Rhetoric in the Heritage of Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi

Author: Karim Al-Tai

This book is at the heart of rhetorical research, which its early founders intended to be a comprehensive look at the pillars of rhetorical discourse that produce rhetorical effect. This includes the speaker, who is considered one of the sources of rhetorical production or rhetorical action, and one of the principles of rhetorical analysis for any discourse aiming for impact. While this book explicitly declares its affiliation with rhetoric in its original structure before its fragmentation and dismemberment, it also declares that this rhetoric is not self-sufficient knowledge nor a complete achievement. It reminds us that rhetoric is a characteristic of discourse before it is a theory of discourse, and that dealing with discourse as rhetoric requires constantly expanding and renewing our perspective. This is what makes the boundaries of the rhetorical field not fixed by rigid constraints, and this also explains the nature of the rhetorical approach adopted by the researcher in this book. It is a multi-faceted approach that starts with Aristotle to embrace new rhetoric with Perelman, pragmatics, enunciation linguistics, discourse analysis, poetics, and narratology.