Colóquio Retórica, Literatura e Cultura

The organization will be jointly organized with SOPCOM —Rhetorics WG—, LabCom, Praxis, UBI and CICANT, ULHT, thus promoting the connection of the Portuguese Communication Association, the Research Centers in the field of Communication that exist in Portugal and whose members belong to SOPCOM and are dedicated to the study of Rhetoric, lato sensu. The remarkable historical link existing between Rhetoric, literature and culture, which includes the present-times itself, as it will be uncovered, is the element that constitutes the justification of the theme of the conference, which seeks to analyze the specific links of classical rhetoric in contemporary culture and presenting itself as a posthumous tribute to the great thinker George Steiner, whose work deals in this intersection. If the internal logic of the argument was the one which gave the guide-lines to the study of Rhetoric, when taken not only as a technique, but also as a method, it began to penetrate fields that were foreign to it in the classical period.  The consequences of this, we will have the opportunity to assess during the meeting, led Rhetoric to go through wider fields, into a much broader territories that are not limited to the way classical doing, but also to the way in which this new forms of language access demarcates a new identity: the textual identity, the identity of its author, the identity of a historical epoch, the identity of its own way of making oneself. It will be in this double meaning, and on these two aspects, that we will try to update the meaning and use of Rhetoric. We aim to an intimate, face to face, argumentation to pinpoint what is Rhetoric’s is in the present days and which outcomes we can expect from its inception to modern world. We often realize that Rhetoric is taken as a mere instrumental technic, nonetheless important philosophical problems are concealed behind this common meaning.