Hasil untuk "Style. Composition. Rhetoric"

Jill Swiencicki

: This essay argued that, in the post-Dobbs era, reproductive justice-themed mural art serves a memori-alizing function as well as a site of utopic imagining in a time of declining access to reproductive healthcare. The author has used personal experience as a clinic escort to ground a visual rhetorical analysis of three reproductive justice-themed murals across the United States. The essay has identified recurring aesthetic elements in the mu-rals’ compositions, including the female gaze, flowers in bloom, haloes, bold directional symbols, and affirming text. Drawing on reproductive justice scholarship and feminist rhetorical theories of place, the author argued that these aesthetic elements counter fetal personhood rhetoric and assert reproductive justice principles.

Rachel E. Molko

: This article offers a case study of Barbara Kruger’s visual rhetoric to show how her signature fusion of found photography and sensational, headline-styled typography constructs a persuasive visual language that both inhabits and destabilizes dominant ideologies. Drawing on feminist rhetorical theory and cultural studies including Campbell (1998); Moi (1997); Balsamo (1996); Milkie (2002); and Dubriwny (2005), the analysis situates Kruger’s art as a subversive engagement with the visual grammars of advertising and mass media. Through close readings of Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground ) (1989) and Untitled (Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face) (1981), the article demonstrates how Kruger leverages collage to collapse binaries (subject/object, passive/active, high/ low), expose the commodification of bodies, and reconfigure spectatorship via a feminist gaze. Ultimately, this study proposes collage as feminist iconography with durable subversive potential, offering a model for rhetorical invention within and against the visual regimes of consumer capitalism.

Silvia Tsvetanska, Maya Sotirova

Issue 66 of the Rhetoric and Communications journal is dedicated to topics traditionally related to rhetoric as theory, practice, and research methods, as well as to current manifestations of communication in a virtual environment, the use of artificial intelligence, and digitalization. The authors represent Bulgarian universities and academic institutions (Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Thracian University, Stara Zagora, UNIBIT, the Higher School of Insurance and Finance (VUZF), and the Agricultural Academy), as well as universities from Germany, China, Cyprus, Nigeria, and Lithuania. This ensures continuity between different generations of scholars and researchers and expands the scope of scientific networks through the inclusion of researchers from diverse fields and countries. The first section, “Rhetoric and Communication in Society,” brings together articles presenting results from both theoretical reviews and analyses of oratorical performances, ranging from presidential debates to official statements by heads of state. Fee-Alexandra Haase presents rhetorical canons, including ethos, pathos, and logos; establishes the scope and dimensions of rhetorical paradigms derived from the works of Quintilian and Cicero; and traces contemporary concepts of rhetoric through the prism of persuasion in publications by 20th- and 21st-century scholars. Shane Crombie presents the results of a comparative analysis of rhetoric from three countries, examined through the prism of its influence on society, in the publication “Asymmetrical Rhetoric – Lithuania, China, and the Voice of Small Nations.” Three authors—Surajudeen Dayo Ogunsola, Josiah Sabo Kente, and Tsegyu Santas—analyze the 2023 presidential elections in Nigeria, conducting a study of public attitudes, the use of radio, and virtual communication through social networks and digital media platforms during election campaigns, in which political rhetoric has specific manifestations. Milena Gurkova conducts a rhetorical analysis of Emmanuel Macron’s speech delivered at the opening of the restored Notre Dame de Paris Cathedral, concluding that the French president’s rhetoric lies between epideictic and visionary discourse. The second section, “Virtual Communication, Education, Artificial Intelligence,” includes publications dedicated to the use of artificial intelligence in various rhetorical and educational practices, as well as communication in virtual space. Ilin Slavov, using the method of autoethnographic observation, presents experiences of cyber-learning and the use of artificial intelligence by teachers and students in the context of pedagogical and academic communication. Anna Lozeva presents the results of an analysis of texts generated by artificial intelligence; she identifies phenomena at the linguistic and communicative levels and outlines trends in language practice and communication in the globalized digital context under the influence of large language models. Juliana Georgieva examines phenomena related to artificial intelligence from a different perspective, namely its manifestation as a factor in learning and internal communication within organizations. Boryana Kozareva presents the results of research into the possibilities of using traditional and modern methods to analyze the activities of university libraries in Bulgaria and their presence in the virtual space, where artificial intelligence, software applications, and chatbots are actively used. Irena Shunina presents the concept of democratic education developed by Yakov Hecht and provides examples of democratic education in Bulgaria. In the section “Modern Research Methods,” Ivanka Mavrodieva presents the book by Lyubomir Stoykov, The Style of Dictators: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin. Silvia Tsvetanska is a Doctor of Pedagogy and an Associate Professor at the Department of Social Work of the Faculty of Pedagogy at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski.” Her research interests include pedagogical communication, psychological aspects of communication, group dynamics training, and social work. She is the author of the book Challenges in Pedagogical Communication (2006); the textbook Conflict Resolution: Strategies and Approaches (2006); Pedagogical Communication for Practical Purposes (co-authored with Bistra Mizova, 2015); The European Credit System in Vocational Education and Training as a Tool for Promoting Lifelong Learning (2018); and numerous studies and articles in the fields of education and social work. Maya Sotirova is a Doctor of Pedagogy and an Associate Professor at the Department of Didactics of the Faculty of Pedagogy at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski,” specializing in the methodology of teaching Bulgarian language and literature in primary education. Her scientific interests include language and literature teaching in grades 1–4, personalized learning, intercultural communication and education, and pedagogical interaction in a multicultural environment. She is the author of numerous publications, as well as the books Children’s Non-Standardness (2002), Intercultural Processes in Education (2010), and Personalized Bulgarian Language Teaching in the Primary Stage of the Basic Educational Level (2023). Issue 66 of the Rhetoric and Communications Journal (January 2026) is published with the financial support of the Scientific Research Fund, Contract No. KP-06-NP7/23 of December 08, 2025. Rhetoric and Communications Journal, issue 66, January 2026 Read the Original in Bulgarian and English

