RHETORICAL ANALYSIS AT THE SERVICE OF BUSINESS COMMUNICATION: GENDER-BASED DIFFERENCES IN STUDENTS' PERCEPTION OF THE SPEAKER

The paper points out the benefits of rhetorical analysis and rhetorical criticism in developing business communication skills. At Zagreb School of Economics and Management, both the American and the European approach to business communication have been combined, with LSP courses taught in the first year and business communication and rhetoric courses taught in the second year. An experiment was conducted on a sample of 99 students, including 57 female and 42 male participants, who were asked to assess the teenage activist Greta Thunberg and her speech at the UN Climate Action Summit in 2019. The research focused on the role of the gender in perception of quality, attractiveness of the speech, the use of ethos, pathos and logos, persuasiveness and the influence potential. The results showed that male students gave lower grades to Greta and her speech, unlike the female students, who would also be more willing to change their behavior as the result of listening to Greta’s speech. Nevertheless, these differences were statistically significant only for a limited number of questions. The potential gender bias to speakers should be addressed in the rhetoric and business communication course design. Exposing students to a diverse set of speakers increases their critical thinking skills, ensuring higher objectivity and bias-free assessment of speakers including their peers.

The Protean Viewpoint in One Hundred Years of Solitude

Point of view is a primary category of narrative, given that other elements such as characterization, description, language, worldview, structure, and genre, if they are to be convincing, need to be consistent with the adopted vantage point. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, where there is little direct dialogue, a polyvalent and multilayered diegesis, where an uncertain narrator recounts what different characters see, feel, and say, becomes a signature technique. According to Boris Uspensky, the “ideological point of view,” defined as the way of looking at the world conceptually, is not explicitly expressed, but found rather at the phraseological level of the narrative—marking a return to rhetorical criticism. “Many years later, before the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that remote afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” From the outset, the viewpoint is marked by extreme shifts in person, character, time, tenses, and space, mapping its polyphony. This polyvalent narrator shifts from character to character, while the phraseology evokes different genres of the marvelous (myth, legend, folk tales, children’s stories, fairy tales, chronicles, travelogues, and ethnographic accounts). This overlay supports the verisimilitude of magical realist narrative. Ultimately the authorial mask is revealed to be Melquiades, himself a protean figure, a gypsy, merchant, explorer, ethnographer, inspired in Don Quixote’s Cide Hamete Benengeli. The narrator’s worldview coincides with the characters, such that no one shows surprise before the supernatural. The ideology appears naive, provincial, rural, primitive, and akin to outsider art, while maintaining a sophisticated technique.

Jeremiah’s Deathscapes

This chapter explores the rhetorical structures of the book of Jeremiah with regard to its message of violent destruction—a topic that the chapter defines under the heading of “deathscape.” This term is defined as having two sub-strands: embodiment and spatiality. Jeremiah contains much material relating to the experiences of the central prophetic figure, which provides a solid textual resource for examining how the human person is impacted by the task of proclaiming terror and loss. The Confessions especially display a persona traumatized by this task. At the same time, land is rendered desolate, alongside the human inhabitants. Spatiality provides a tool for reading urban destruction via the lens of a withered landscape. Reading Jeremiah as a single work employs the methodological lens of rhetorical criticism, examining the way in which violent imagery expresses the link between historical events and literary depictions of the impact of warfare. Seeking for the cause of great suffering, Jeremiah locates it in the action of divine justice, a manner of providing order for chaos that renders the deity monstrous since it is the divine sphere that contextualizes unbearable human pain. Evaluation of Jeremiah’s urban imaginary aligns not only with material events but also with responses from differing audiences and parallel subject areas, such as gender, disability, and colonialism. Ultimately, the chapter suggests, further reflection on the inanimate agency of urban environments in creating textual poetics of deathscape will be useful.

Integrating CDA with ideological rhetorical criticism in the investigation of Abe Cabinet’s discursive construction in “Indo-Pacific Strategy”

In recent years, the Indo-Pacific strategy and the Quad concept have been introduced and advocated by various countries. Since the second term of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the “Indo-Pacific Strategy” has been widely promoted. Assisted by corpus linguistics, this paper aims to explore the implicit ideology by providing insight into the context model from CDA perspective, and to decode the discursive construction by combining “ideographs” and “policy triggers” as Ideological Rhetorical Criticism instructed. The study shows these political texts are rich in forms of rhetorical strategies of “routinization”, “hegemony”, “uniformization” and “naturalization” used to construct a discursive system to distinguish “them” from “us”, so that to realize political aims.

“Men så skedde inte i Sverige” – om anklagens anatomi

Despite the fact that defense and apology have been studied thoroughly in rhetoric and communication research in recent decades, their counterpart; the accusation has received ­surprisingly limited ­attention from rhetorical criticism. This essay sets out to remedy parts of these shortcomings by suggesting to define the accusation as a situated act where somebody ascribes guilt to a group or individual. The definition ties the accusation to the representation of acts considered to be in violation of ­existing norms and the essay argues that the logic of narra­tive determines the forms and functions of an accusation. The essay tests the definition through close readings of accusations from the debate about the proper handling of the corona-virus, as this debate has played out in the Scandinavian countries during 2020. Two extreme examples of accusations – one situated in the ­formal legal system, one situated in an informal, private conversation – are briefly analyzed before the essay turns to its main case in the form of an article from Dagens Nyheter, in which Swedish scientists accuse the Swedish health authorities and the Swedish government for neglect

The Church's Contextual Mission to Poverty Problems in Indonesia

Poverty in Indonesia is a crucial problem that must be considered by various parties, including the church. However, the church often neglects this because the church is often preoccupied with its theological model that sides with wealth so that the existence of the poor is ignored. This makes the church's mission neglected because it does not take the condition of the poor seriously. Using the phenomenological method, this article shows that poverty should be a severe concern in the missiological aspect of the church. In addition, the method of rhetorical criticism is used to show that the Bible also speaks of God's care for the poor. The study results recommend that the church should have the courage to carry out missiological duties to the poor by putting the poor first and placing the poor as equals, who also receive the same salvation from God. Through this missiological task, the church will contribute to alleviating poverty. ABSTRAKKemiskinan di Indonesia merupakan masalah krusial yang harus diperhatikan oleh berbagai pihak, termasuk gereja. Namun seringkali gereja mengabaikan hal ini, karena gereja seringkali asyik dengan model teologinya yang berpihak pada kekayaan, sehingga keberadaan orang miskin diabaikan. Hal ini menjadikan tugas misiologi gereja terbengkalai karena tidak memperhatikan dengan serius keadaan orang miskin. Dengan menggunakan metode fenomenologi artikel ini menunjukkan bahwa masalah kemiskinan harus menjadi perhatian yang serius dalam aspek misiologi gereja. Di samping itu digunakan juga metode kritik retorik untuk menunjukkan bahwa Alkitab pun berbicara tentang kepedulian Allah terhadap orang miskin. Hasil penelitian merekomendasikan bahwa gereja harus berani menjalankan tugas misiologi kepada orang-orang miskin, dengan cara mendahulukan dan menempatkan orang miskin sebagai sesama yang sejajar, yang juga mendapatkan keselamatan yang sama dari Allah. Melalui tugas misiologi tersebut, gereja akan berkontribusi untuk mengentaskan kemiskinan.