ABSTRACT A major contribution to rhetorical theory and an important tool of rhetorical criticism, Perelman’s distinction between particular audiences and the universal audience has been misconstrued by his critics and even by Perelman himself. Properly construed, the universal audience is focused on facts and truths and consists of all human beings in so far as they are rational; consequently, discourse addressed to it eschews proofs from character and emotion. In contrast, addresses to particular audiences focus on values; they embrace not only proofs reason, but also those from character and emotion.

ABSTRACT This essay attempts to de-link the study of the Rigveda from both colonial philology and ongoing Hindu nationalist projects. It brings the rhetoric of form, especially as theorized by Kenneth Burke, to open up space for critics and commentators with a broader range of relationships to Brahmanical liturgy. To further the goal of delinking, it first narrows the scope of analysis to dialogue hymns, which are reminiscent of debates found within Buddhist conversion narratives rendered in versified Sanskrit. It then centers formal linguistic figures that these two layers of Sanskrit poetry have in common. Finally, conceptualizing these formal devices, it uses analytic categories from a South Asian critical tradition (alaṃkāraśāstra). Framed and constrained in this manner and applied to the (ex-)lovers’ quarrel of Purūravas and Urvaśī (in R.V. 10.95), a Burkean analysis reveals an exchange that both satisfies the “appetites” and allays the concerns of conservative audiences, who otherwise might fear that their wives could follow Urvaśī’s example and happily part with their wedded partners-in-sacrifice.

ABSTRACT In this essay, I examine two epideictic artifacts from the Roman Principate, The Res Gestae Divi Augusti and the summi viri, arguing Augustus used them to reshape the model of a good leader, in part, by emphasizing contributing to the built environment of the city. Additionally, the public and visual nature of these artifacts made them highly accessible to those outside of the Roman elite, who may have sought social mobility through the imperial bureaucracy allowing for more diverse participation in the Roman government. I close by considering the influence of classical exemplars on U.S. civic spaces.

ABSTRACT Our understanding of the origins and early development of Greek rhetoric can be enlarged and sharpened by attending to the specific historical, cultural, and material contexts in which it was embedded. We perceive the cultural meanings and physical challenges of Greek rhetorical practice only to the extent that we consider the actual places and spaces in which it unfolded. This study examines and assesses the bouleutêrion (council house) as a venue for oratorical performance in the ancient Greek world, surveying a range of such buildings and describing their historical contexts, physical settings and configurations, and suitability as oratorical venues.

ABSTRACT In the late American nineteenth century, oratory was de rigueur. Institutionally, liberal arts colleges sought to distinguish themselves by teaching moral character. Such an ethotic education was sine qua non for any student of political oratory. This essay argues that such an emphasis on character and oratory, coupled with Illinois College’s rhetorical curriculum and extracurricular events, afforded a kairotic and didactic moment for William Jennings Bryan to learn and practice Isocrates’ brand of rhetorical paideia. Taught primarily through the use of paradigm cases and imitation, Isocrates emphasized the import of a speaker’s ethos over the art itself. Bryan shared this perspective. Drawing from both “Against the Sophists” and “Antidosis,” we conduct a comparative analysis by reading Isocrates’ ethotic-based rhetorical theory alongside of Bryan’s 1881 graduating oration entitled “Character.”

ABSTRACT In Book III of the Rhetoric, Aristotle focuses at length on the effect of lexical energeia. Scholarship on energeia in this passage almost always associates it with with analysis of enargeia in later texts. However, it is not clear that these two are used as equivalents in Aristotle. Here I survey Aristotle’s conceptions of energeia across the corpus in order to understand Aristotle’s use of energeia in the Rhetoric more precisely. I argue that Aristotle’s model of energeia has a consistent fundamental meaning, even as it crosses many topoi, and that Aristotle’s rhetorical energeia cannot be conflated with enargeia.

