Rhetorica
1293 articlesSeptember 2014
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The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present ed. by Timothy M. Costelloe, and: Translations of the Sublime: The Early Modern Reception and Dissemination of Longinus’ Peri Hupsous in Rhetoric, the Visual Arts, Architecture and the Theatre ed. by Caroline van Eck, et al ↗
Abstract
Reviews 419 tional textual forms than they might have appeared when first becoming widely available and used in the 1990s. And yet, the contemporary history narrated here doesn't always seem right. McCorkle acknowledges that many digital rhetoricians often equate delivery with medium. He himself seems to equate them early in his book, in some of its opening sentences: “This book is about the moving parts of the rhetorical process: the raised arm, the clenched fist, the shifting counte nance, and (more recently) the array of typefaces, color palettes, graphics, background audio files, and other multimodal content used to help covey a given message to its intended audience" (1). Ultimately, however, the materi ality of digital interfaces is not embodiment, even if such interfaces remediate approaches, positions, and stances from embodied rhetorical performances. Late in the book, McCorkle acknowledges this: "In the era of digital writing, rhetoric has disembodied the canon of delivery" (160). Such disembodiment suggests that what is at stake in contemporary delivery is more than just an interplay of older media forms and newer media forms. As he puts it: "expanding the theoretical scope of delivery to include texts not uttered by the speaking body extends the conceptual language of the canon beyond the traditionallv understood constraints of space and time, making it a far richer part of the rhetorical process" (160). Yes, surely he's right. But perhaps digital delivery is not just disembodiment, or portends a new set of relations between communication and bodies? Such a question lies beyond the scope of McCorkle's book, but it's to his credit that his analysis leaves us wondering what new bodies of knowledge our digital technologies might deliver to us. Jonathan Alexander University of California, Irvine Costelloe, Timothy M., ed. The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 13 + 304 pp ISBN 978-0-521-14367-7; Eck, Caroline van, Stijn Bussels, Maarten Delbeke, Jurgen Pieters, eds. Translations ofthe Sublime: The Early Modern Recep tion and Dissemination of Longinus' Peri Hupsous in Rhetoric, the Visual Arts, Architecture and the Theatre. Leiden: Brill, 2012. xix + 272 pp. ISBN 978-90-04-22955-6 Just as aesthetics is undergoing something of a revival in classical studies, so too is the heritage of the sublime increasingly getting its due again. The two collections under review contribute mightily to both trends. And they do so above all by marshaling a strong army of scholars from a number of disciplines, from Classics and modern literatures to philosophy, geography, architecture and design, art history, theater, and rhetoric. The diversity pays off: the sublime is shown to flourish in each of these areas, 420 RHETORICA often unexpectedly, as if diffusing its radiant light into all conceivable corners of the modern world and into the present. If you had any doubt whether Longinus made an impact on modernity, you need look no further than here. Costelloe's volume, though not explicitly concerned with the reception of Longinus, is nonetheless heavily informed by this agenda. The Introduc tion and the first chapter ("Longinus and the Ancient Sublime" by Malcolm Heath) set the tone for the remaining chapters, which quickly rush into the eighteenth century, starting with Burke, Kant, representatives of the Scot tish Enlightenment (a refreshing change), French neoclassicists, and then the sublime of Lyotard and company, the most recent French heirs to Boileau and company. These essays constitute the first part of the collection, which offer less of a "Philosophical History of the Sublime" than a drastically fore shortened version of that history. The second part spreads out in fascinating ways to look at the sublime in the Netherlands and in America in the 18i/7 and 19f/z centuries, in the fields of the philosophy of nature and the environment, in religion, among British Romantics, and against the background of the fine arts question and in architecture. The most interesting essays are those that broach unfamiliar territory. The associationalism of Gerard, Karnes, Alison, and Stewart reconstructed by Rachel Zuckert and put in relation to the sub lime will likely send readers off to the library (or to Google) in search of X these intriguing figures, as will Eva Madeleine...
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Abstract
Thomas Hobbes is a severe critic of rhetoric but he is also a careful student and skillful practitioner of the art of persuasion. Many critics have therefore argued that Hobbes’s views of rhetoric are both conflicted and inconsistent. In contrast, I argue that Hobbes’s conception of rhetoric displays remarkable consistency. While he rejects the abuses of rhetoric abundant in political oratory he nevertheless embraces the power of eloquence. In Leviathan Hobbes reconciles his appreciation of eloquence with his distrust of oratory by refashioning rhetoric into a private, rather than public art, which fulfills many of the traditional duties of rhetoric.
