Rethinking Relationships Through Rhetoric: Coordinating Interpersonal Approaches

Authored by renowned communication and relationship scholar Steve Duck, Rethinking Relationships Through Rhetoric: Coordinating Interpersonal Approaches invites readers to reconsider their assumptions and understanding of relationships. The second edition of the text features a fresh emphasis on rhetoric and its insights into the ways in which individuals use discourse to promote vantage points and opinions or to make arguments or representations that are intended to influence others.

The book posits that everyday communication is largely argumentative, propositional, sermonic, and intentionally influential in nature. Readers learn how even mundane communication subtly pitches the views of the speaker towards the listener and invites approval or objection. The text reconsiders the implications of seeing acquaintance as an ongoing, unfinished, and largely communicatively-based activity that is not captured in laboratory snapshots, and so challenges readers to better understand how relationships are formed through series of everyday interactions and active inquiry by listeners rather than "self-disclosure" by speakers. It also explores how cultural influence, the assessment of behaviors, and moral judgements affect everyday interactions and consequently, our relationships.

Providing readers with a deep examination of the ways in which individuals practice their relationships and embody them in social spaces, Rethinking Relationships Through Rhetoric is an ideal textbook for advanced courses and graduate programs in interpersonal communication and interpersonal relationships.

Steve Duck is an accomplished and prominent relationship scholar and the Daniel and Amy Starch Distinguished Research Chair in CLAS at the University of Iowa. His work centers on relationship development and disintegration with a focus on everyday interactions, especially variation in experiences and understandings over time. He has edited or written 50 books and was founder and first editor of the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.