Rhetorical Factors as Clues to Form and Meaning
Aldo Scaglione
R HETORIC has many uses, and have been proposed in a sort of revivalist vogue for discipline that had lost most its vitality between 1800 1950. One advantage which rhetoric should once again command respect is it can make us realize how several newfangled theoretical approaches are little more than new garb longstanding concerns. Interest statements ups downs, somewhat generational waves. Between the two world wars theory was largely national (with New Criticism America, Crocian Idealism Italy, Formalism among expatriate Russians, especially through Prague school, so on), but since World War II become strikingly cosmopolitan-as generally until at least 1800-even when principal impulses could be clearly localized, as Paris with structuralist theorems emanating from LUvi-Strauss, or, mediating force post-Saussurian linguistics, Geneva, Copenhagen, (while American Bloomfieldian structuralism tended to resist literary application). We now witnessing, newest generation, cosmopolitan breadth reinforced by limited opening toward stylistics post-Bloomfieldian linguists both America abroad, remarkable interest pure or abstract offers sundry combinations juxtapositions three basic ingredients: post-structuralist methodology; focus on reception interpretation; and, times, search underlying economic,
Comparative Literature