Liuxin Yang, Priyanka Ladha

This paper presents a comprehensive pipeline that integrates state-of-the-art techniques to achieve high-quality cartoon style transfer for educational images and videos. The proposed approach combines the Inversion-based Style Transfer (InST) framework for both image and video style stylization, the Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer (IPT) for post-denoising, and the Domain-Calibrated Translation Network (DCT-Net) for more consistent video style transfer. By fine-tuning InST with specific cartoon styles, applying IPT for artifact reduction, and leveraging DCT-Net for temporal consistency, the pipeline generates visually appealing and educationally effective stylized content. Extensive experiments and evaluations using the scenery and monuments dataset demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach in terms of style transfer accuracy, content preservation, and visual quality compared to the baseline method, AdaAttN. The CLIP similarity scores further validate the effectiveness of InST in capturing style attributes while maintaining semantic content. The proposed pipeline streamlines the creation of engaging educational content, empowering educators and content creators to produce visually captivating and informative materials efficiently.

Zhanjie Zhang, Quanwei Zhang, Guangyuan Li et al.

Artistic style transfer aims to transfer the learned style onto an arbitrary content image. However, most existing style transfer methods can only render consistent artistic stylized images, making it difficult for users to get enough stylized images to enjoy. To solve this issue, we propose a novel artistic style transfer framework called DyArtbank, which can generate diverse and highly realistic artistic stylized images. Specifically, we introduce a Dynamic Style Prompt ArtBank (DSPA), a set of learnable parameters. It can learn and store the style information from the collection of artworks, dynamically guiding pre-trained stable diffusion to generate diverse and highly realistic artistic stylized images. DSPA can also generate random artistic image samples with the learned style information, providing a new idea for data augmentation. Besides, a Key Content Feature Prompt (KCFP) module is proposed to provide sufficient content prompts for pre-trained stable diffusion to preserve the detailed structure of the input content image. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments verify the effectiveness of our proposed method. Code is available: https://github.com/Jamie-Cheung/DyArtbank