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414 RHETORICA The focus of "Chapter 5 Giving and Getting Advice by Letter" is the way advice was offered as a gift to the recipient. This act of advice giving, though, was fraught with many perils. White's analysis of these perils shows encyclopedic knowledge of Cicero's social relationships and sensitive close reading. He shows how the advice giver had to balance the risk of bad advice with the opposite risk that bland generalities would be useless, and the hierarchical problem that while detailed and specific advice was the most useful gift, it could also appear condescending. Furthermore, advice given or received could implicate the interlocutors in each others' actions, leading to credit in the case of good results and discredit otherwise. Finally, "Chapter 6: Letter Writing and Leadership," shows the role of letters in the political events of 44 and 43, showing how letters functioned as part of political persuasion, influence peddling, and strategic communica tion. White shows how Cicero's letters help us understand his involvement in these events in a more personal and direct manner than the Philippic Orations and provide for us a rare opportunity to understand the positions, motivations, and maneuvers of the Roman political elite in a time of crisis. Overall, Cicero in Letters is an erudite, readable and original work that promises to be a major landmark in its area. Rhetorical scholars, however, will find frustrating a few significant lacunae in White's approach. The first, and most obvious, is that in explaining Ciceronian persuasion, White does not cite Cicero's rhetorical works at all, apparently thinking that Cicero's books on persuasion are of no use at all in helping us understand his per suasive practices. A second issue not addressed by White is the pedagogical circulation of letters. Roland Barthes famously said that "literature is what is taught" (1986). As many letter collections circulated in antiquity as peda gogical models, and Cicero's orations also functioned as models for students of rhetoric, it is puzzling that White does not address the possibility of peda gogical intentions and uses of the letters. Despite lack of direct interaction with rhetorical scholarship and rhetorical approaches to epistolography and epistolary theory, White's Cicero in Letters lays invaluable groundwork for future rhetorical studies of Ciceronian letters. Carol Poster York University Samuel McCormick, Letters to Power: Public Advocacy Without Pub lic Intellectuals. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011.197 pp. ISBN (Hardcover) 978-0-271-05073-7 Samuel McCormick s new volume holds two arguments in equipoise. As its title suggests, the first argument focuses on Letters to Power. It is an investigation of epistolary rhetoric, its form, its audiences, its strategies, and its cunning. Make no mistake, this is not your standard issue ars dictaininis. Reviews 415 Under McCormick s careful hand, the old art of letter writing is invested with a host of pressing lessons: about power, about the professoriate, and about the history of rhetoric. As his subtitle suggests, the second argument is about Public Advocacy Without Public Intellectuals. Here McCormick's concern is with learned intervention. In an age in which the classic role of the public intellectual is increasingly unavailable, McCormick asks what modes of resistance are available for today's institutionalized academics? The book's conceit, of course, is that these two arguments work in tandem: that the epistolary form provides rhetorical resources for learned advocacy. McCormick's account of epistolary rhetoric is grounded in the letters of Seneca the Younger, Christine de Pizan, Immanuel Kant, and Soren Kierkegaard. He argues that the epistolary form constitutes a "minor rhe toric" (13). It is a "minor" rhetoric not because letters are subordinate to treatises, but because the letters harbor the capacity to destabilize the hierar chy according to which treatises or tomes are more important than personal letters. Most importantly from my perspective, as a "minor rhetoric" the letter harbors the potential to reshape the history of rhetoric. From the per spective of the epistolary form, Seneca, Christine, Kant, and Kierkegaard now fit squarely in rhetorical history. Significantly, their place in such a history requires no recourse to the thematics of their thought; Seneca thematized retirement and Kierkegaard...
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Abstract
This essay argues that Edmund Spenser’s legal poem, the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie, considers how civil conflicts implicitly generate a basis for their own evaluation and resolution. To illustrate this idea, Spenser draws from a tradition of rhetorical argumentation stretching from Aristotle and Cicero to Rudolph Agricola and Philip Sidney This tradition emphasizes how fictions establish the shared questions that can create a deliberative context for equitable judgment when general law and particular case come into conflict. Dramatizing this rational process through an allegorical legal trial, Spenser illuminates how divergent judgments and actions become ethically legible to one another as parts of the same deliberative whole.
August 2014
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Abstract
This essay takes up a discussion concerning the 1929 debate between the philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger by reading it as an instatiation of an ongoing dilemma within the field of rhetoric. I argue that the Davos meeting may be productively read through the lens of rhetorical theory and that such a reading can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of this event. The essay concludes by making a case for Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms as a normative ground for a rhetorical theory whose central purpose is to construct a decent, cultured, cosmopolitan, critical humanism.
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Abstract
Pro Sulla §§18–19 demonstrates a tactic of self-depiction unique in Cicero's speeches; the orator represents an internal dialogue in which his natural kindness towards the Catilinarian Autronius is overcome by arguments that his audience can recognize as the prosecutor's stock tactics of emotional amplification prescribed in De Inventione. By ostentatiously persuading himself to sternness with the stock appeals designed to persuade a normative audience, the orator can justify his actions against the Catilinarians while asserting that his essential nature is kind and compassionate. This tactic is both essential for Cicero's persuasive strategy and useful for his broader self-depiction for the reading audience of the speech.
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Book Review| August 01 2014 Review: A History of Renaissance Rhetoric 1380–1620, by Peter Mack Peter Mack, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric 1380–1620 (Oxford–Warburg Studies), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 345 pp., ISBN: 978-0-19-959728-4 William P. Weaver William P. Weaver Baylor University, 1 Bear Place #97144, Waco, TX 76798, USA. w_weaver@baylor.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2014) 32 (3): 317–319. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2014.32.3.317 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation William P. Weaver; Review: A History of Renaissance Rhetoric 1380–1620, by Peter Mack. Rhetorica 1 August 2014; 32 (3): 317–319. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2014.32.3.317 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2014 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Review: <i>“Imprison'd Wranglers”: The Rhetorical Culture of the House of Commons, 1760–1800</i>, by Christopher Reid ↗
Abstract
Book Review| August 01 2014 Review: “Imprison'd Wranglers”: The Rhetorical Culture of the House of Commons, 1760–1800, by Christopher Reid Christopher Reid, “Imprison'd Wranglers”: The Rhetorical Culture of the House of Commons, 1760–1800, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 270 pp., ISBN: 978-0-19-958109-2 Katie S. Homar Katie S. Homar University of Pittsburgh, 526 Cathedral of Learning, 4200 Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15260-0001, USA. ksh19@pitt.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2014) 32 (3): 312–314. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2014.32.3.312 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Katie S. Homar; Review: “Imprison'd Wranglers”: The Rhetorical Culture of the House of Commons, 1760–1800, by Christopher Reid. Rhetorica 1 August 2014; 32 (3): 312–314. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2014.32.3.312 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2014 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Review: <i>Alexandre le Grand. Les risques du pouvoir, Textes philosophiques et rhétoriques</i>, by Laurent Pernot ↗
Abstract
Review of a book in which a selection of rhetorical and philosophical texts of Roman age concerning Alexander the Great is introduced, translated, and commented
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Review: <i>Metamorphoses of Rhetoric. Classical Rhetoric in the Eighteenth Century</i>, by Otto Fischer and Ann Öhrberg ↗
Abstract
Book Review| August 01 2014 Review: Metamorphoses of Rhetoric. Classical Rhetoric in the Eighteenth Century, by Otto Fischer and Ann Öhrberg Otto Fischer and Ann Öhrberg, eds., Metamorphoses of Rhetoric. Classical Rhetoric in the Eighteenth Century. (Studia Rhetorica Upsaliensia 3), Uppsala: Rhetoric at the Department of Literature, Uppsala University, 2011, 213 pp., ISBN: 978-91-980081-0-4. ISSN: 1102–9714 Merete Onsberg Merete Onsberg Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, Section of Rhetoric, University of Copenhagen, Karen Blixens Vej 4, DK-2300 Copenhagen S, DENMARK. onsberg@hum.ku.dk Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2014) 32 (3): 319–321. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2014.32.3.319 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Merete Onsberg; Review: Metamorphoses of Rhetoric. Classical Rhetoric in the Eighteenth Century, by Otto Fischer and Ann Öhrberg. Rhetorica 1 August 2014; 32 (3): 319–321. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2014.32.3.319 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2014 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Abstract
Rejecting rhetoric as a prescriptive system which obstructs creativity is an attitude found in writers from all epochs of literature. This essay looks at three writers from different periods, writing in different languages, whose hostile statements about rhetoric stand in stark contrast to their extensive and original use of its devices as an effective tool of literary creation. Goethe, Victor Hugo, and Mario Vargas Llosa each find innovative ways of integrating the ancient techniques and their described functions into their writing. This article identifies the rhetorical devices that play a crucial role in shaping each author's characteristic tone, and capture the spirit of their epoch.
