Description
Gold Mining, the Art of Rhetorical Discourse Analysis departs from the fundamental insight that “whatever relation to reality the discourse world may claim, it is always mediated by a narrator as well as by the interpretative acts of the audience” (p.43). Therefore the rhetorical analysis of ‘truth’ and ‘validity’ is necessarily always related to defeasible interpretations and evaluations. Some discourses, however, seem to challenge this rhetorical insight. Photographic legal evidence is a discourse genre that strongly invites an audience to go along with the rhetorically defeasible illusion that Neil Feigenson calls ‘naïve realism’. The rhetor claims to show ‘the reality of a certain time and place’; he claims the discourse is an image of truth. This makes photographic legal evidence an interesting genre to review the arguments from rhetoric that even this discourse construes reality. Even if we accept a (historical) reality to exist and if we accept that photography is a direct mechanical transcription (a “mirror with a memory”, according to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr), still from a rhetorical perspective the discourse is not a mere vehicle to convey reality. This has implications for our thinking about truth and validity, in the context of criminal law, but a fortiori in many other contexts too. I found out that departing from this genre helps me to formulate questions concerning relations between discourse and (perceived) reality more precisely for genres (such as photojournalism, verbal reporting) that maintain even more complicated relations with a reality that they claim to be relevant for. It focuses our attention on the rhetorical devices that are employed to construe ‘truth’.| Period | 19 Sept 2016 |
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| Held at | Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China |