La dissertation française : un genre argumentatif entre rhétorique et logique (évidences, présupposés et changements de paradigme)
French dissertation: an argumentative genre between rhetoric and logic (evidences, assumptions and paradigm shifts)

Summary/Abstract: Traditional dissertation has been practised by several generations of students. This exercise has also been commented on by several generations of school system experts. Between commentaries of teachers (before 1980) and those of didacticians (after 1980), some differences of perspective seem to have installed themselves in a relatively stable way. The present article can’t detail the shift between a paradigm dominated by the link between language and thought and a paradigme dominated by a communicative conception of the language. It can however choose a specific aspect of that paradigm shift: the concurrence between two definitions of rhetoric. The definition explicitly rejected but implicitly conveyed by dissertation manuals, tends to mask the situation of communication. On the contrary, the definition of rhetoric used by didacticians insists on the essential necessity of an audience. The present article proposes an analysis of the concurrence between those two definitions.

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