Description:
Rhetorical criticism that emphasises both how an artistic work was designed to be an author's fitting response to the exigencies of a situation and to the needs and interests of its audience legitimately attends to the text of scripture as it has come down to us. Realising that the beauty and poignancy as well as the informative and argumentative qualities of biblical discourse are all participants in a persuasive enterprise designed to elicit faith, an astute critic seeks to discover how readers might apprehend the meaning and action of a text. In seeking to demonstrate the pervasive presence and origins of rhetorical figures such as chiasmus, critical studies have often missed the functional aspects of these devices. Kenneth Burke's notion of rhetorical form provides a fundamental conceptual model for analysing how chiasmus works on readers and listeners to help them perceive meaning and feeling.