Microsoft Word Revised Syllabus Ver doc

Rhetoric
Rhetoric is the technique of literary creation, as well as, the description and 
codification of its precepts. It is based upon the theory of genres which is a classification of 
various literary works according to their end such as aesthetic, polemic, didactic, etc. and 
their means and media: writing, singing, reciting, etc. The genre determines both the form of 
the expression and the content. The theory of expression which is the one most elaborated has 
resulted in inventories of figures: phonetic, lexical, and syntactic. The theory of content deals 
with composition or the ordering of various parts and arguments, and with invention which
comprises and inventory of top or common themes with rules for expanding them and setting 
them according to well tried canons into narrations, descriptions, etc.

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First, under the name of stylistics various methods of studying expression have been 
devised. During this time after a period of “disaffection” a new interest in genres has 
developed. On the one hand, the notions of, function and," communication have shown their 
importance in new genres like the mystery novel", the musical comedy, press editorials, 
advertising, etc. On the other hand, the difficulty exists of understanding older works without 
knowledge of the conditions under which they were created. Through this new approach, 
more recently, stress has been put upon the form of content which appears as a system of 
signs, at and a upper level, invested with a semiotic function of its own; this system is studied 
according to models borrowed from current linguistic analysis.
So, a new rhetoric is being built within two main disciplines: stylistics and literary 
semiotics. The first is a study of linguistic form which is sometimes called linguistic 
stylistics; the second, a study of content called literary stylistics, theory of literature, new 
criticism, etc. both borrow their concepts, their models and their methods from modern 
linguistics. For one who knows the history of recent linguistics - the mutations, the 
contradictions, and the polemics of the various schools will find it easy to understand the 
proliferation and often the confusion of this discipline.

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