The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, published in 1958, is usually associated by argumentation scholars with the rhetoric of thinkers ranging from Corax and Thysias to Aristotle and Quintilian. This type of association reveals the doubtful tendency to take Perelmann's theory as a reconstruction of Aristotelian rhetoric. It is worth noticing that these have actually distinct fields of application. In face of the narrow bound between rhetoric an eloquence, which draws the characteristic features of ancient rhetoric, one must reckon that the new rhetoric incorporates elements of argumentative elaboration - and thus of the textual product - which were not then contemplated in the rhetorical field. Even the New Rhetoric no longer stands as reference to those wishing to be initiated in the hard task of analyzing argumentative pieces. Also the New Rhetoric, engraved in socio-juridical theories of Boaventura Sousa Santos, does not contemplate the present time cognitive environment and models. Today, persuasion strategies have assumed features which are so differentiated that they hardly resemble those pointed out in classics dedicated to describe them, such as Aristotle and Schopenhauer. Our approach consists in contemplating the pragmatic component of argumentation - persuasion - so as to configure the existence of a Nuper-rhetoric capable of contemplating the (mainly) persuasive environment(s) and the elaboration of argumentative pieces.
Rhetoric; Persuasion; Argumentation; Nuper-rhetoric