Mary Garrett and Xiaosui Xiao's "The Rhetorical Situation Revisited"

Garrett, Mary, and Xiaosui Xiao. "The Rhetorical Situation Revisited." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 23.2 (1993): 30-40.

This article works from Lloyd Bitzer's notion of "the rhetorical situation", taking the Chinese response to the West during the Opium Wars as an example of how "the discourse tradition is both a source and a limiting horizon for the rhetor and for the audience of the rhetorical situation" (38).

They continue,

Thus, a discourse tradition directly or indirectly participates in a rhetoric situation in at least three ways: it generates needs and promotes interests in an audience that must to be met by new discourses [huh?]; it cultivates an audience's expectations about the appropriate forms of discourses, the proper subject matter, the right modes of argumentation, and so forth in relation to a given circumstance; and it also affects an audience's recognition and interpretation of a rhetorical exigency. (38-9)

[Although this article is also not about rhetorical pedagogy, per se, it is about how a rhetorical situation can be perceived differently by an audience depending on the audience's discourse traditions. This might have an effect on how students receive a teacher's teaching, for instance. Hmmmm….]

[Mary Garrett] [intercultural communication] [rhetoric] [rhetorical situation] [Xiaoxui Xiao]