June 2014
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Abstract
Pro Sulla §§18–19 demonstrates a tactic of self-depiction unique in Cicero’s speeches; the orator represents an internal dialogue in which his natural kindness towards the Catilinarian Autronius is overcome by arguments that his audience can recognize as the prosecutor’s stock tactics of emotional amplification prescribed in De Inventione. By ostentatiously persuading himself to sternness with the stock appeals designed to persuade a normative audience, the orator can justify his actions against the Catilinarians while asserting that his essential nature is kind and compassionate. This tactic is both essential for Cicero’s persuasive strategy and useful for his broader self-depiction for the reading audience of the speech.
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Abstract
Rejecting rhetoric as a prescriptive system which obstructs creativity is an attitude found in writers from all epochs of literature. This essay looks at three writers from different periods, writing in different languages, whose hostile statements about rhetoric stand in stark contrast to their extensive and original use of its devices as an effective tool of literary creation. Goethe, Victor Hugo, and Mario Vargas Llosa each find innovative ways of integrating the ancient techniques and their described functions into their writing. This article identifies the rhetorical devices that play a crucial role in shaping each author’s characteristic tone, and capture the spirit of their epoch.
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Metamorphoses of Rhetoric. Classical Rhetoric in the Eighteenth Century ed. by Otto Fischer, Ann Öhrberg ↗
Abstract
Reviews 319 mate surpassing by the same forces of Renaissance humanism that renewed its cultural lease in the Western world. William P. Weaver Baylor University Otto Fischer and Ann Ôhrberg, eds., Metamorphoses ofRhetoric. Clas sical Rhetoric in the Eighteenth Century. (Studia Rhetorica Upsaliensia 3), Uppsala: Rhetoric at the Department of Literature, Uppsala University, 2011, 213 pp., ISBN: 978-91-980081-0-4. ISSN: 1102-9714 As a result of the critique from grammarians and philosophers of the pre vious centuries, eighteenth century rhetoric can be said to undergo metamor phoses in several ways. Inspired by a new philosophical awareness of man's thought and language combined with an interest in conversational commu nication, works on style and taste came to the fore in all European countries. This volume presents important eighteenth century rhetorical works and their contexts in France, Germany, and Sweden. Two chapters deal with rhetoric's status in France. Marc André Bernier from Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières follows the changes through inventio: "Metamorphoses of the inventio in Eighteenth-Century France from Bernard Lamy to Jean-Francois Marmontel" (pp. 25-43). Here we find in ventio combined with creativity in Marmontel's poetics. This gives way to a cosmological inventio integrating nature, history, and words in an untra ditionally way stressing the infinite possibilities. In "Renouveau de la rhétorique et critique des théories classiques du lan gage" (pp. 45-69) Gabrielle Radica from Université de Picardie-Jules Verne in Amiens uses Etiene Bonnot de Condillac and Jean-Jacques Rousseau as examples. With illustrative citations from these two authors she presents the epistemological context for her conclusion: Condillac and Rousseau gave new life to the passions, their language and effect based on "fondements an thropologiques" (p. 64) - not a result of rhetoric as ars, but rather of a natural practice. One gets the impression that these passions, at least in a Condillac's pedagogical context, should always be polite. Regarding the beauty of style, he recommends two properties: "la netteté et le caractère" (p. 53). Anna Cullhed from Uppsala University studies Entwurfeiner Théorie und Literatur der schbnen Wissenschaften by Johann Joachim Eschenburg. Through the changes in the respective editions she follows the evolvement of belletrist rhetoric from the end of the eighteenth into the beginning of the nineteenth century (pp. 71-107). Eschenburg is a well-chosen demonstration of the growing tension between rhetoric and poetics. Interestingly enough, he is acquainted with the Scottish rhetoricians Campbell, Lord Karnes and Blair (p- 94). 320 RHETORICA The last four chapters by three scholars from Uppsala University and a Ph.D-student from Órebro University give an insightful picture of eigh teenth century rhetoric in Sweden. Here lies the book's main contribution to eighteenth century scholarship. Material from Swedish archives and press is made available to the public. Otto Fischer gives an overview of how the critique of rhetorical matters - for example, textbooks used in schools - led to a new return to antique authors (pp. 109-131). From his reading of pub lished as well as unpublished material, he gives a good impression of the inherent tension concerning rhetoric towards 1800: "to rescue eloquence we must do away with rhetoric, at least with rhetoric conceived of as theory and pedagogy." (pp. 120-21) Marie-Christine Skuncke is known within Nordic rhetoric for her book about Gustav Ill's rhetorical and political education. In "Appropriations of Political Rhetoric in Eighteenth-Century Sweden" (pp. 133-51), she returns to Gustav III focusing on his speech from 1772. This crucial speech ended an unruly, though politically free period and restored a powerful monarchy. Skuncke juxtaposes a critical pamphlet from the emerging middle class with the king's speech and find them both eloquent. Stefan Rimm's "Rhetoric, Texts and Tradition in Swedish 18th Century Schools" (pp. 153-72) is related to his dissertation on the subject. Read ers may already have some idea of Apthonius' progymnasmata in Swedish schools from papers at ISHR conferences. Rimm focuses on Vosius' Elementa Rhetorica analyzing several editions. To some degree Rimm underestimates the influence of belletrist rhetoric on school rhetoric at the end of the century, but he rightly warns us against...
