The rhetorical legacy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Method, 'ethos', and imagination.

Abstract

Rhetoricians and literary scholars have commonly accepted the idea that there is no "Romantic Rhetoric." However, a number of theorists (Richards, Burke, Berlin, and Berthoff) have speculated that Samuel Taylor Coleridge left a rhetorical legacy in his "Essays on the Principles of Method," Biographia Literaria, Logic, and Aids to Reflection. My dissertation develops the implications of what they have suggested, explores Coleridge's rhetoric, and discusses how that rhetoric might be applied to composition classes in our time. Specifically, the key to Coleridge's approach to the composition of knowledge centers around the creation of an ethos through language that interprets both inner experience and the world of the senses. His methods for establishing a relationship between the inner and outer world offer us strategies for encouraging students to find personal yet unified views of our diverse society.