we were" and "the company we must become," the metaphor of a ship in rough seas. A Burkean reading notices that the speech invites employees to identify with the company against the abstract enemy of market conditions — the layoffs are something happening to everyone, not done by leadership. A Perelman-style reading exposes the missing premise: that the cuts are necessary, which is asserted rather than argued. A discourse-analytic reading places the speech inside the genre of contemporary executive communication and asks what such speeches systematically conceal. Four readings, four different findings — and only the combined view tells you what the speech actually accomplishes.

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