Con/Texts of Persuasion is a path-breaking multidisciplinary body of essays devoted to exploring how discourse – literary, but also political, religious, commercial and philosophical – draws on strategies from linguistics, pragmatics, argumentation theory, rhetoric and hermeneutics, not merely to communicate, but to induce recipients to think or to act differently than they might have otherwise. Persuasion is context- and culture-bound, a dialogue-friendly rhetoric in the hermeneutics of understanding (Gadamer) whose negation, manipulation, can serve the ends of propaganda («Bend Sinister»); but it is also a vehicle for circumventing censure (burlesque) or for providing oratory with intertextual resonance (“I have a dream”). An appeal to emotions, values and subjectivity, persuasion can “immerse” the reader in a fictional world or it can result from the “phonosemantic” strategies of poetry and advertising. And the ways of persuasion can extend to the situatedness of interpretive context in critical discourse in its ideologically consonant vs. dissonant modes. An invaluable collection for anyone with an interest in the persuasive powers of textual communication.

John Pier
Université François-Rabelais de Tours

CONTENTS

Carol Weston: Preface. Finding your Voice — Michael Toolan: How Does Literary Language Move Us? On Being ‘Immersed’ and Emotionally Engaged by Literary Narratives — Jacob L. Mey: Ephraim of Bonn and the Slaughter of Isaac — Beatriz Penas Ibáñez: Totalitarian Perversions of the Art of Persuasion. From Klemperer’s LTI to Nabokov’s Investigations in Bend Sinister — Andrea Pérez Arduña: The Persuasive Function of Intertextuality in Martin Luther King’s Memorial Speech “I Have a Dream” — Purificación Ribes: Nineteenth-Century Burlesque: Rhetorical Strategies — Azucena Penas Ibáñez: From Conceptual Meaning to Intentional Meaning in Argumentative Persuasion: A Literary Case — Marta Dahlgren: Reading between the Lines? Inference, Connotation, and Associations in Poetry and Translated Poetry — Christophe Den Tandt: Dialogical Realism in Contemporary Painting, Fiction, and Film — Javier Muñoz-Basols: On the Interrelationship between Sound and Meaning — María Carmen López Sáenz: The Application of Rhetoric to Paideia. H.-G. Gadamer — Luisa Paz Rodríguez: On the Origins of Persuasive Communication (From Heidegger’s Philosophy of Communication) — José Ángel García Landa: Acritical Criticism, Critical Criticism: Critical Interaction, Reframing and Topsight.