Rhetoric as the Contextual Manipulation of Self and Nonself

Abstract

This article highlights an important mediating process in rhetoric: the situational reconstruction of collective self-boundaries of speaker and audience. We illustrate this process by a rhetorical case study. Using a psychorhetorical analysis of a missionary speech that was given by a Jewish ultra-orthodox preacher to a Jewish Israeli nonorthodox audience, we point to the rhetorical context markers -the rhetorical strategies that construct a discursive context -that the orator used to manipulate the audience's collective self and nonself in a way that would serve his rhetorical goals.