Abstarct: The current material has the goal of presenting the intense development of rhetoric as an academic discipline with a research focus on the Scandinavian countries, which over the last few decades have marked an increasing scope of research and intensification of their interdisciplinary approach. What is also presented is a characteristic research tradition with Norwegian roots or the study of “subject-oriented prose” (“sakprosa”) i.e. non-fictional texts dedicated to a specific subject with the underlying premise that societal development can be understood through the communication patters of this society and the analysis of such texts, especially scientific ones and their effects on the public thinking providing the possibility for understanding the very ways through which modern society and modern thought came into being. This approach has much in common with the rhetoric of science. The last part of the material is dedicated to the short resume of the concept of two key figures in Scandinavian rhetoric – Jorgen Fafner and Christian Kock. According to Fafner rhetoric can be viewed as “philosophy of communication”. His approach is humanistic with particular interest in the influence of rhetoric in the development of culture and the individual, described by him as a verbally perceiving and acting being. Christian Kock, on the other hand, aims at defining rhetoric as a normative and empiric science focused on particular utterances. Together with their different definitions and approaches towards rhetorical studies, they also lay out new research possibilities.
Key words: Scandinavian rhetoric, research, subject-oriented prose.
Rhetoric and Communications E-journal, Issue 20, November 2015, rhetoric.bg/, journal.rhetoric.bg, ISSN 1314-4464