The series ‘neue rhetorik - new rhetoric’, edited by Prof Dr Joachim Knape, Prof Dr Olaf Kramer, and Prof Dr Dietmar Till, comprises monographs and collected works that deal with the problems and results of current rhetoric research; it promotes the development of theory and explores current communication practice. The volumes break new ground conceptually in the exploration of the old topic of rhetoric in a cultural and social context and document the contemporary relevance of rhetoric in its theoretical approach and also in its perspective on the modern knowledge society.
As a discipline that deals with the cultural embedding, the mode of expression and effect of communication, and in particular with questions of textuality, rhetoric is, alongside philosophy, one of the oldest theoretically systematised fields of knowledge in Europe. Since antiquity, the history of rhetoric has repeatedly given rise to works that speak of a ‘new rhetoric’. A closer look reveals that the new consists partly in reformulations of traditional knowledge about rhetoric, partly in updates of classical theories, but also partly in contemporary new approaches that bring new perspectives into play.