Ivanka Mavrodieva

Issue 65 of the Rhetoric and Communications journal follows the established tradition of, on the one hand, uniting publications thematically within sections that more compactly present the development of the discipline at theoretical, methodological, and applied levels; and on the other hand, publishing high-quality scholarly articles by both established academics and young researchers. In the section “Rhetoric, Media, Semiotics,” the opening article, co-authored by Tetiana Zinovieva and Mariia Yakubovska, outlines a new interdisciplinary field—gamified digital journalism—as an emerging rhetorical practice for engagement, learning, and interaction. Remaining in the field of rhetoric, and particularly with respect to its functions in international relations and the activities of the European Union, Monika Panayotova analyzes a speech delivered by Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen during Denmark’s rotating presidency of the EU Council, combining methods rooted in Aristotelian rhetorical traditions with 21st-century approaches advanced by Simon Sinek. Elena Tarasheva examines parliamentary discourse in the Bulgarian National Assembly, presenting the results of a study employing a new method of keyword calculation—textual dispersion—and drawing conclusions regarding “high-frequency repetitions, collocations, cognitive metaphors, and rhetorical means of argumentation.” Pavleta Nachevska investigates the role of the media in reporting military actions. Tsvetelina Uzunova presents the results of a study of media and digital communication strategies of monarchies, seeking answers for their implementation between tradition and algorithms in media environment. Miroslav Dachev offers an engaging analysis in his article “The Semiotics of the Name: Icon, Name, Miracle.” The section “Communications in Society and Business” includes two publications addressing refugees and migrants. Deniza Georgieva presents the results of an analysis of the interpreter’s role and influence in therapeutic and interview contexts when working with refugees. Seungeun Lee conducts a comparative analysis of migration and migrants from Korea to three European countries: Bulgaria, Hungary, and Slovakia – as represented in media and institutional documents. Lyubomira Spasova presents in her article the results of a comparative analysis of scales for measuring the cognitive styles of advertising consumers. The section “Academic and Pedagogical Communication” comprises articles related to reporting on methodologically oriented research. Valeria Kardashevska presents results from the application of new approaches to training students of acting in stage speech, implemented in blended learning formats (face-to-face and online) at the National Academy for Theatre and Film Arts in Sofia and the National University of Theatre, Cinema, and Television in Kyiv. Spas Rangelov, from Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, College of National Strategic Languages in Korea, employs autoethnographic observation and analysis to describe the teaching of regional studies courses in an international academic environment, identifying cultural specificities and communicative challenges. Daniel Polikhronov analyzes the messages of contemporary Bulgarian pop-folk music and their impact on processes of education and socialization. Lulivera Krasteva reports on research methods and findings from Prof. Dr. Minka Zlateva’s book Retrospections on Public Communication.

Ivan Lohvin

Statement of the problem. Reynaldo Hahn (1874–1947) is a French composer of the “Belle Époque” who remained in the shadow of his contemporaries for a long time, and his piano legacy, in particular, is insufficiently studied both in the scientific and performing context. The lack of an established interpretative tradition and systematized information about the available performing versions has led to a limited presence of his compositions in concert practice and the media space. The issue of identifying approaches to interpreting Hahn’s music is becoming particularly relevant, as it opens up the opportunity for performers and researchers not only to more deeply understand Hahn’s individual style, but also to reassess his role in the context of French musical culture of the early 20th century. Objectives, methods, and novelty of the research. The purpose of the article is to form a holistic view of the interpretative dimension of Reynaldo Hahn’s piano creative work by analysing the existing media publications and releases, as well as to identify the main approaches to the interpretation of his piano compositions by comparing two independent complete audio collections – by Italian pianists Cristin Ariagno and Alessandro Dellavan. The methodological basis is based on historical (using the chronological principle and elements of quantitative analysis), comparative and interpretive methods. The historical approach allowed us to trace the dynamics of the spread of interpretations of R. Hahn’s piano compositions in a time perspective and to analyse the back catalogues of performers, while the comparative method provided the possibility of a detailed comparison of two performing versions. The interpretive method made it possible to identify semantic, stylistic, and expressive features in the performers’ interpretation of Hahn’s works. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that the interpretative dimension of R. Hahn’s piano creative work for the first time has become the subject of scientific attention not only in the Ukrainian, but also in the international musicological context. Results and conclusions. The article presents the releases of R. Hahn’s piano music available in the media space and traces the dynamics of their spreading over time. A comparison of the releases of the complete collection of R. Hahn’s piano compositions performed by Cristina Ariagno and Alessandro Dellavan allowed us to outline the artistic orientations of the pianists and the differences in their interpretations. Cristina Ariagno demonstrates an approach that can be characterized as dramatic-expressive: her interpretation is distinguished by active tempo movement, contrasting dynamics, bright sound colours, psychological tension and emotional rhetoric. Instead, Alessandro Dellavan chooses a lyrical-philosophical or contemplative type of interpretation, preferring chamberness, inner concentration and meditative sound. His interpretation is distinguished by a delicate touché, a subtle gradation of dynamics, which emphasizes the philosophical depth and shades of intimacy inherent in Hahn’s music. Both artists share a desire to popularize little-known composers, but their stylistic vectors differ: Ariagno focuses mainly on the French repertoire, while Dellavan’s interests have a wider range. The results obtained open the way for further musicological research into the piano legacy by R. Hahn, as well as their practical mastery by pianists-performers.

