This book examines the reception of rhetoric and the rhetoric of reception. By considering salient rhetorical traits of rhetorical utterances and texts seen in context, and relating this to different kinds of reception and/or audience use and negotiation, the authors explore the connections between rhetoric and reception. In our time, new media and new forms of communication make it harder to distinguish between speaker and audience. The active involvement of users and audiences is more important than ever before. This project is based on the premise that rhetorical research should reconsider the understanding, conceptualization and examination of the rhetorical audience. From mostly understanding audiences as theoretical constructions that are examined textually and speculatively, the contributors give more attention to empirical explorations of actual audiences and users. The book will provide readers with new knowledge on the workings of rhetoric as well as illustrative andguiding examples of new methods of rhetorical studies.

Introduction; Jens Kjeldsen.- The Argumentative Burdens of Audience Conjectures; Edward Schiappa & Jennifer Stromer-Galley.- Assessing audience reactions to Winston Churchill's speeches; Richard Toye.- Audience Response to Mediated Authenticity Appeals; Magnus Hoem Iversen.- Focus Group Studies of Social Media Rhetoric; Eirik Vatnøy.- Think-Aloud Reading: A Real Audience's Concurrent Reaction to the Implied Audience in Political Commentary; Mette Bengtsson.- The Semiotics and Rhetoric of Music: A Case Study in Aesthetic Protocol Analysis; Christian Kock.- Competing Perspectives: Using Ethnographic Methods to Study Embodied and Emplaced Rhetorics; Aaron Hess.- The audience and the spectacle: Bodu Bala Sena and the controversy of Buddhist political activism in Sri Lanka; Michael Hertzberg.- Pandemic Rhetoric and Public Memory. What People (Don't) Remember from the 2009 Swine Flu; Kristian Bjørkdahl & Benedicte Carlsen.- Icons, Appropriations, and the Co-production of Meaning; Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites.- The Rhetorical Power of News Photographs: A Triangulatory reception-approach to the Alan Kurdi images; Jens E. Kjeldsen & Ida Andersen.

Jens E. Kjeldsen is Professor of Rhetoric and Visual Communication at University of Bergen, Norway. He has written extensively about rhetoric, visual communication and argumentation, speech making, speech writing and PowerPoint-presentations. Kjeldsen is President of the Rhetoric Society of Europe and co-founder and longtime chief editor of the research journal Rhetorica Scandinavia. Several of his publications, including two edited collections, deal with reception-oriented approaches in the field of rhetoric.