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Alexandre le Grand. Les risques du pouvoir, Textes philosophiques et rhétoriques éd. par Laurent Pernot ↗
Abstract
314 RHETORICA cause Reid zzlook[s] askew at existing disciplinary histories" to reassemble the sometimes disparate people, texts, and institutions that comprised Parlia ment's rhetorical culture (Hawhee and Olson, "Pan-Historiography, p. 96). He recognizes multiple eighteenth-century disciplines at play in the print circulation of Parliament and enlists several contemporary disciplines to in terpret archives that complicate the purview of traditional scholarship about Parliament. In addition to history and rhetorical theory, Reid draws upon his background as a scholar of eighteenth-century literature, discussing, for instance, how Cowper, Samuel Johnson, and William Hazlitt criticized par liamentary oratory Complementing Matthew Bevis's study of nineteenthcentury literature and rhetoric, he shows "how the permeable boundaries between speech and print were related to those between politics and liter ature" because print media encouraged readers to imaginatively reconstruct parliamentary speech (Bevis, The Art of Eloquence, 2007, p. 23). Like Cow per liberating the "imprison'd wranglers," Reid gives voice to the variety of rhetorical activities surrounding the eighteenth-century Commons. With copious archival evidence and thoughtful deployment of recent historio graphic approaches, he sheds new light on the rhetorical practices of the eighteenth-century Parliament and its constituents. Katie S. Homar University ofPittsburgh Laurent Pernot (ed., trans., comm.), Alexandre le Grand. Les risques du pouvoir, Textes philosophiques et rhétoriques, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2013, XXIII + 242 pp., ISBN: 978-2-251-33967-2. Se fu il grande teatro ateniese del V secolo a. C. a mettere per primo al centro della scena la duplice veste della figura del monarca, sempre in bilico fra regalità e tirannide, fu uno storico del IV secolo, Teopompo, a far risaltare le luci e le ombre che si riverberavano da un personaggio storico, l'ingombrante padre di Alessandro, Filippo II di Macedonia, dando cosí vita a una nuova impostazione storiografica (cfr. L. Canfora, in C. Franco, Vita di Alessandro il Macedone, Palermo 2001, pp. 11-12). Sarebbe stato pero il figlio, il grande conquistatore del mondo, a prestarsi, piú di ogni altro, a un grandioso sviluppo di questa idea della compresenza di bene e male (peraltro connaturata alia visione greca delle cose fin da Hes. Op. 179): e quegli storici che ne raccontarono vita e imprese, e che eccellevano anche come scrittori (si pensi a Curzio Rufo), fecero di lui un ritratto, di perdurante influenza, caratterizzato da potenti chiaroscuri. Alessandro divenne cosí un paradigma del potere, e del suo buono o cattivo uso, soprattutto nei lunghi secoli in cui un potere supremo vi fu, incarnato da un imperatore, di volta in volta migliore o peggiore di chi l'aveva preceduto sul trono. Reviews 315 Nell originale scelta di testi greci e latini, di età impériale, che costituiscono il corpus di questo suggestivo piccolo libro dal titolo molto signifi cativo (Les risques du pouvoir), Laurent Pernot (LP) raccoglie e antologizza autori (Seneca padre, Dione di Prusa, Luciano; estratti di «une foule de déclamateurs grecs et latins, célèbres ou anonymes» ) che «se situent sur un double registre, celui de la philosophie et de la rhétorique à la fois» (p. XI-XII), e che hanno scritto di Alessandro Magno senza essere né storici né biografi. Apre il volumetto una breve premessa generale (Avant-propos) sui principi che hanno informato la selezione degli autori e dei testi e sul filo conduttore che idealmente li unisce (pp. IX-XVIII); la corredano alcuni ausili pratici per il lettore (un prospetto cronológico délia storia délia Macedonia fino alla morte di Alessandro e una cartina, ridotta all'essenziale, dell'itinerario délia sua grande spedizione in Asia). A ogni testo antico riportato, in una traduzione realizzata da LP appositamente per questo volume, viene premessa una Introduction, che dà notizie sull'autore e sul testo prescelto. Seguono due appendici su terni alquanto specialistici (pp. 163-170: I. La théorie des trois "dénions"; II. La fin énigmatique du quatrième Discours sur la Royauté) e una abbastanza ricca serie di note di carattere molto vario: sono per lo più informative ed esplicative, ma registrano anche puntualmente citazioni e allusioni presentí nei testi; non mancano, in taluni casi, quelle di carattere più specificamente filológico. Chiudono Popera una...
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Abstract
This essay takes up a discussion concerning the 1929 debate between the philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger by reading it as an instatiation of an ongoing dilemma within the field of rhetoric. I argue that the Davos meeting may be productively read through the lens of rhetorical theory and that such a reading can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of this event. The essay concludes by making a case for Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms as a normative ground for a rhetorical theory whose central purpose is to construct a decent, cultured, cosmopolitan, critical humanism.