ABSTRACT The first emperor of Rome, Augustus, exploited architecture to convey his sophisticated propaganda. He famously boasted to have found Rome a city of brick, and left it a city of marble. This claim has been considered an apt metaphor for the establishment of an imperial state, though the quantitative, physical veracity of the boast has never been fully interrogated. A team from UCLA mapped and modeled the marble projects added to Rome in the decades of Augustan power, using rule-based procedural modeling to generate numerous 3D, interactive, geo-temporal simulations of the entire cityscape with each marble intervention placed in situ topographically and chronologically. Broad, pan-urban views of the city’s evolution revealed that Augustan marble projects were neither overwhelming in number nor readily visible. Examination of the urban experience over time and space, however, revealed that marble construction had a constant and pervasive impact. Daily urban residents found their movements blocked by marble transports and their senses bombarded by the noisy, dusty work at construction sites. Thus, it was not the rhetoric conveyed by architecture that justified Augustus’ claim, but the rhetoric of the building act that spoke loudly and persuasively in situ.

ABSTRACT In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an unprecedented number of Gnostic manuscripts were unearthed at sites across Egypt. Discovered on the Cairo antiquities market, in ancient trash heaps, and in buried jars, these papyri have radically refigured the landscape of early Christian history. Rhetoric, however, has overlooked the Gnostics. Long denigrated as heretical, Gnostic texts invite historians of rhetoric to (re)consider the role of gender in the early Church, the interplay between gnōsis and contemporary rhetorical concepts, and the
development of early Christian rhetorical practice(s) within diverse historical contexts, including the Second Sophistic. In response to recent calls for rhetorical archaeology, this essay returns to Cairo, Oxyrhynchus, and Nag Hammadi. These three locations refigure early Christian rhetoric(s) in situ.

ABSTRACT Lysias is best known for his portrayal of character (ethopoiia), his believable narratives, his plain or “Attic” style, and for the role he plays as inferior foil to Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus. But he was also an important figure in developing, refining, and employing types of argument, including the rhetorical technique that would later be called the enthymeme. In On the Death of Eratosthenes, Lysias not only uses enthymemes, he highlights their use, selects a term (enthymizing), and demonstrates how “enthymizing” could be central to rhetorical artistry, to narrative development, to legal reasoning, and to political activism. Examining Lysias 1 not only deepens our understanding of Lysias’ rhetorical abilities, but it suggests that the orators had an important role to play in the development of rhetorical theory.

ABSTRACT Limiting ourselves to scholarly books published in English from 2009–2016, we survey classics scholarship about rhetoric in ancient Rome from the late republic through the early empire. We seek traditional threads and growing trends across those works that advance our understanding of rhetoric’s practical, theoretical, and material manifestations during that time of tumult and transition. We begin broadly, using companion books to delineate three structural pillars in the scholarship: rhetoric as a formal cultural system, the republic as subject to ruptures and reinventions, and Cicero as a foremost statesman of the late republic. Then we move into scholarship that draws upon nontraditional rhetorical objects, such as art, and that moves into increasingly vibrant areas of interest in rhetoric, such as the senses. Overall, we find that classicists writing about ancient Roman rhetorical culture share with their counterparts in rhetoric an urge to test old verities and to add historical depth to larger scholarly turns within the humanities.

ABSTRACT This essay discusses the philosophical grounding of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria in order to appreciate the rationale for his view that rhetoric is central to education. This appreciation for Quintilian’s orientation is intended not only to garner a deeper understanding of the principles behind his view of education but also to offer insights to the issues that we share today with respect to teaching oral and written expression. One of the central topics of this essay is how Quintilian reconceptualized the concept of declamation away from its sophistic forms to a problem-solving system of casuistry that provided a ratio for developing proficiency in adjudicating issues of value and preference.

ABSTRACT Quintilian’s notion of imitation is often acclaimed for its focus on invention and appropriateness and for highlighting attunement to individual talent. Yet these aspects tend to be somewhat neglected in the practice of imitation as shaped by the classical rhetorical tradition, which primarily focuses on imitation exercises for beginners. This essay accentuates Quintilian’s chapter on imitation, which, as stressed by Murphy, is aimed at the mature student, in order to propel these precepts into today’s teaching. Specifically, this article advances a pedagogy of student-driven imitation constituted of five dimensions and characterized by the student’s own choice of text, valuing reflexive process over mirroring, and strengthening rhetorical agency. The exposition of student-driven imitation is supplemented with questions that students might address and excerpts from a student’s work.

