Definition:
Persuasive discourse dealing with values that bring a group together; the rhetoric of ceremony, commemoration, declamation, play, and display. See also epideictic.
Examples and Observations:
- "Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it's perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black--considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible--you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge.
"We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization--black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand, and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion, and love."
(Robert F. Kennedy, on the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4, 1968) - "In demonstrative oratory, we deal with what deserves praise or blame; we may do this either in a general way, as when we praise bravery, or in a particular case, as when we praise the bravery of Scipio. . . .
"A civil question can take any of the forms [of rhetoric]: when it seeks the ends of justice in a court of law, it becomes judicial; when it asks in an assembly what is useful or proper, then it is a deliberative act; and when it proclaims publicly what is good, the civil question becomes demonstrative rhetoric. . . .
"Anything treating of the propriety, justice, or goodness of an act already performed in a manner of public interest is demonstrative."
(Boethius, Overview of the Structure of Rhetoric, c. 520)
Also Known As: epideictic, demonstrative oratory