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“Imprison’d Wranglers”: The Rhetorical Culture of the House of Commons, 1760–1800 by Christopher Reid ↗
Abstract
Reviews Christopher Reid, "Imprison'd Wranglers": The Rhetorical Culture ofthe House ofCommons, 1760-1800, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 270 pp., ISBN: 978-0-19-958109-2 As rhetoricians expand the parameters of rhetorical histories, the inter actions between politicians and the people on "Main Street" or "out of doors" become as important as the words of famous orators. In Imprison'd Wranglers, Christopher Reid extends this approach to the eighteenth-century British Parliament. He argues for a "rhetorical culture" surrounding the House of Commons in an era when politicians became public figures. According to Reid, new relationships developed between Members and constituents with the expansion of print culture: "eloquence was flowing outside the House, to be captured, admired, or caricatured in print, before flowing back in the form of pamphlets and newspaper reports... which were read in the Chamber " (p. 14). By tracing this flow through multiple institutions and media, he produces a comprehensive account of change and continuity in parliamentary oratory. The title of Reid's book comes from William Cowper's The Task (1785), in which the poet, reading newspaper reports of debates, longs to "set th' im prison'd wranglers free." While Cowper reconstructs orators' performances, Reid examines now MPs were metaphorically "imprisoned" in the "chain of newspaper mediations that brought speech events in Westminster" to distant constituents and reassesses the rhetorical dynamics of distributing parliamentary speech in print (p. 3). By addressing "the complex reciprocity between print and oratory" in late eighteenth-century Britain, Imprison'd Wranglers complements recent work by Carolyn Eastman (A Nation ofSpeechifiers , 2009) and Sandra Gustafson (Imagining Deliberative Democracy, 2011), who explore how printed American oratory fostered new political identities in the new nation and promoted new forms of rhetorical education at the turn of the nineteenth century (Eastman, p. 10). Reid likewise studies how print reconstructions of the British Commons "brought parliamentary debate onto a broader terrain of public argument," "permanently altered the rhetorical context" of political speech, and gave the people "a stake in Parliament" (Reid, p. 11, 75). To survey the breadth of Parliament's "rhetorical culture," Reid exam ines newspapers, pamphlets, letters, collections like William Cobbett's ParliaRhetorica , Vol. XXXII, Issue 3, pp. 312-323, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2014 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.2014.32.3.312. Reviews 313 ntaty History ofEngland, and satirical sketches (p. 3). The architecture of the Chamber, the classical curriculum, and the working conditions of newspaper reporters also come under his purview. He draws on political historians like David Cannadine and Joanna Innes but approaches parliamentary texts and practices as a historian of rhetoric. Reid compares parliamentary speaking techniques to classical and eighteenth-century rhetorical theories and ad dresses the challenges of working with transcripts of oral performances. For him, reporters transcripts matter less as accurate representations of speech than as efforts to represent "the House as a place of collective rhetorical action ... in which political arguments and meanings were forged" (p. 17). These archives, including the transcripts, the Chamber, and reporting practices, re veal how oratory circulated beyond the Chamber and brought constituents into the political nation. Imprison'd Wranglers comprises four sections: Part 1 (Chapter 2) ap plies Roxanne Mountford's "geography of a communicative event" to St. Stephen's Chapel, the home of the eighteenth-century Commons (p. 25). The three chapters of Part 2 discuss how Parliament reached the public through the "fictitious tribunals of the press" (Chapter 3), reporters who copied debates from memory (Chapter 4), and visual satirists like James Gillray (Chapter 5) (p. 75). In Part 3, Reid examines how MPs modified classical rhetorical practices including declamation (Chapter 6) and the con cept of ethos (Chapter 7) in the face of increasing publicity. Part 4 features a broader view of parliamentary rhetorical culture with a case study of the 1773 Lord Clive debates (Chapter 8) and an exploration of MPs' persuasive uses of quotation (Chapter 9). Reid concludes with...
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Abstract
Reviews 317 Peter Mack, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric 1380-1620 (OxfordWarburg Studies), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 345 pp ISBN: 978-0-19-959728-4 In A bdistoi i/ of Renaissance Rhetoric 2380—1620, Peter Mack expertly describes the fortunes of Renaissance rhetoric within its academic and textual settings. Rhetoric in the Renaissance was a school subject, mostly covered in the grammar schools, with secondary importance in the universities, and thousands of rhetorical textbooks from the period survive as testimony to its ascendancy within the liberal arts curriculum. With a dizzying command of technical detail, Mack has delved into this large and complex textual record and emerged with a synthesis that will be required reading for students of the subject. Beginning with a description of the most significant ancient treatises on rhetoric, followed by a chapter on the contributions of key fifteenth-century Italians (and one notable Cretan, George of Trebizond), Mack proceeds to a series of four chapters focused on teachers whose textbooks had an extraordinary impact on the theory and teaching of rhetoric in the sixteenth century: Rudolph Agricola, Erasmus, Melanchthon, and Ramus. The chapter on Melanchthon, the "dominant figure" of the years 1519-45 (p. 104), is filled out with sections on his chief students and followers. The chapter on Ramus (and his associate Omer Talon) gives a useful overview of the controversy and key combatants surrounding his polarizing reforms. With helpful tables outlining the contents of their principle writings on rhetoric, Mack charts their innovative and (again in the case of Ramus) agonistic adaptations of the classical program. The first half of the book is therefore devoted to the big players in the book market for Renaissance rhetoric - those whose work best adapted the classical program to the educational needs and occasions of the humanist school. Indeed, for much of the period that Mack describes, Renaissance rhetoric was a symbiosis of two types of books on rhetoric: classical (Ciceronian) treatises and humanist manuals. For most of the sixteenth century, there is a strong correlation between the numbers of editions of the Rhetorica ad Herennium (still generally attributed to Cicero in the period) and the most popular humanist treatises (pp. 30-2). Mack explains the apparent symbiosis by noting the frequent use of humanist treatises as a preliminary study, a prologue to the study of a full-length classical treatise. But after decades of steady demand, humanist manuals and classical treatises alike suffer steep declines in production after the 1560s. The cause of the sudden decline is not clear, though Mack offers a number of suggestions: the rising fortunes of Talon's rhetoric, which was not coupled to full-length treatises; new syntheses of classical and humanist rhetoric, such as found in the popular De arte rhetorica libri tres (1562) of the Jesuit educator Cyprian Soarez; the scholastic revival of the late-sixteenth century; or even the efficiency of the second-hand book market to meet continuing demand for humanist and classical rhetorics. 318 RHETORICA Renaissance rhetoric was equally tied up with the fortunes of the liberal arts, especially logic or dialectic. It is one of the virtues of HRR 1380— 1620 that it provides through the main part of the narrative a parallel account of the fortunes of both humanist rhetoric and dialectic. Melanchthon described his textbooks on rhetoric and dialectic as companion pieces, and even Ramus, who notoriously drew a sharp distinction between dialectic and rhetoric, distributing four of the five classical offices of rhetoric between them, insisted on the necessity and complementarity of both (pp. 142-5). Both rhetoric and dialectic were combined in a very influential method of critical reading, one of the uses of Renaissance rhetoric to which Mack is especially attentive. The parallel fortunes of rhetoric and dialectic in northern Europe that Mack tells in the first half of the book are complemented, in the second half, by a chapter on the fortunes of rhetoric in southern Europe in the sixteenth-century (chapter 8), and chapters on the contemporary fortunes of specialized rhetorical treatises: manuals of tropes and figures (chapter 10), letter-writing manuals (chapter 11), preaching manuals and legal di alectics (chapter 12), and vernacular rhetorics (chapter 13). In...
