Rhetoric

Rhetoric is the science and art of persuasive, effective speech, which arose in ancient Greece (5th century BC) and became one of the foundations of European education. Classical rhetoric elaborated the doctrine of the five stages of composing a speech: invention (finding the material), disposition (arrangement), elocution (verbal ornamentation, the doctrine of tropes and figures), memory (memorization), and delivery (pronunciation). Its theorists were Aristotle ('Rhetoric,' with the doctrine of ethos, pathos, and logos), Cicero, and Quintilian ('The Education of the Orator'). In the Baroque era, rhetoric was taught at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (the courses of Feofan Prokopovych). Having declined in the 19th century, rhetoric was revived in the 20th as 'neo-rhetoric' — the theory of figures (Groupe μ, 'General Rhetoric') and Chaïm Perelman's theory of argumentation. For literary studies, rhetoric remains a source for classifying tropes and figures and analyzing a text's persuasive strategies.