ABSTRACT This essay discusses the relationship between Quintilian’s vision of the ideal orator and his emphasis on declamation. I argue that, for Quintilian, declamation was much more than a useful exercise. Rather, it was a method for training orators to experience the world from a variety of perspectives, something Quintilian considered to be both an essential rhetorical skill and an important quality of the “good man speaking well.” I further argue—taking an exercise from my own first-year writing classes as an example—that contemporary adaptations of ancient rhetorical pedagogy often fail to fully engage with the ethical dimensions of exercises such as declamation. I conclude by calling for a greater consideration of the ethical dimension of ancient rhetorical exercises in our contemporary adaptations of them so that we can truly meet Quintilian on his own ground.

ABSTRACT Quintilian does not offer an explicit mechanism that connects eloquence and ethics. This essay suggests that this omission is a consequence of the significant role that imitation plays in Quintilian’s pedagogy. This essay further suggests that the particular habits of mind that are cultivated through imitation are those that are associated with civic virtue, and it offers some ways that civic virtue might be cultivated in contemporary classrooms through a pedagogy that relies on imitation.

ABSTRACTThis essay makes the case that the account of delivery featured in the Institutio Oratoria remains germane to contemporary speech pedagogy. Quintilian emphasizes that (1) powerful delivery is central to eloquent public speaking; (2) delivery functions in concert with the other canons of rhetoric; and (3) delivery is governed by general rhetorical concepts such as decorum and ethos. Furthermore, scrutiny of Quintilian’s perspectives on gender and power can lead to fruitful rethinking of current pedagogy’s traditionalist tendencies.

ABSTRACTThere has been a surge of scholarly interest lately in the progymnasmata, those ordered exercises in composition that played such an important role in rhetorical education from antiquity to the Renaissance. Comprising an integrated program in literary, civic, and moral effectiveness, they offer a compelling alternative to language arts pedagogy today, which seems too often driven by the goal of “college and career readiness.” But to be truly useful as a pedagogical model, the progymnasmata need to be embedded in something like the comprehensive educational philosophy of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria.

ABSTRACT Quintilian makes writing one of the four interrelating elements (with reading, speaking, and listening) to be used in producing in his “perfect orator” what he calls “habit” (hexis), or the facility of being able to write or speak well on any subject. It requires constant study over time, requires organization, and is reinforced by constant practice. His practical observations on writing may well have value for us in modern times.

ABSTRACT The emplacements of rhetoric are manifold and the inquiries into the topologies of rhetoric are ways of understanding developments in rhetorical theory. To these ends, I contrast in this article the invocations of place in rhetorical theory old and new. In this long view, the spatiality of rhetoric appears to be multifaceted. I show that in Greco-Roman rhetorical theory, spatiality is topical, figured metaphorically and literally, and functions as a precedent condition for rhetoric. I argue that modern/postmodern theories differ from traditional theories of rhetoric not because they rely more or less on the materiality or immateriality of place, but because of their orientations to place as heterotopic, that is, as fluid and contingent. I then offer an account of how heterotopic rhetoric challenges orders of knowledge allowing for ever-new articulations through a close reading of Barack Obama’s Dreams from my Father. The heterotopology of rhetoric proposed here expands understandings of the heuristic function of place. The essay considers the implications heterotopic place holds for identity and subjectivity.

ABSTRACT Freedom is a contested concept, at once bound up with and promising transcendence of social bonds. This article examines the understanding of freedom particular to rhetorical theory, a troubled freedom that is the negotiation of constraint. Articulating this concept in negotiation of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s “universal audience,” the article explores a key implication of troubled freedom for the governance of human persons. Given that human personhood is a rhetorical phenomenon, that persons emerge in flows of tendentious discourse, the article urges a rhetorical approach to democratic constitution writing. Constitution should be composed to foster the rhetorical capabilities of demoi.

