Presence and Global Presence in Genres of Self-Presentation: A Framework for Comparative Analysis

• Published in: Rhetoric Society quarterly 2008-10, Vol.38 (4), p.357-384
• Main Authors: Atkinson, Nathan S., Kaufer, David, Ishizaki, Suguru
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Cover letters; Criticism; Discourse/Text genres; Linguistics; Qualitative comparative analysis; Rhetoric; Rhetorical argument; Rhetorical criticism; Rhetorical devices; Schools of rhetoric; Self portraiture; Spoken communication; Theory; Words
• ISSN: 0277-3945; 1930-322X
• DOI: 10.1080/02773940802167583

We review Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's original formulation of presence as a technique of argument associated primarily with the selection of individual rhetorical elements, and the recent extension of the notion by Gross and Dearin, where presence is understood as a second-order effect that denotes the systematic expression and inhibition of patterns of rhetorical elements across an entire text or rhetorical artifact. We argue for an additional extension to this more global notion of presence, one that makes it not only global within a text or class of texts, but also comparative, allowing the analyst to make rigorous comparisons of expressed and inhibited rhetorical patterns across different texts, or different classes of texts, including different rhetorical genres. A return to the original conception of presence allows us to make this extension, and we illustrate global presence within this newly proposed comparative framework by analyzing two genres of self-presentation in classroom practice: the cover letter and the self-portrait. We show the close ties between global presence and genre as ways of theorizing deep similarities across texts.