Rhetorical Audience Studies and Reception of Rhetoric

Exploring Audiences Empirically

Jens E. Kjeldsen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783319616186
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the reception of rhetoric and the rhetoric of reception. By considering salient rhetorical traits of rhetorical utterances and texts seen in context, and relating this to different kinds of reception and/or audience use and negotiation, the authors explore the connections between rhetoric and reception. In our time, new media and new forms of communication make it harder to distinguish between speaker and audience. The active involvement of users and audiences is more important than ever before. This project is based on the premise that rhetorical research should reconsider the understanding, conceptualization and examination of the rhetorical audience. From mostly understanding audiences as theoretical constructions that are examined textually and speculatively, the contributors give more attention to empirical explorations of actual audiences and users.The book will provide readers with new knowledge on the workings of rhetoric as well as illustrative andguiding examples of new methods of rhetorical studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Audience Analysis and Reception Studies of Rhetoric
• 2. The Argumentative Burdens of Audience Conjectures: Audience Research in Popular Culture Criticism (Reprint)
• 3. Assessing Audience Reactions to Winston Churchill’s Speeches
• 4. Audience Response to Mediated Authenticity Appeals
• 5. Focus Group Studies of Social Media Rhetoric
• 6. Think-Aloud Reading: Selected Audiences’ Concurrent Reaction to the Implied Audience in Political Commentary
• 7. The Semiotics and Rhetoric of Music: A Case Study in Aesthetic Protocol Analysis
• 8. Competing Perspectives: Using Ethnographic Methods to Study Embodied and Emplaced Rhetorics
• 9. The Audience and the Spectacle: Bodu Bala Sena and the Controversy of Buddhist Political Activism in Sri Lanka
• 10. Pandemic Rhetoric and Public Memory. What People (Don’t) Remember from the 2009 Swine Flu
• 11. Icons, Appropriations, and the Co-production of Meaning
• 12. The Rhetorical Power of News Photographs: A Triangulatory Reception Approach to the Alan Kurdi Images
• Backmatter