Audience
Golden, Berquist, and Coleman begin their process of adopting rhetorical stance with an analysis of the audience. Successful authors and speakers utilize their knowledge of their audience so that the audience believes they are motivated to the author’s purpose by their own agency (see Campbell and Hugh Blair). The author creates this impression by demonstrating an understanding of her audience’s needs and by “substantiating”, according to Kenneth Burke, intellectual and empathetic relationships between herself and her audience. Plato’s “noble aims” of rhetoric require the author to strive for a moral elevation of both author and audience; Aristotle and Cicero emphasized the consideration of human nature and emotion in the successful understanding of one’s audience and the establishment of the relationships necessary for achieving persuasion.
Read more about this topic: Rhetorical Stance
Famous quotes containing the word audience:
“Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favor with its original audience as a new generation grows up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of “quaint,” and cultivated people become interested in it, and finally it begins to take on the archaic dignity of the primitive.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)
“Bottom. What is Pyramus? A lover or a tyrant?
Quince. A lover that kills himself, most gallant, for love.
Bottom. That will ask some tears in the true performing of it. If I do it, let the audience look to their eyes.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The flattering, if arbitrary, label, First Lady of the Theatre, takes its toll. The demands are great, not only in energy but eventually in dramatic focus. It is difficult, if not impossible, for a star to occupy an inch of space without bursting seams, cramping everyone else’s style and unbalancing a play. No matter how self-effacing a famous player may be, he makes an entrance as a casual neighbor and the audience interest shifts to the house next door.”
—Helen Hayes (1900–1993)