May 2014
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Book Review| May 01 2014 Review: The Genuine Teachers of This Art by Jeffrey Walker Walker, Jeffrey. The Genuine Teachers of This Art. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011. 356 pp., ISBN: 978-1-61117-016-0 Rhetorica (2014) 32 (2): 195–197. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2014.32.2.195 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Review: The Genuine Teachers of This Art by Jeffrey Walker. Rhetorica 1 May 2014; 32 (2): 195–197. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2014.32.2.195 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2014 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Review: Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women's Tradition, 1600–1900 by Jane Donawerth ↗
Abstract
Book Review| May 01 2014 Review: Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women's Tradition, 1600–1900 by Jane Donawerth Jane Donawerth, Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women's Tradition, 1600–1900. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. xi–xv +205 pp., ISBN: 978-0-8093-8630-7 Rhetorica (2014) 32 (2): 200–202. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2014.32.2.200 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Review: Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women's Tradition, 1600–1900 by Jane Donawerth. Rhetorica 1 May 2014; 32 (2): 200–202. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2014.32.2.200 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2014 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Book Review| May 01 2014 Review: Rhetoric and Medicine in Early Modern Europe by Stephen Pender and Nancy Struever eds. Stephen Pender and Nancy Struever eds, Rhetoric and Medicine in Early Modern Europe, Farnham: Ashgate, 2012, ix, 299 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4094-3022-6 Rhetorica (2014) 32 (2): 202–204. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2014.32.2.202 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Review: Rhetoric and Medicine in Early Modern Europe by Stephen Pender and Nancy Struever eds.. Rhetorica 1 May 2014; 32 (2): 202–204. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2014.32.2.202 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2014 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Book Review| May 01 2014 Review: Early Modern Women's Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty by Patricia Pender Patricia Pender, Early Modern Women's Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty (Early Modern Literature in History, eds. Cedric C. Brown and Andrew Hadfield), New York: Palgrave/MacMillan, 2012. 218 pp., ISBN: 978-0-230-36224-6 Rhetorica (2014) 32 (2): 204–207. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2014.32.2.204 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Review: Early Modern Women's Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty by Patricia Pender. Rhetorica 1 May 2014; 32 (2): 204–207. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2014.32.2.204 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2014 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Abstract
This article explores the instrumentality of traditional African drums in influencing human behavior, and debunks view-points held by some critics that these drums are mere instruments for entertainment, voodoo, or rituals. It argues that as cultural artifacts, the drums are a primal symbol (a speech surrogate form qualified as drum language) used for rhetorical purposes to influence social behavior, to generate awareness, and to prompt responses for the realization of personhood and the formation of group identity. This ascription of rhetorical functionality to the African drum-dance culture provides interesting insights into the nature of rhetorical performance in the non-Western world.
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Book Review| May 01 2014 Review: La dottrina dell'evidenza nella tradizione retorica greca e latina by Francesco Berardi Francesco Berardi, La dottrina dell'evidenza nella tradizione retorica greca e latina (Papers on Rhetoric. Monographs 3), Perugia: Editrice “Pliniana”, 2012, 242 pp., ISBN 978-88-97830-01-6 Rhetorica (2014) 32 (2): 197–200. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2014.32.2.197 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Review: La dottrina dell'evidenza nella tradizione retorica greca e latina by Francesco Berardi. Rhetorica 1 May 2014; 32 (2): 197–200. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2014.32.2.197 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2014 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Other| May 01 2014 Addresses of Contributors to This Issue Rhetorica (2014) 32 (2): 210–211. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2014.32.2.210 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Addresses of Contributors to This Issue. Rhetorica 1 May 2014; 32 (2): 210–211. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2014.32.2.210 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2014 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Book Review| May 01 2014 Review: Thomas De Quincey: British Rhetoric's Romantic Turn by Lois Peters Agnew Lois Peters Agnew, Thomas De Quincey: British Rhetoric's Romantic Turn, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. 165 pp., ISBN: 978-0-8043-3148-2 Rhetorica (2014) 32 (2): 207–209. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2014.32.2.207 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Review: Thomas De Quincey: British Rhetoric's Romantic Turn by Lois Peters Agnew. Rhetorica 1 May 2014; 32 (2): 207–209. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2014.32.2.207 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2014 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Abstract
Although much has been written about ancient rhetorical theories of example, few scholars have examined the subtypes of example contained in these ancient rhetorical theories. As a corrective to this scholarly blind spot, this article explores the lesser-known conceptual history of “comparison,” which Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian all theorize as a subtype of example. Taken together, their rhetorical theories suggest that arguments by comparison are hypothetical, contentious, indirect, interrogative, and frequently deceptive. Moreover, Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian all theorize comparison by calling attention to the persuasive artistry of Socrates, notably his use of arguments by comparison to provoke interlocutors without challenging them directly. Understanding and explaining these rhetorical theories of comparison is the primary task of this article.