ABSTRACT Under the Roman Empire, the Greek elites expressed the greatest respect for the emperors and celebrated the advantages of Roman domination. But behind the brilliant façade, certain factors of complexity were at work. This article uses the notion of “figured speech” to detect covert advice or reservation in the works of Dio of Prusa, known as Dio Chrysostom, and Aelius Aristides, two important representatives of Greek literature and the so-called Second Sophistic (first to second century CE). By “figured speech” ancient rhetoricians meant the cases in which orators resorted to ruses to disguise their intentions, by using indirect language to get to the points they wanted to make. Our method consists of linking certain texts by Aristides and Dio and passages from theoretical treatises together to make clear the precise procedure of figured speech that is used in each case: eloquent silence, “the hidden key,” blame behind praise, generalization, and speaking through a mask. Figured speech is an avenue of research that is opening up to interpret Greek rhetoric and literature better. The Greek case is particularly rich, and it could help analyze the return of the same phenomenon in other epochs and other cultures.

ABSTRACT This study examines ancient Roman ideas about humor’s boundaries in public culture. In particular, I analyze book 6, chapter 3 of the Institutio Oratoria, which covers Quintilian’s reflections on the subject. Following Cicero, Quintilian engages the tensions between humor and decorum in his political context, using urbanitas to refine the former and to loosen the latter’s strictures. In this process, the use of urbanitas implicitly points readers toward factors that can make humor rhetorical. Quintilian thus answers Cicero’s question about the degree to which humor should be used and furthers inquiry into how much rhetorical humor can or should be taught.

ABSTRACT Among Aristotle’s arts of argumentation, two are directly linked to archai, or first principles. Analytic deduces from them and dialectic tests their veracity. This article situates rhetoric as likewise useful for philosophical investigation in Aristotle’s own system by demonstrating how the Rhetoric assigns to rhetorical practice attributes that are uniquely related to the archai—without which investigations into and based on them would be impossible. That is, given the primary nature of the first principles as described by Aristotle, the strategic use of metaphor is the only intellectual machinery he has for articulating, disseminating, and gaining acquiescence for them.

ABSTRACT This article offers a rhetorical theory of what Giorgio Agamben has called the “state of exception” through a genealogy of the figure of Cincinnatus. In classical Rome, Cincinnatus was named dictator not once, but twice; first to save the city from invaders, and second to put down a popular, democratic uprising. Here we see the two sides of exception, or what I call the two faces of Cincinnatus: enemyship, and sovereign violence. These two faces are linked by an anti-democratic logic that is premised on the will of “the people,” as becomes clear in the counter-revolutionary writings of the founders of the United States.

ABSTRACT Studies in the history of rhetoric can be enriched by paying more attention to the relationship between theological belief and rhetorical theory. This article describes ways in which theology shaped the rhetorical theory of Austin Phelps (1820–1890), the fifth Bartlet professor of sacred rhetoric at Andover Theological Seminary, America's first graduate school of theology and a premiere institution for rhetorical education during the nineteenth century.

ABSTRACT Taking seriously Kenneth Burke's claim that identification follows property's logic discloses identification's rootedness not only in nonsymbolic motion but also in attitudinal sensation, that midway realm between sheer motion and symbolic action. Burke's key distinction is among three terms, not two—implying consubstantial (not antithetical) relations between pure persuasion and identification. Thus understood, these relations have implications for the New Rhetoric, in particular for how it frames the question of justice.

