A Pragmatic Theory of Rhetoric

Walter H. Beale offers" "the most coherent treatment of the aims and modes of discourse to be presented in more than a decade. His development of a semiotic "grammar of motives" that re-lates the problems of meaning in discourse both to linguistic structure and ways of construct-ing reality stands as a pro-vocative new theory of rhetoric sharply focused on writing. He includes a comprehensive treatment of rhetoric, its classes and varieties, modes, and stra-tegies. In addition, he demon-strates the importance of the purpose, substance, and social context of discourse, at a time when scholarly attention has be-come preoccupied with process. He fortifies and extends the Aristotelian approach to rhetoric and discourse at a time when much theory and pedagogy have yielded to modernist assump-tions and methods. And finally, he develops a theoretical framework that illuminates the relationship between rhetoric, the language arts, and the hu-man sciences in general.