iPods, viagra, and the praiseworthy life: epideictic rhetoric in technology and medical print advertising.

E PIDEICTIC RHETORIC—THE RHETORIC OF ‘‘PRAISE AND BLAME’’— grounds itself in a culture’s mainstream values. People or things (in this study, lifestyles and products) that purport to demonstrate or embody currently favored values are praised and thus reinforced in epideictic rhetoric, and those out of favor and perceived as nonmainstream in common culture are criticized. Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, who brought attention to epideictic rhetoric’s function in many genres in the twentieth century (it is not just for funeral oratory anymore), identify epideictic’s strongly ideological function as strengthening the ‘‘intensity of adherence to values held in common by the audience of the speaker’’ (52). Because those values are implicit—‘‘undisputed though not formulated ’’ (52)—Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca note that in epideictic discourse ‘‘the speaker readily converts into universal values, if not eternal truths, that which has acquired a certain standing through social unanimity’’ (Perelman and