March 2014
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Reviews 197 Walker completes his work with a subtle admonition coupled with a call to return to what has worked and what matters—an Isocratean model of training rhetors that eschews the place of impractical (high) theory (p. 280). While it's nearly impossible to pin down the most significant contribu tion from The Genuine Teaehers of This Art, Walker's opus goes a long way to resolve what Alan Gross has termed the "historical discontinuity" of the rhetoiical tradition, which results from what George Kennedy labels the technical, sophistic," and "philosophic" traditions by arguing at least in the Isocratean model, a tradition rooted in pedagogy, the tripartite distinction is a false one-all three coexisted happily and, importantly, effectively (Gross, pp. 32-33).' After all, as Walker not so subtly reminds us, "what makes rhetoric rhetoric is its teaching tradition, its function as an 'art of producing rhetors'" (p. 285). Kathleen Lamp Arizona State University Francesco Berardi, La dottrina dell'evidenza nella tradizione retorica greca e latina (Papers on Rhetoric. Monographs 3), Perugia: Editrice zzPliniana ", 2012, 242 pp., ISBN 978-88-97830-01-6 L'esigenza di una nuova monografía dedicata al tema studiatissimo dell'evidenza è opportunamente giustificata da Francesco Berardi (di seguito F. B.), che rileva due prospettive altrettanto parziali nella cospicua bibliografía sull'argomento: l'una, critico-letteraria, incentrata sulla tradi zione alessandrina; l'altra, tecnico-retorica, frammentata nelle tassonomie polimorfe ed eterogenee dei manuali greci e latini. Scopo del volume è dunque fare ordine in questa complessa tradizione e classificare le diverse forme dell'evidenza secondo le rispettive funzioni, seguendo il modo in cui sono state concepite e si sono quindi sviluppate nella precettistica antica (pp. 11-17). La distinzione terminológica preliminare tra ¿vspyaa, vivificazione del messaggio attraverso l'uso di metafore e similitudini che animano referenti inanimati, ed ¿vápyeia, evidenza pittorica realizzata mediante l'arcumulo di descrizioni denotative (pp. 19-39), permette di comprendere perché l'evidenza sia considerata virtù fondamentale della narrazione, improntata a descrizioni minuziose e realistiche. Ribaltando la communis opinio sulla base di una cronología rigorosa, F.B. dimostra come questo apporte giunga alia ]Alan G. Gross, "The Rhetorical Tradition," in Richard Graff, Arthur E Walzer, Janet M. Atwill, eds. The Viability ofthe Rhetorical Tradition (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). See also, George Kennedy. Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). 198 RHETORICA retorica dalle teorie poetiche e storiografiche, e non vice versa (pp. 41-49). Nel quadro dello stile semplice e disadorno, tale forma di evidenza pud trasformarsi, da semplice virtú narrativa deWinuentio, in qualité specifica delYelocutio. Questo processo tende poi a estendersi, al punto che, adop tando la dottrina dell'ornato stilistico e della figura-lumen, nelle Partitiones oratoriae Cicerone avrebbe per primo elevato chiarezza, brevità, crédibilité, evidenza, etopea e decoro al rango di parametri principali del discorso ora torio. Con Dionigi di Alicarnasso e Quintiliano questa evidenza si sarebbe ulteriormente connotata come frutto della collaborazione del destinatario del messaggio alla costruzione dell'illusione visiva (pp. 51-73). Infine, dallo schema accademico delle uirtutes elocutionis è probabile che sia germogliata la teoria delle categorie stilistiche (lôéoei) ove, nella prospettiva degli esiti finali dell'effetto visivo, l'evidenza è intesa essenzialmente come vigore espressivo funzionale alla purezza, alla bellezza, allô splendore, ecc. (pp. 75-88). E B. circoscrive a ragione tutti questi ambiti della dottrina retorica alio studio dell'evidenza corne effetto e li distingue dai casi in cui essa è causa di una rappresentazione mentale subordinata alla mozione degli affetti o all'ornato stilistico. Dopo aver ricordato i legami cognitivi tra cpavTaaioc e tolOoç secondo Aristotele e Quintiliano, E B. ricostruisce con grande precisione il ruolo delle circostanze (wpewpew), intese come forma più po tente di argomentazione e progressivamente adottate ai fini dell'amplificatio nell'esercizio di scrittura definito xoivôç tôtcoç dai progymnasmata. Poiché riguarda fatti gié accertati, quest'ultimo si colloca dopo la dimostrazione e tende dunque a corrispondere alla perorazione finale di un discorso. E B. istituisce cosí una convergenza tra i due settori, distinti dai fatto che, a differenza di quanto accade ne! zluogo comune', Pepilogo di un'orazione riguarda sempre...
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204 RHETORICA on the value for the human sciences of "contested concepts" and the endless debate which must go on around them. This collection provides models of different ways of studying the fas cinating parallelism between medicine and rhetoric. It shows how rhetorical knowledge can enhance our understanding of early modern medical and health-related works and it offers engaging readings of some very interesting little-known texts. Peter Mack Warburg Institute, London Patricia Pender, Early Modern Women's Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty (Early Modern Literature in History, eds. Cedric C. Brown and Andrew Hadfield), New York: Palgrave/MacMillan, 2012. 218 pp., ISBN: 978-0-230-36224-6 In Early Modern Women's Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty, Patricia Pender argues that the modesty topos frequent in early modern English women's works should not be read literally, but as "the very mark of liter ariness" and "early modern women's subtle and strategic self-fashioning" (3). In the introduction, Pender surveys earlier feminist criticism on modesty topoi that used this material to explain women's lower rate of publication, and argues that these critics have read the passages too literally, and, as a consequence, that we continue "to underrate [early modern women's] con siderable rhetorical ability and agency" (6). Pender's study reviews the use of modesty topoi in prefaces and writings by English authors Anne Askew, Katherine Parr, Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer, and Anne Bradstreet, and also examines what Pender sees as a general tendency "to read women's modesty tropes autobiographically" (7). Chapter 1 surveys advice for the deployment of modesty topoi in classi cal and Renaissance rhetorics: Cicero, Quintilian, Ad Herennium, Castiglione, George Puttenham, Abraham Fraunce, and John Hoskins. Especially helpful is the summary (pp. 22-24) of the flexible and varied forms of this rhetorical strategy: disavowal of authorship, remorse, belittling the achievement, lack of time for writing, writing only at the behest of another, role of compiler not author, apology citing utility of the subject, and, in general, writers' discounting of their abilities. Pender links the use of the modesty topos to early modern understanding of figures as "dissimulation" (borrowing from Puttenham) and early modern anxiety about "women's innate duplicity" (34). Pender, whose background is English literature not history of rhetoric, convincingly argues that for women, as well as for men, avowing modesty is often not an apology, but rather a display of rhetorical proficiency. In Chapter 2 Pender quite brilliantly uses John Bale's editing of Anne Askew s Examinations as an example of the emphasis on "collaborative co- Reviews 205 authorship (al) in the early modern history of the book. However, in stead of seeing Bale as supporting Askew's purpose, Pender searches for those places where Askew's words "exceed the frame that Bale provides for them, finding that Askew offers a "profoundly confident and combative self-representation under the guise of weak and humble woman" (49). This conclusion is not news in Askew criticism, although reading Askew through the rhetoric of modesty is innovative and helpful. It is disappointing that Pender did not follow through, though, on her initial observation. For ex ample, she argues that Bale misunderstands Askew's rhetoric of modesty (complimenting judges, humble submission, quoting authority) to circum vent her accusers (60-61), that Bale himself is misled by Askew's modesty into reading her as a weak woman made strong by God's grace (59-60): "[wjhan she semed most feble, than was she most stronge. And gladly she rejoiced in that weaknesse, that Christ's power myght strongelye dwell in her" (61). Here is a missed opportunity to argue, instead, for collaborative coathorship, to see that Bale does understand Askew, recognizing her wily use of Paul's celebration of the weak and foolish made strong and wise by Christ (1 Corinthians 1:27—a celebration that Erasmus had famously deployed in The Praise of Folly). In Chapter 3, Pender suggests that focusing on modesty rhetoric in Katherine Parr's Prayers or Medytacions refines "our understanding of her development of a degendered, generically-human speaking subject" (72). But, suggests Pender, although Parr does not apologize for her sex, substi tuting the...
