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Rhetorical Devices

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The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Rhetorical Devices

 

expressive stylistic locutions that are historically evolved means of organizing a sentence and that utilize chiefly the emotional and imperative qualities of speech; an obsolete term for figures of speech. In a narrow sense, the term applies to three figures of speech: rhetorical exclamation, rhetorical appeal, and rhetorical question (a statement in the form of a question).

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
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References in periodicals archive
In literature, rhetorical analysis has been creatively extended beyond the traditional rhetorical devices (ethos, pathos, and logos) to examine rhetorical themes and tropes (e.g., myths) (Bush and Boiler 1991; Yar 2008).
To analyse the 'White Heat' speech, I use three classical rhetorical devices as identified by Aristotle, namely ethos, pathos, and logos:
Chapter Two, "Retoricas literarias bilingues," provides an overview of the rhetorical devices employed by multilingual writers to communicate the, "sofisticadas bifurcaciones, multiples rutas alternativas, inusitadas conexiones y asociaciones linguisticas, dobleces de pensamiento" that arise from moving among the multiple worlds they inhabit through language (39).
Through her thorough explanation of the rhetorical devices Dumas uses in his refashioning of the merveilleux, Anselmini makes a strong case for viewing Dumas as a serious writer and not, as she says, the stereotypical "ecrivain populaire, donc un grand enfant, comme ses lecteurs." At 442 pages, her extremely informative work is at times dense and quote heavy, though in her defense, she is profiling an extremely prolific writer and does tackle 38 primary novels and references at least ten more of Dumas's works.
The third section, Lyric, Song and Audience, is concerned with different rhetorical devices found in texts.
In regard to rhetorical devices, ambiguity is not accidental.
Through these allusions to postwar icons, Gonzalez Reyes emphasizes the rhetorical devices that serve to uphold much current art, which has one foot in presumed aesthetic values and the other in a luxury market.
I longed for the rhetorical devices considered here to be contrasted with those used in, say, "A Game of Clue" by Steven Millhauser which uses much the same plot device with characters in the board game Clue; or even with other novels that revolve around the self-awareness and dramatic freedom of fictional characters such as The Alchemist's Apprentice by Jeremy Dronfield or the Tuesday Next novels of Jasper Fforde.
For them, rhetorical devices are either in violation of Socrates' philosophical commitments, or, as some intellectualists hold, there are quite simply no such things as such devices, but only instances of good and bad reasoning.
McQuarrie and Mick postulate that consumers encounter advertisements as active readers of texts, that visual elements can be structured as rhetorical devices, and that a sufficient stock of cultural knowledge is required to interpret the rhetorical structure assembled by the advertiser.
Such rhetorical devices, provided with no supporting evidence to allow the reader to verify the claim or research it further, detract from the author's argument as well as bring into question the validity of his thesis.
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