Debating Culture: Arguments for a Discursive Per - spective on Culture in Rhetorical Criticism

Abstract

It is far from controversial to claim a connection between rhetoric and culture. But how can this connection be described and how can rhetorical criticism contribute to cultural studies? These are the main questions of the present article. Beginning from Barbara Johnstone’s three perspectives on the relationship between rhetoric and culture: the cross-cultural, the intercultural, and the multicultural, the article argues for the importance of supplementing these with a fourth perspective, Gerd Baumann’s discursive perspective. The perspectives are grouped as first and second order perspectives on rhetoric and culture, and it is argued that Baumann’s perspective is particularly useful because it covers both first and second order. Thus, the discursive perspective has an important and untapped explanatory potential: here, the rhetorical articulation of culture becomes the object of criticism, whereas the other perspectives primarily see culture as the context of the rhetorical utterance. An analysis of a number of EU member states’ strategies for creating intercultural dialogue serves as an illustrative example of the article’s theoretical and methodological contributions.