Rhetorical Audience Studies and Reception of Rhetoric

Jens E. Kjeldsen is Professor of Rhetoric and Visual Communication at University of Bergen, Norway. He has written extensively about rhetoric, visual communication and argumentation, speech making, speech writing and PowerPoint-presentations. Kjeldsen is President of the Rhetoric Society of Europe and co-founder and longtime chief editor of the research journal Rhetorica Scandinavia. Several of his publications, including two edited collections, deal with reception-oriented approaches in the field of rhetoric.

• Introduction; Jens Kjeldsen.- The Argumentative Burdens of Audience Conjectures; Edward Schiappa & Jennifer Stromer-Galley.- Assessing audience reactions to Winston Churchill's speeches; Richard Toye.- Audience Response to Mediated Authenticity Appeals; Magnus Hoem Iversen.- Focus Group Studies of Social Media Rhetoric; Eirik Vatnøy.- Think-Aloud Reading: A Real Audience’s Concurrent Reaction to the Implied Audience in Political Commentary; Mette Bengtsson.- The Semiotics and Rhetoric of Music: A Case Study in Aesthetic Protocol Analysis; Christian Kock.- Competing Perspectives: Using Ethnographic Methods to Study Embodied and Emplaced Rhetorics; Aaron Hess.- The audience and the spectacle: Bodu Bala Sena and the controversy of Buddhist political activism in Sri Lanka; Michael Hertzberg.- Pandemic Rhetoric and Public Memory. What People (Don’t) Remember from the 2009 Swine Flu; Kristian Bjørkdahl & Benedicte Carlsen.- Icons, Appropriations, and the Co-production of Meaning; Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites.- The Rhetorical Power of News Photographs: A Triangulatory reception-approach to the Alan Kurdi images; Jens E. Kjeldsen & Ida Andersen.

“Kjeldsen’s Rhetorical Audience Studies presents a compelling argument for flipping the script on the way we study rhetoric. This reversal resonates with the methodological turn in the field and holds significant potential for the way scholars approach the agency and dynamism of those who receive rhetoric. The volume will be a helpful starting place for critics interested in attending to rhetoric’s other angles and vistas.” (Sara McKinnon, Rhetorica Scandinavica, retorikforlaget.se, February, 15, 2019)