Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation

A constitutive rhetorical text is Bitzer's 'The Rhetorical Situation', which has given many a student of Rhetoric a 'Wow-experience'.

But however insightfull and pleasing the article is, its age begins to show.

Here is an article that shouts: 'Bitzer, move over'. Not the first of its kind but Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from Within the Thematic of Differance, a response to Lloyd F. Bitzer's essay on the rhetorical situation, re-working the arguments of Richard Vatz from the perspective of Lacan and American appropriations of Derrida by Barbara A. Biesecker takes post-modernism seriously:

"Critiques bring to the analysis of rhetorical events various assumptions about the nature of symbolic action. Yet almost invariably they share common presuppositions about the constituent elements of the rhetorical situation and the logic that informs the relations between them."