Audience and situational context, the latter defined as a pairing of time and place coordinates, have passed through stages of union, separation, and identification in the history of rhetoric. From Aristotle through Cicero and Quintilian to Hugh Blair and George Campbell, audience was a synecdoche for the situations of utterance that defined deliberative, forensic, and epideictic (in the classical period) or homiletic (in the eighteenth century) oratory. With the shift from oral to written texts as the object of rhetorical inquiry during the nineteenth century, this principle of classification became less viable, since situational context in its literal sense disappears for texts composed to be read. Moreover, the assumption of James Kinneavy's "Theory of Discourse" that all discourse possesses a situational context entails that situation cannot determine persuasive (sub)aim, as had historically been assumed. Consequently, Kinneavy separates audience (the "decoder") from situational context, making the former by itself constitutive of persuasive discourse. However, the notion of decoder cannot differentiate qualitatively along an axis of engagement in a rhetorical situation. To correct this deficiency, recent work has reunited audience and situational context, indeed collapsed them, through metaphorical extensions such as audience evocation and displaced contexts of (genre) convention or discourse community. (Nine references are attached.) (Author/ARH)