Rhetoric in Poststructuralist Literary Theory

Abstract

This article deals with the specific use that has been made of rhetoric by literary theory during the 1960s, a period that has been called “poststructuralist”. Our intention is to do a sighting of how the rhetorical knowledge has been used from the poststructural poetics, once an extensive and truthful recuperation of rhetoric was done integrating it with the modern sciences of discourse. And also when, on the contrary, a metatheoric element was taken from it in order to carry out a literary analysis. Since the rhetoric differentiation, carried out by Aristotle, between science and art, it is clear that modern literary theory uses an interpretative and analytic perspective taken from rhetorical science as a method of analysis of the literary text.