Rehtoric In Its Broad Perspective

The history of the development of humankind is in a sense thehistory of development of rhetoric. Rhetoric touches almost every aspect of our life, from daily life to the competition for interests between nations. Rhetoric can be dated back to ancient Greece. As a persuasive art, rhetoric is regarded as the systematic summarization of the ways of speaking eloquently. Since then rhetoric has been going through lots of change. The ancient rhetoric that studies the oratory in ancient Greek and Rome shifted to later focus on literary rhetoric with analysis of figures, subordinating rhetoric to aesthetics or literary theories at the beginning of the 20^th century.From the beginning of the 20^th century on, rhetoric gradually became an independent field of study, shifting from rhetoric in its narrow perspective (RNP for short later on, whenever necessary) to rhetoric in its broad perspective (RBP for short later on, whenever necessary), which is interdisciplinary in nature, concerned with philosophy, linguistics, psychological analysis, cognitive science, sociology and so on. Structuralism and post-modernism exerted a tremendous influence on rhetoric. Cognitive factors were taken into full account to make rhetoric studies a science instead of mere skills..This paper takes upon itself to trace the development and trends of rhetoric studies by first discussing the characteristics of rhetoric in its broad perspective both at home and abroad, then focusing on thoughts of rhetoric in its broad perspective in the theoretical framework put forward by Professor Tan Xuechun, an eminent scholar of rhetoric in contemporary China, and finally suggesting areas for further research.