General Rhetoric: Figures of Communication

The history of ideas, like political history, is marked by declines and restorations, dispossessions and returns. If someone had claimed ten years ago that rhetoric would once again become an important discipline, it might have seemed ridiculous. At that time, what Valéry thought about the "role of the first hand" played by "rhetorical phenomena" in poetry was almost forgotten. A variation on "figures", written by the literary writer of refined and elegant taste J. Paulhan, was not always read with the same interest. Those who were more far-sighted knew that the subject called rhetoric, "among the ancient disciplines, was the one that most deserved the name science" (P. Guiraud). But even they did not seem to nurture excessive hopes for its revival.