ABSTRACTThis article treats the idea of consilium as a concept in the rhetoric of the Western Middle Ages. The tradition of civic oratory in antiquity was associated with the deliberative genre, and civic speech was perpetuated in the Middle Ages but manifested itself as consilium. In the letters of Fulbert of Chartres, the rhetorical commentaries of Thierry of Chartres, and the rhetorical treatises of Albertanus of Brescia and Brunetto Latini, the concept of consilium (“counsel”) systematically describes persuasive human interaction to address deliberative uncertainty about future civic decisions. Medieval rhetoricians use the term consilium both synonymously with deliberation and to describe an activity of persuasion that is akin to deliberative oratory. In rhetorical texts describing the practice of counsel in the Middle Ages, we see a transition from counsel as a subject of rhetorical theory to counsel as a public practice.

ABSTRACT In several recent essays, Brad McAdon has argued that Aristotle's Rhetoric is such a fractured, inconsistent text that it is reasonable to conclude it is not the work of a single author, “Aristotle,” but the work of an editor who combined sections of treatises by several authors. This article challenges McAdon's thesis by reexamining the historical transmission of the Rhetoric and analyzing a central passage in the work—namely Rhetoric 1.4–14 (on the idia or special topics)—that McAdon believes Aristotle could not have written.

ABSTRACT In addition to rhetorical theorists, historians of rhetoric mistakenly believe that Aristotle carefully articulated how the use of rhetoric may be thought of as being human. Here, insofar as I believe he left this work undone, I offer an ontological framework to conceive of rhetoric as intrinsic to human nature, using the essentialist paradigm espoused by Aristotle and expanded upon by St. Thomas Aquinas as a theoretical foundation. A prefatory theory is proposed that rhetoric might be thought of as being natural for its teleological orientation toward action.

ABSTRACT This article culls a theory of rhetorical vision from Aristotle's Rhetoric by examining the cluster of terms that bears on his theory of visual style. Rhetorical vision stands apart from but complements visual rhetoric in that it attends to the rhetorical and linguistic conjuring of visual images—what contemporary neuroscientists call visual imagery—and can even affect direct perception. The article concludes by examining rhetorical vision in Demosthenes' Epitaphios. At stake in this investigation is the visible and visual liveliness of rhetoric and its ability to alter sense perception.

ABSTRACTThis reading of De Oratore uses Stoic philosophy and rhetoric to trace out a complex Ciceronian theory of rhetoric. Cicero rejected Stoic style, labeling it as meager and unpersuasive. However, he coalesced Stoic philosophy with Greek rhetoric to produce his ideal orator. Cicero described eloquentia as natural public speech that was distinctive to every person, yet he also explained how eloquence, like wisdom, unified aspects of the entire universe. Through these connections, Stoic influences enabled Cicero to negotiate major questions concerning rhetoric, such as the emotional control of the orator, the virtue of eloquence, and the status of rhetoric as an art. Cicero's negotiation is productive of a theory of rhetoric that is useful today, especially as it holds speech and public action as important and fundamental acts of human individuality.

ABSTRACT As Cicero details in his De Officiis (On Duties), Stoic ethical theory proceeds from a poetics of virtue according to which people act dutifully by performing the roles (personae) in which nature has cast them. Stoicism's dramatistic conception of duty fits within the theatrical dynamics of ancient rhetorical practice, theory, and pedagogy and is a noteworthy precursor to persona theory in contemporary rhetorical studies. Furthermore, the centrality of decorum to Stoic personae theory gives it a poignant rhetorical quality, especially given the circumstances during which Cicero introduced it to Roman readers.

ABSTRACT Traditional readings of Nietzsche's essay “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” tend to emphasize the clash between philosophy and rhetoric in the form of two distinct personae—the intuitive, Sophistical artist who embraces the rhetorical power of language to create and destroy on the one hand, and the rational, Stoic philosopher who uses concepts to order the world into a block universe on the other. However, I argue that his essay presents us with not two characters but three—the Stoic philosopher, political rhêtôr, and the Dionysian artist. Furthermore, none of these three characters can be said to be representative of Nietzsche's attitude toward the Sophists. This article thus proposes a model of the Sophistical artist which combines aspects from each of these personae in a way that brings together the power of tragic suffering, persuasive word, and passionate music, respectively. This reading of Nietzsche's work discloses an ideal image of a “new” Sophist as an unfettered spirit for whom Dionysian music and philosophical word cooperate to produce a complex rhetorical discourse capable of overcoming the nihilism of the modern age in order to produce a higher culture. This attitude would therefore make the new Sophist capable of grand aspirations and opportune actions while always remaining cognizant of the sublime and terrible nature that underlies his fragile dreams of beauty.