Hanyang Luo, Sijia Cheng, Wanhua Zhou et al.

Live-stream shopping is developing rapidly, but the sales levels of live streaming products vary by different hosts. How to increase the sales volume of live streaming products has become a problem. Consumers’ purchase behavior in live streaming is determined by some subjective factors, and the persuasiveness of linguistic style affects this subjective judgment to a certain extent. Therefore, the persuasiveness of the hosts’ linguistic style will lead to changes in consumers’ purchase intentions, which will affect the sales volume of products sold in the live streaming. Based on Hovland’s persuasion model, Aristotle’s rhetoric skills, text analysis, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic extraction model and grounded theory, this study divides the host’s linguistic persuasive style in the social e-commerce environment into five types: appealing to personality, appealing to logic, appealing to emotion, appealing to reward, and appealing to exaggeration. Combined with the sales volume of the product, we establish a regression model, and obtain the influence results of the host’s various linguistic persuasive styles on the sales of live streaming products. The results show that: the linguistic persuasive style of appealing to personality has the greatest positive impact on the sales volume of live broadcast products, but the linguistic style of appealing to logic has a negative impact. Interestingly, the same linguistic style has different effects for different types of products: the linguistic style of appealing to exaggeration has a negative effect on the sales volume of apparel products, but it has a positive influence on the sales volume of digital electrical products. Therefore, different linguistic styles should be used for different product types.

Laura Feibush

: The cosmetic practice of doing makeup—or “getting ready”—is a site for rhetorical analysis presently underrepresented in scholarship about embodied rhetorics. Following the steps outlined in a YouTube-style “Get Ready With Me” video series, this article argues that makeup can be understood rhetorically as a form of subtle feminism, not just in the way that it appears to others once finished and on display, but in how it instantiates a particular relationship to the self in its application. This process illuminates feminist ideologies by bringing about particular visual regimes and patterns of looking, challenging delineations of public and private, emphasizing individuals’ embodied lived experiences of identity

Wancheng Feng, Wanquan Feng, Dawei Huang et al.

Stylization for visual content aims to add specific style patterns at the pixel level while preserving the original structural features. Compared with using predefined styles, stylization guided by reference style images is more challenging, where the main difficulty is to effectively separate style from structural elements. In this paper, we propose StyleBrush, a method that accurately captures styles from a reference image and ``brushes'' the extracted style onto other input visual content. Specifically, our architecture consists of two branches: ReferenceNet, which extracts style from the reference image, and Structure Guider, which extracts structural features from the input image, thus enabling image-guided stylization. We utilize LLM and T2I models to create a dataset comprising 100K high-quality style images, encompassing a diverse range of styles and contents with high aesthetic score. To construct training pairs, we crop different regions of the same training image. Experiments show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results through both qualitative and quantitative analyses. We will release our code and dataset upon acceptance of the paper.

Lucas H. Ueda, Leonardo B. de M. M. Marques, Flávio O. Simões et al.

