A comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to the analysis of public rhetoric, Modern Rhetorical Criticism teaches readers how to examine and interpret rhetorical situations, ideas, arguments, structure, and style. The text covers a wide range of critical techniques, from cultural and dramatistic analysis to feminist and Marxist approaches. A wealth of original criticism demonstrates how to analyze such diverse forms as junk mail, congressional debates, and traffic regulations, as well as literature. This long-awaited revision contains new coverage of mass media, feminist criticism, and European criticism.

A comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to the analysis of public rhetoric, Modern Rhetorical Criticism teaches readers how to examine and interpret rhetorical situations, ideas, arguments, structure, and style. The text covers a wide range of critical techniques, from cultural and dramatistic analysis to feminist and Marxist approaches. A wealth of original criticism demonstrates how to analyze such diverse forms as junk mail, campaign speeches, and popular entertainment, as well as literature. This long-awaited revision offers specific guidance on crafting analytic essays, and contains new coverage of legacy as well as new media, identity criticism, and post-colonial and decolonial criticism. The fourth edition also offers additional resources online for instructors and students.

Appeals in Modern Rhetoric: An Ordinary-Language Approach introduces students to current issues in rhetorical theory through an extended treatment of the rhetorical appeal, a frequently used but rarely discussed concept at the core of rhetorical analysis and criticism. Shunning the standard Aristotelian approach that treats ethos, pathos, and logos as modes of appeal, M. Jimmie Killingsworth uses common, accessible language to explain the concept of the rhetorical appeal—meaning the use of language to plead and to please. The result is a practical and innovative guide to understanding how persuasion works that is suitable for graduate and undergraduate courses yet still addresses topics of current interest to specialists. Supplementing the volume are practical and theoretical approaches to the construction and analysis of rhetorical messages and brief and readable examples from popular culture, academic discourse, politics, and the verbal arts. Killingsworth draws on close readings of primary texts in the field, referencing theorists to clarify concepts, while he decodes many of the basic theoretical constructs common to an understanding of identification. Beginning with examples of the model of appeals in social criticism, popular film, and advertising, he covers in subsequent chapters appeals to time, place, the body, gender, and race. Additional chapters cover the use of common tropes and rhetorical narrative, and each chapter begins with definitions of key concepts.

What distinguishes the study of rhetoric from other pursuits in the liberal arts? From what realms of human existence and expression, of human history, does such study draw its defining character? What, in the end, should be the purposes of rhetorical inquiry? And amid so many competing accounts of discourse, power, and judgment in the contemporary world, how might scholars achieve these purposes through the attitudes and strategies that animate their work? Rethinking Rhetorical Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy: The Living Art of Michael C. Leff offers answers to these questions by introducing the central insights of one of the most innovative and prolific rhetoricians of the twentieth century, Michael C. Leff. This volume charts Leff ’s decades-long development as a scholar, revealing both the variety of topics and the approach that marked his oeuvre, as well as his long-standing critique of the disciplinary assumptions of classical, Hellenistic, renaissance, modern, and postmodern rhetoric. Rethinking Rhetorical Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy includes a synoptic introduction to the evolution of Leff ’s thought from his time as a graduate student in the late 1960s to his death in 2010, as well as specific commentary on twenty-four of his most illuminating essays and lectures.

Now in its second edition, Rhetorical Criticism: Perspectives in Action presents a thorough, accessible, and well-grounded introduction to contemporary rhetorical criticism. Systematic chapters contributed by noted experts introduce the fundamental aspects of a perspective, provide students with an example to model when writing their own criticism, and address the potentials and pitfalls of the approach. In addition to covering traditional modes of rhetorical criticism, the volume presents less commonly discussed rhetorical perspectives, exposing students to a wide cross-section of techniques.

This indispensable text brings together important essays on the themes, issues, and controversies that have shaped the development of rhetorical theory since the late 1960s. An extensive introduction and epilogue by the editors thoughtfully examine the current state of the field and its future directions, focusing in particular on how theorists are negotiating the tensions between modernist and postmodernist considerations. Each of the volume's eight main sections comprises a brief explanatory introduction, four to six essays selected for their enduring significance, and suggestions for further reading. Topics addressed include problems of defining rhetoric, the relationship between rhetoric and epistemology, the rhetorical situation, reason and public morality, the nature of the audience, the role of discourse in social change, rhetoric in the mass media, and challenges to rhetorical theory from the margins. An extensive subject index facilitates comparison of key concepts and principles across all of the essays featured.