Didactic argumentation and polemic argumentation in the political press of the first half of the 20th century: the argentinian Socialist Yearbook as a Rhetorical device

Abstract

This article provides a longitudinal study of argumentative structures in the Socialist Yearbook, published by the Argentine Socialist Party between 1928 and 1951 and inscribed in the genre tradition of popular almanac. Through the survey of the rhetorical strategies deployed in the publication, we analyze its location within social public discourse and describe the tensions between the different discursive “durations” that compose the Yearboook and its gradual changes over the period under study. We define the Yearbook as a complex rhetorical device, consisting of multiple components with different semiotic configurations and various communicative functions (chronicles, reports, stories, statistics, manifestos, biographies, poems, photographs, advertisements, to name a few). Firstly, through microdiscursive analysis, we analyze how the Yearbook’s initial stage (1928-1937) leans on compositional heterogeneity to build its arguments by means of selection, trimming, sequencing and framing of preexisting articles imported from previous publications; thus, it displays a didactic argumentative configuration (Courtine, 1983), allowing the Yearbook to adequately address a broad and diverse readership in order to better introduce and strengthen socialist topica at the time (Angenot, 1993, 2010). Moreover, analysis of the second stage of the publication (until its demise in 1951) reveals a striking contrast with the previous stage regarding rhetorical devices. At the ending of the 1930s, the Yearbook starts to develop a tendency towards generic homogenization around explicitly political genres, a strengthening of polemic argument and greater deployment of pathemic operations. Finally, we conclude that these shifts affect the ethos of the socialist group, considered as a rhetorical entity, strongly bound to the modes of argument developed at each stage.