Incorporating cross-speaker style transfer in text-to-speech (TTS) models is challenging due to the need to disentangle speaker and style information in audio. In low-resource expressive data scenarios, voice conversion (VC) can generate expressive speech for target speakers, which can then be used to train the TTS model. However, the quality and style transfer ability of the VC model are crucial for the overall TTS model quality. In this work, we explore the use of synthetic data generated by a VC model to assist the TTS model in cross-speaker style transfer tasks. Additionally, we employ pre-training of the style encoder using timbre perturbation and prototypical angular loss to mitigate speaker leakage. Our results show that using VC synthetic data can improve the naturalness and speaker similarity of TTS in cross-speaker scenarios. Furthermore, we extend this approach to a cross-language scenario, enhancing accent transfer.

Simon Scherrer, Shivaprakash N. Ramakrishna, Vincent Niggel et al.

Contacts between particles in dense, sheared suspensions are believed to underpin much of their rheology. Roughness and adhesion are known to constrain the relative motion of particles, and thus globally affect the shear response, but an experimental description of how they microscopically influence the transmission of forces and relative displacements within contacts is lacking. Here we show that an innovative colloidal-probe atomic force microscopy technique allows the simultaneous measurement of normal and tangential forces exchanged between tailored surfaces and microparticles while tracking their relative sliding and rolling, unlocking the direct measurement of coefficients of rolling friction, as well as of sliding friction. We demonstrate that, in the presence of sufficient traction, particles spontaneously roll, reducing dissipation and promoting longer-lasting contacts. Conversely, when rolling is prevented, friction is greatly enhanced for rough and adhesive surfaces, while smooth particles coated by polymer brushes maintain well-lubricated contacts. We find that surface roughness induces rolling due to load-dependent asperity interlocking, leading to large off-axis particle rotations. In contrast, smooth, adhesive surfaces promote rolling along the principal axis of motion. Our results offer direct values of friction coefficients for numerical studies and an interpretation of the onset of discontinuous shear thickening based on them, opening up new ways to tailor rheology via contact engineering.

Christian Plantin

This article interrogates the Western “confrontational” model of argumentation, discourse/counter-discourse, and a possible alternative to the Toulminian model, through the prism of Chinese argumentation. It is based on a selection of translated extracts from classical Chinese texts. The passages studied range from Confucius (6th century CE) to the 1st century CE. AEC. The conditions for working with translations are specified in a text using analogy. An argument based on a play on homonymous words (and considered invalid by the translator) falls into the vast domain of arguments based purely on linguistic maneuvers. Numerous cases illustrate the fundamental role of contradiction and ad hominem refutation as possible sources of an argumentative situation. The Western tradition has produced many systems of “rules for an honorable controversy”; we have come across a set of rules on a similar but different issue: the precautions to be selected when choosing a discussion partner. §4 is devoted to what seems to be a general characteristic of the period under consideration (Graham 1989), which produces sophisticated argumentation, without referring it to a theory of argumentation, but to the notion of ritual. In conclusion: the Western style of analysis is robust and can account for facts that are constant in other cultures. Perhaps the differences lie elsewhere?

S. Botex

I aim to inspire people to suppress language and practices that oppress people. I engage with scholarship to advocate for learning from suppressed communities. I call for rhetoric and composition scholars to recognize how the existence and progress of oppressed communities require suppressing language and practices that oppress those communities.

Yunpeng Bai, Jiayue Liu, Chao Dong et al.

Text-based style transfer is a newly-emerging research topic that uses text information instead of style image to guide the transfer process, significantly extending the application scenario of style transfer. However, previous methods require extra time for optimization or text-image paired data, leading to limited effectiveness. In this work, we achieve a data-efficient text-based style transfer method that does not require optimization at the inference stage. Specifically, we convert text input to the style space of the pre-trained VGG network to realize a more effective style swap. We also leverage CLIP's multi-modal embedding space to learn the text-to-style mapping with the image dataset only. Our method can transfer arbitrary new styles of text input in real-time and synthesize high-quality artistic images.

Dan Ruta, Andrew Gilbert, John Collomosse et al.

