Answer:
Rhetorical analysis has seen a sort of revival in recent decades, after a long period of disuse. From the times of ancient Greece until the beginning of the modern era, rhetoric was considered a major tool for creating effective and esthetically appealing discourse. With the advent of modern thinking, however, rationality and a scientific definition of the ideas of "truth" and "empirical proof" displaced the idea of a constructed argumentation. It has only been since scientific truths themselves have been "relative-ized", at first through notions like "paradigms," and later through the introduction of concepts and tools such as "deconstruction" that analysts have again begun to consider the importance of a discipline related to the formal construction of argumentative techniques. But the revival is not exactly a new event. About 50 years have passed since PERELMAN and OLBRECHTS-TYTECA first published their "Traité de l'argumentation" (The new rhetoric: A treatise on argumentation). If rhetoric was ignored for so long it was because it became associated with manuals for florid but empty discourse, partly because modern belief in scientific discourse could not be placed in doubt. "Rhetoric" was defined as insincere, and pompous bombast. At the present time, however, rhetoric is seen in another light. It has become a tool for studies in philosophy, law, linguistics, literature, and in relation to mass communication and political practices. (1988) have been particularly eloquent with regard to the use of rhetoric for psychological, sociological, and political analysis
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