Internal rhetorics: toward a history and theory of self-persuasion

Since its early history in Greek culture, traditional rhetorical study has focused primarily on persuasive language used in public sphere. There has been little study, however, of what Jean Nienkamp calls internal rhetoric, which occurs between one aspect of self and another inside one's mind. Nienkamp opens study of internal by discussing how concept developed alongside traditional classical and modern rhetorical theory. Nienkamp shows how we talk to ourselves, or more specifically, how we talk ourselves into things: justifications, actions, opinions, theories. She explains that just because we see ourselves as divided, as torn in different directions by conflicting desires, duties, and social mores, it does not mean that we are split into discrete identities that neither interrelate nor interact. In this groundbreaking study, Nienkamp identifies two major aspects of internal rhetoric: the conscious 'art' of cultivated internal rhetoric and the unconscious 'nature' of primary internal rhetoric. Selecting a small number of figures from history of - including Isocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Lord Shaftesbury, Richard Whately, Kenneth Burke, Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, George Herbert Mead, and Lev Vygotsky - Nienkamp argues for a version of rhetorical self that takes into account both ways we are formed by and formulate internal and external rhetorics and ways our physical bodies act as a contributing scene - an agora - for internal rhetoric.