ABSTRACTThis article examines the interplay between the Stoic concept of cosmopolis and Greek rhetorical discourses of the polis in the Roman imperial period. D. A. Russell's “Sophistopolis” (from Greek Declamation, 1983) and Doyne Dawson's work on utopian political theory (1992) serve as points of departure for developing a method of reading the political in Second Sophistic rhetoric. The text under examination is a major first-century oration: Dio Chrysostom's Euboean Discourse. Composed around 96 CE, after Dio's return from exile by Domitian, the Euboicus combines a castaway's rural fable with didactic commentary, forcing the utopian pastoral hard up against a lecture on economic and social distress in the imperial city. Dio creates disjunctive moods, city-visions, and speaking personae, performing a rhetorical tour de force while simultaneously constructing a political subject at the limit of creaturely need. A “cosmopolitical” analysis of Second Sophistic rhetoric finds the consummate artistry of the paideia addressed to imperial power and provincial realities, revealing civic breakdown and human suffering in the city-spaces of empire.

AbstractMust acts of identification via an inclusive “we” mystify the inequalities they are meant to transcend? One answer lies in this essay's reading of Abraham Lincoln's and Kenneth Burke's rhetoric, a reading that tracks (especially through Lincoln's rhetoric) the “ways of identification,” ways which Burke claimed “are in accordance with the nature of property.” Identification in Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address confirms much of Burke's theory, yet Lincoln's career of appeals to the connections between property and propriety—and in particular the specific identifications made by such appeals in the Second Inaugural—suggests that Burke's presentation of identification is itself a kind of mystification that can lead to under-reading the ways of identification.

Abstract Although conventional views about late nineteenth-century rhetoric highlight a shift from oratory to composition and from classical rhetoric to a “new” rhetoric with origins in Scottish rhetoricians (with a loss of scholarship and quality), James M. Hoppin's Homiletics can be grouped with an increasing number of works that complicate such views. Hoppin focuses on oratory; reveals an especially broad and scholarly knowledge of classical, religious, and foreign rhetorics; uses a complex of ideas called “uniformitarianism” to justify his primary focus on classical rhetoric; and achieves high quality. His concept of invention has both classical and Christian roots in a complex relationship reflecting both scope and narrowness.

Abstract Ancient India formalized rhetorical debate in the Sanskrit Nyāya Sūtras. Still influential, they remain relatively unknown because India is thought more mystical than logical, because Nyāya has been misinterpreted through Greek logic and terminologies, and because of its epistemology and soteriology. Perrett's four Western “approaches” to India—“magisterial,” “exoticist,” “curatorial,” and “interlocutory”—provide perspective. Magisterial blindness and exoticist assumptions prohibit understanding of Nyāya and delay its inclusion in rhetorical studies. A curatorial/interlocutory approach (translation and elucidation) reveals Nyāya's nature, as well as its similarities with Aristotle's enthymeme and example, enriching our understanding of the history and nature of rhetoric.

Abstract This essays offers a rhetorical interpretation of judicial opinions Joseph Story wrote in four U.S. Supreme Court cases concerned with the slavery question: U.S. v. La Jeune Eugenie (1822), Groves v. Slaughter (1841), U.S. v. Amistad (1841), and Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842). I argue that Story, a jurist trained in the intellectual traditions of the early republic, performed judicial argument as a kind of rhetorical action dependent upon Ciceronian controversia, a mental habit of arguing pro et contra on any matter in dispute. In consequence of this approach to judicial argument, Story's opinions do not represent a choice between positive law or natural law, neither do they represent a commitment to legal instrumentalism or legal formalism; rather they present controversial responses to rhetorical situations broadly conceived.

