"rhetorical situation"

Definition:

The context of a rhetorical act; minimally, made up of a rhetor, an issue, and an audience. Put another way, a rhetorical situation occurs when a rhetor, audience, medium (such as a text or speech), and a context converge to create a rhetorical act, such as an act of writing or speaking.

Examples and Observations:

• Lloyd Bitzer states that rhetorical discourse occurs in response to a rhetorical situation. Bitzer provides three key components that define and make-up any rhetorical situation:
  1. Exigence: "An imperfection marked by urgency; it is a defect, an obstacle, something waiting to be done, a thing which is other than it should be." There are many different kinds of exigencies, but a rhetorical one exists when discourse can positively modify it.
  2. Audience: an "audience consists only of those persons who are capable of being influenced by discourse and of being mediators of change."
  3. A set of constraints: "made up of persons, events, objects and relations which are parts of the situation because they have the power to constrain decision and action needed to modify the exigence."
  Once we recognize these three elements that make up the rhetorical situation, Bitzer says that rhetorical discourse can come into play.
  (from Lloyd Bitzer, "The Rhetorical Situation." Philosophy and Rhetoric 1, 1968: 1-14.)



• "Most rhetorical scholars believe it is not a question of whether discourse either responds to or creates situations; in fact it does both. In a 1979 [article], . . . John Patton notes how 'the meaning of rhetorical situations is a dual process, partly a matter of recognition, i.e., clarity and accuracy of perception, and partly a matter of intentional, artistic, human action.'"
  (James Jasinski, "Rhetorical Situation," in Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, 2001: 696)