- The ancients and the classics: the sophists, Aristotle, medieval logic, Machiavelli, Bentham, Schopenhauer..
- The new rhetoric (1958): Perelman, Toulmin.
- Recent theories : Ducrot, Hirschman, Walton, Amossy, Angenot, Grize, Maingueneau, Reboul, Plantin, Doury... The ADL/ADD debate (" argumentation dans la langue " or " argumentation dans le discours ").
Birth of rhetoric in ancient Greece. Basic bibliographical data. The counter-example of China. The case of ancient Egypt according to the work of Laurent Coulon. From masters of truth to sophists (Corax, Gorgias, Protagoras). Discourse genres in Aristotle's Rhetoric. Roland Barthes' critical synthesis of the history of rhetoric(Communications, vol. 16, 1970). For Barthes, rhetoric is submission to doxa. Michel Foucault : " l'ordre du discours " (opening lecture 1970), an extreme vision of rhetoric as a political tool. 1950s : the return of rhetoric (Kenneth Burke, Stephen Toulmin, Chaïm Perelman). Toulmin's theory presented. Can rhetoric be separated from non-rhetoric ? The impossible separation of discourse genres. What is non-rhetoric ?