Abstract This essay is an inquiry into Heraclitus' conception of logos and its importance for sophistic thought. Following G. S. Kirk, I argue that Heraclitus used logos to designate structure or ordered composition, both in language and in the physical world. Further, I propose that early sophists like Gorgias and Protagoras shared with Heraclitus a structural conception of logos. The essay proceeds by reviewing various understandings of Heraclitus and his philosophy, making the case that Heraclitus did use logos to signify structure or “ordered composition,” and by exploring the relationship between Heraclitus, read in this way, and the sophists.

Abstract A case study of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, can inform nineteenth-century North American rhetorical history by exposing the interplay of rhetorical theory and practice in an educational setting during the antebellum period. Evidence of this interplay emerges in the subject matter of students' quarterly exhibition and commencement orations and of their literary society presentations from 1823 to 1845. When considered as a curricular whole, this evidence suggests a symbiotic relationship between the primarily moralistic and belletristic discourse favored by the college's curriculum and the more broadly civic judicial and deliberative discourse favored by its literary societies.

Abstract Aristotle's Rhetoric leaves a number of unanswered questions, among them the nature of the relationship between verbal style and êthos, or character, as a means of persuasion. Statements throughout the Rhetoric suggest a connection between manner of expression and persuasive character, but Aristotle's ideas in this area are underdeveloped. Here we argue that Aristotle's stylistic theory, while not demonstrably inconsistent with the technical proof through character, cannot be made to conform neatly with it in most salient respects. Though Aristotle does not explicit y identify style as a means through which the speaker may convey the impression that he possesses positive intellectual or moral qualities, he does recognize a role for lexis in the expression of generic character traits and is aware that an inappropriate style will damage the speaker's credibility. Hence, attention to style is important for the presentation of a plausible êthos and, in this limited respect, style does contribute to the maintenance of persuasive character. This conclusion must be inferred from passing remarks in the Rhetoric. The absence of a more fully developed theory is curious in light of the availability of examples from the discourse of Attic logographers like Lysias, a speechwriter universally praised by later critics for his mastery of ethopoeia(character portrayal).

Abstract The tradition of Western stylistics, initiated by Aristotle, is impregnated with the dialectics between established and unconventional usage. In the twentieth century, Bakhtin acknowledged this dynamic through his conception of the dialectical nature of language. Concepts of the plain style, many of them emanating from the United States, deviated from this dynamic. Prestigious style handbooks such as The Elements of Style and Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, which championed a form of the plain style based on empiricism, offered advice that undermined the dialectical, dynamic nature of language. At the same time, calls for cavalier self-expression, e.g., experimentation in Baudrillard and experimentalism in Lloyd, could not account for the great achievements of Western stylistics. A paucity of stylistic diversity led Foucault to promote “heterotopias.” Cixous proposed a three-stage model for linguistic development designed to heighten dialectical interplay between tradition and novelty. Attuned to the crisis in written expression, Kristeva stressed the need for enhancing the role of aesthetic products in contemporary life.

Abstract Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's Traité de Vargumentation: la nouvelle rhétorique marked a revolution in twentieth-century rhetorical theory. In this essay, we trace Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's turn from logical positivism and the accepted belief that reason's domain was the vita contemplativa to rhetoric and its use as a reason designed for the vita activa. Our effort to tell the story of their rhetorical turn, which took place between 1944 and 1950, is informed by an account of the context in which they considered questions of reason, responsibility, and action in the wake of World War II.

Abstract In eleventh century Italy, Anselm de Besate claimed rhetoric had become too technical and difficult to use. He wrote the Rhetorimachia as a controversia, applying declamatory form to a written composition, in order to illustrate rhetoric's usefulness. Nonetheless, Anselm complained that critics failed to understand this intent. Contemporary readers, unfamiliar with the declamatory tradition, have also misunderstood the intent of his controversia. Here, I compare Anselm's controversia with those found in Seneca the Elder and with the declamatory pedagogy of Quintilian, showing that Anselm was imitating a well-established tradition of educational practice as well as displaying his rhetorical artistry.