Style transfer is the task of reproducing the semantic contents of a source image in the artistic style of a second target image. In this paper, we present NeAT, a new state-of-the art feed-forward style transfer method. We re-formulate feed-forward style transfer as image editing, rather than image generation, resulting in a model which improves over the state-of-the-art in both preserving the source content and matching the target style. An important component of our model's success is identifying and fixing "style halos", a commonly occurring artefact across many style transfer techniques. In addition to training and testing on standard datasets, we introduce the BBST-4M dataset, a new, large scale, high resolution dataset of 4M images. As a component of curating this data, we present a novel model able to classify if an image is stylistic. We use BBST-4M to improve and measure the generalization of NeAT across a huge variety of styles. Not only does NeAT offer state-of-the-art quality and generalization, it is designed and trained for fast inference at high resolution.

Ajay Patel, Delip Rao, Ansh Kothary et al.

Style representation learning builds content-independent representations of author style in text. Stylometry, the analysis of style in text, is often performed by expert forensic linguists and no large dataset of stylometric annotations exists for training. Current style representation learning uses neural methods to disentangle style from content to create style vectors, however, these approaches result in uninterpretable representations, complicating their usage in downstream applications like authorship attribution where auditing and explainability is critical. In this work, we use prompting to perform stylometry on a large number of texts to create a synthetic dataset and train human-interpretable style representations we call LISA embeddings. We release our synthetic stylometry dataset and our interpretable style models as resources.

Gongye Liu, Menghan Xia, Yong Zhang et al.

Text-to-video (T2V) models have shown remarkable capabilities in generating diverse videos. However, they struggle to produce user-desired stylized videos due to (i) text's inherent clumsiness in expressing specific styles and (ii) the generally degraded style fidelity. To address these challenges, we introduce StyleCrafter, a generic method that enhances pre-trained T2V models with a style control adapter, enabling video generation in any style by providing a reference image. Considering the scarcity of stylized video datasets, we propose to first train a style control adapter using style-rich image datasets, then transfer the learned stylization ability to video generation through a tailor-made finetuning paradigm. To promote content-style disentanglement, we remove style descriptions from the text prompt and extract style information solely from the reference image using a decoupling learning strategy. Additionally, we design a scale-adaptive fusion module to balance the influences of text-based content features and image-based style features, which helps generalization across various text and style combinations. StyleCrafter efficiently generates high-quality stylized videos that align with the content of the texts and resemble the style of the reference images. Experiments demonstrate that our approach is more flexible and efficient than existing competitors.

Niccolò Amelii

Il presente saggio si propone di analizzare stilisticamente e tematicamente le opere di Francesco Pecoraro, prestando particolare attenzione ai romanzi La vita in tempo di pace e Lo stradone. Mediante una close reading comparativa volta a porre in dialogo reciproco i due romanzi e i racconti raccolti nel volume Camere e stanze, l’obiettivo principale è quello, da un lato, di indagare i processi formali e compositivi mediante cui Pecoraro rielabora il genere del romanzo-saggio e lo declina secondo peculiari risoluzioni inventive; dall’altro, di illuminare le risorse espressive e le operazioni narrative attraverso cui la soggettività dei suoi personaggi entra in tensione dialettica con la realtà e lo spazio urbano circostanti.

Mattia Mossali

Questo articolo propone un approfondimento sull’ultima fase della poetica di Sylvia Plath. Attraverso la lettura e il commento di alcuni testi dalla raccolta Ariel, nell’edizione restaurata che corrisponde alla sequenza nient’affatto casuale concepita dalla poetessa, si tracceranno le coordinate di un progetto che richiama le antiche cosmologie, dal momento che Plath prova a dare vita a un mondo, nuovo e più intimo, finalmente libero da dolorose separazioni. Pare indubbio che i componimenti per Ariel siano pervasi da un senso di creazione; come ha sottolineato Nadia Fusini, ciò a cui il lettore assiste è un vero e proprio miracolo di transustanziazione, attraverso cui Plath trasforma la sua scrittura in organismo vivente. Nell’intento di chiarire questa affermazione, nell’articolo si sostiene che, in Ariel, Plath non si nasconde più dietro la tecnica acquisita; al contrario, creatore e creatura nei testi della maturità diventano la stessa cosa. È questo l’inizio di un percorso che la porterà non solo a diventare Poeta, ma a farsi poesia.