Rhetorical Audience Studies and Reception of Rhetoric

Without audiences, there would be no rhetoric. Understanding audiences, therefore, is essential for understanding rhetoric. If we do not understand when, how and why audiences are influenced by communication, or see how they negotiate and reject rhetorical messages, then we do not understand rhetoric. In light of this, it is surprising that rhetorical scholars have paid so little attention to audiences—or to be more precise: to empirical audiences. This book encourages researchers to do more studies of empirical audiences and their reception of rhetoric. The chapters offer examples of central methods of understanding reception and empirical audiences: historical approaches such as archival-historical methodology and historiography, interviews and focus group research, protocol analysis, ethnographic participation and observation, appropriation as reception and finally triangulation, where the researcher applies several methods in unison. While these methods are common in media studies, anthropology, cultural studies and other fields of research, they are surprisingly rare in rhetorical studies.

This chapter is a reprint with a new introduction of a classic 1998 text on claims about specific effects on audiences or claims describing the determinate meaning of a text for audiences. The chapter notes that these ‘audience conjectures’ are being advanced by rhetorical critics of popular culture texts without adequate evidence. The thesis is that if critics make claims concerning the determinate meanings of the text or the effects those texts have on audiences, then the critic should support such claims with audience research. The chapter concludes with three theoretical notions: that wording in scholarly writing matters, that the lines between social scientific and humanistic research should be blurred, and that audience research enhances the connections between rhetorical and cultural studies.

Iversen presents the findings of a focus group reception study, shedding light upon how people make sense of and evaluate authenticity appeals in political advertising. These appeals attempt to present a politician as “one of the people”, but also as a true individual, happily sharing their personality and inner emotions. The study concludes that the films function as a resource for citizens’ thinking about what a good political leader should be like. Iversen identifies a distinct ideal for politicians present in Norwegian political culture, namely, the ideal of “authentic leadership”. The authentic leader is not only truly himself but also communicates the right balance of closeness and distance. He is as we are but also above us.

Vatnøy demonstrates how focus group interviews are a productive supplement to rhetorical studies of social media. Focusing on the use of group interviews in audience studies, political communication studies, and studies of social media, the chapter draws attention to the unique benefits of the methodology when studying rhetorical practice in new media environments. The chapter is concluded with a case study of the “Hey Girl Audun Lysbakken” campaign, an anonymous campaign that spread replicated memes for political use. In this case, the focus group interviews reveal how voters in different age groups understood the memes very differently and how their perceptions of the interactive functions of Facebook affected their responses to the memes.

This chapter investigates how selected audiences react to the implied audience in Danish political print newspaper commentary. When introducing the concept of second persona, Edwin Black only uses vague expressions like “vector of influence” and “the pull of an ideology” about the impact of the discursive audience construction, but instead of taking this for granted. Bengtsson uses think-aloud protocol as a way of studying an audience’s reaction, getting a better grasp of how people understand, interpret and negotiate commentator discourse. The study finds that while some people engage in the implied audience offered, others have strong negative reactions refusing to take it upon them. The study shows how readers react to the commentators postulating manner and call for arguments to use in discussions with family and friend.

This paper investigates musical semiotics (how listeners experience meanings in music). It discusses what bearing listeners’ experience of meanings may have for their aesthetic experience of music. The study is rhetorical because its focus is effect, not meanings in themselves. It employs “aesthetic protocol analysis,” a design where informants write about their responses and associations while they experience an aesthetic artifact—in this case the first movement of Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto. It is found that listeners’ experienced meanings are fleeting and of multifarious types, showing both intersubjective overlap and divergence. The main claim is that finding meanings in music should not be the purpose of listening; rather, engagement with musical meanings should be seen as a source of, and a means to, aesthetic experience.

Ethnographic methods can inform research into rhetorical scenes. Interviews, participant observation, and affective modes of knowing can illuminate inquiries into complex rhetorical moments. Audience interpretations and judgments can inform competing comprehensions of sites and statements, providing multiperspectival judgment about localized rhetorical performances. Moreover, with its commitment to advocacy, deliberation, and identification, rhetoric offers ethnographers a robust accounting discourse which is performed through language, body, media, and text. Hess offers his ethnographic fieldwork at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, during which he witnessed playful acts including taking selfies or playing hide-and-seek in the memorial. Through interviews, however, Hess learned of more complex judgment about the memorial that connected such “play” with personal remembrance and a living history of the Jewish people.

In Sri Lanka, the virulent nationalist Buddhist group Bodu Bala Sena was able to create a political momentum in 2013–2015 through a series of rhetorical manoeuvres against the Muslim minorities in the country. By producing public spectacles out of controversies around sacred sites and religious practices, Bodu Bala Sena deliberately played out their political rhetoric on multiple audiences. Hence, the role of the spectacle is to incur a form of identity-based political momentum, where the notions of friend-enemy are broadcasted universally through particularized messages to multiple audiences. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Bodu Bala Sena, the chapter will contribute to a deeper understanding of how rhetorical repertoires and religious authority engage in the interstices of religion, politics and public debate.

Pandemics are potentially very serious events, so to prepare for future episodes, we must learn from past cases. In this chapter, we have adapted a method from the ethnographic tradition, which we dub “spontaneous interviews,” and applied it to explore how members of the Norwegian public experienced the pandemic. Studying in particular what they remember about the pandemic rhetoric, we find that our informants misremember many aspects of the communication, ranging from a simple failure to remember, through factual errors, to creative assessments of the episode. We conclude that long-term responses to pandemic rhetoric depend not least on the rhetor’s preestablished credibility, and for this reason, we suggest, the health authorities appear to have little to lose from communicating outside the media in pandemic situations.

Iconic photographs identify important problems and features of audience reception. Hariman and Lucaites analyze how the meaning and effects of iconic photographs are produced through an afterlife of appropriation across a wide array of media. In this chapter they identify three modalities of appropriation: establishing iconic status through design features, repetition, and misrecognition; tracking circulation and patterns of interpretation; and analysis of public culture. They demonstrate basic protocols for analyzing appropriations in a case study of the photograph of the US flag raising on Iwo Jima during World War II: these protocols include aesthetic conventions as they animate civic performance through the interplay of semiotic transcriptions and emotional scenarios that function to mediate constitutive contradictions in the public culture.

This chapter examines the power of news photographs through triangulating reception-oriented analyses of the photographs of the dead Syrian toddler Alan Kurdi, who was found drowned on a Turkish beach September 2, 2015. The images were immediately described as powerful and iconic. However, the analyses by Kjeldsen and Andersen demonstrate that their visual power is more complicated and complex than often assumed. The chapter also suggests that the power of the images can be divided into three temporal phases: (1) Evoking, exercising a power of emotional presence and immediacy; (2) Fading, being challenged, moving out of public agenda, and losing attention; and (3) Iconic renaissance, finally, because they are established and remembered as symbols for a specific event, people return to them when discussing this and similar events.