Forecasting opportunity; kairos, production, and writing

Reference & Research Book News, Nov, 2005

Forecasting opportunity; kairos, production, and writing.

Stephenson, Hunter W.

Univ. Press of America

2005

110 pages

$21.00

Paperback

PN175

Stephenson (writing, U. of Houston, Clear Lake) examines the classical Greek rhetorical construct kairos, which is generally translated as right timing and due measure, and finds modern rhetorical scholars have not grasped its true meaning. Although kairos was originally linked with weaving and archery and denoted a physical space, is was soon detached from that association to acquire a variety of applications and meanings in a variety of disciplines. Through analysis of case studies in journalism, Stephenson refines kairos and finds it applies to a general human performance and to the kairos of a rhetorical performance that follows. In the process he discerns three models of kairos in the production (but not the evaluation) of print-linguistic texts.

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