Ethos Today: The Re-Appropriation of a Key Rhetorical Notion

Abstract This paper shows the contemporary relevance of rhetoric’s insights by showing how today’s disciplines deal with one of its key notions: ethos. It enumerates some of the labels under which it is studied in various disciplines: presentation of self, impression management, image repair, branding, etc. The main part of the essay, however, is devoted to the re-appropriation of ethos by Discourse Analysis (DA), Argumentation in Discourse (a branch of rhetorical argumentation), and, more broadly, by disciplines focusing on discourse and communication. It draws heavily, but not exclusively, on the Francophone trends that devoted a considerable amount of work to ethos both on the theoretical level and in studies of concrete corpora from the domains of politics, the media, sciences, literature, and more. While examining how rhetoric infuses contemporary theories, it highlights the development and enrichment of the rhetorical notion of ethos in frameworks that shed new light on it, contribute tools for in-depth analysis, and redefine its social and political stakes.