The Mutability of Rhetoric
~uarterlyJou~za1of Speech Vol. 86, No. 3, August 2000, pp. 334-353 ility of Rhetoric: Speech and Vision raeli Rapprochement David A. Frank This essay drawsfiom Edwin Black's Rhetoric2 Questions to illuminate the role of mutability in rhetoric, consciousness, and social idiom as it is displayed in Haydar 'Abd al-Shaji's speech delivered at the Madrid confumce on October 31, i"997.Shj's speech repesents a signijcand mutation in Palestinian discourse. In this speech, the symbolic mold and the hereditarian social idiom that had controlled the Palestinian .mructiw ~intif.fb .intjfdo ,uialded lo a mixed idiom that retained the herediiarian valu8ese~sential~for Palestinian identi$ but @ened u$i @ace for the convictional values necessaryfor negotiation and ra9prochement with Imel. This essay demonstrates that rhetorical critical theory could benejt from a close reading and application of the themes in Rhetorical Questions. Key words: Edwin Black, Palestinian, idioms, mutability, rhetoric 19 concluding his book Rhetorical guestions, Edwin Black observed that "the rnut- ability of rhetoric has been predicated, necessarily, on the mutability of con- sciousness itself7'l Changes in consciousness, Black suggests, are revealed in the idioms of social identity human collectives use to describe themselves and other^.^ The terms and words that constitute the idioms of social identity are often at the center of contention as there may be tensions present when universal social idioms (American, So kt, hab) are paired with local social idioms (Southerner, Latvian, Egyptian)."'A ncy may, for a time," Black elaborates, "compound such terms; another isassociate them.974The movement from compound sociall idioms to their disassociation and back again is a function of the mutability of consciousness and of rhetoric.
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