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Reviews Walker, Jeffrey. The Genuine Teachers ofThis Art. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011.356 pp., ISBN: 978-1-61117-016-0 Walker s 1 he Genuine Tenehers of This Art takes its title from a line in Cicero s De orntore in which Antonius attempts to delineate "inexperienced teachers ' who do not train rhetors like Aristotle from sophists like Isocrates who train skilled speakers (pp. 5,44). The title line frames the major argument of the book—that training rhetors, that is, teaching is the unifying element of rhetoric that brings together strains of "discourse, practices, analysis, [and] teaching" (p.l). Walker claims scholars of rhetoric have much overlooked the "school masters." His attempt to correct this omission establishes Isocrates as the founder of the sophistic paideia, which Walker traces from the fourth century BCE, through the Hellenistic period and stasis theory, the late Repub lic in Cicero's De orntore, and finally into the Second Sophistic in the works of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Through this pedagogical history, Walker ar gues, that for Isocrates the "handbook" (teehne) and sophistic traditions were one, effectivelv decentering the "philosophic" tradition. There are too manv high points in The Genuine Teachers of This Art, particularly' for scholars of the history of rhetoric and teachers of rhetoric and composition, to summarize here but permit me to try to touch on a few. Walker's first chapter, a (counter) reading of Cicero's De orntore, begins by classifying Aristotle's rhetoric as primarily interested in "judgment and theory" as opposed to "civic deliberation" and therefore largely outside the realm of training rhetors (pp. 19, 22). Walker makes a brief but interesting argument that Antonius' topics are not from Aristotle but rather are closer to Isocrates' ideai, arguing Aristotle is primarily referenced for the sake of authority (pp. 23, 30-1, 48). Ultimately, Walker argues what Cicero's Crassus and Antonius finally agree on—broad experience—is fundamentally Isocratean (pp. 41, 53, 56). The claim that "there was a teehne of Isocrates, and that it probably was the ancestor of the later sophistic technai” concludes Walker's second chapter (p 90). In order to advance the possibility of an Isocratean teehne, Walker must refute several lines of argument prevalent in the field, specifically that if Isocrates did write a teehne, it was more likely a collection of example speeches, that the teehne attributed to Isocrates was written by a "younger Rhetorica, Vol. XXXII, Issue 2, pp. 195-211, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . C2014 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.2014.32.2.195. 196 RHETORICA Isocrates/' and that it was against Isocrates' own philosophy to write a handbook of precepts. These lines of argument, predominantly advanced by Karl Barwick, though fairly broadly accepted, are refuted by Walker at length, in part, by using parallel case based on other sophistic technai and, most interestingly, by suggesting two definitions of techne, which Walker distinguishes with a subscript to differentiate a non-creative, rule driven art with a more or less guaranteed product from a creative, methodological driven art with the possibility of a successful outcome produced by a skilled practitioner (pp. 63-75). The following chapter takes in an in-depth look at what a techne of Isocrates might have looked like with Walker concluding that the techne likely had two main parts, "the pragmatikos topos [concerned with inquiry and invention] and the lektikos topos [concerned with style] and possibly ... an organized set of progymnasmata" (p. 154). While many of Walker's conclusions in this chapter suggest the techne probably looked similar to the Rhetoric to Alexander, this third chapter is a fascinating look inside Isocrates' pedagogy. These two chapters on Isocrates are likely the most controversial in the book, and while Walker admits he has offered no "irrefutable" evidence of a techne of Isocrates, he does marshal a persuasive case based on available evidence, however scant. The Fourth Chapter, "In the Garden of...
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This article explores the instrumentality of traditional African drums in influencing human behavior, and debunks viewpoints held by some critics that these drums are mere instruments for entertainment, voodoo, or rituals. It argues that as cultural artifacts, the drums are a primal symbol (a speech surrogate form qualified as <i>drum language)</i> used for rhetorical purposes to influence social behavior, to generate awareness, and to prompt responses for the realization of personhood and the formation of group identity. This ascription of rhetorical functionality to the African drum-dance culture provides interesting insights into the nature of rhetorical performance in the non-Western world.
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Abstract
Although much has been written about ancient rhetorical theories of example, few scholars have examined the subtypes of example contained in these ancient rhetorical theories. As a corrective to this scholarly blind spot, this article explores the lesser-known conceptual history of "comparison," which Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian all theorize as a subtype of example. Taken together, their rhetorical theories suggest that arguments by comparison are hypothetical, contentious, indirect, interrogative, and frequently deceptive. Moreover, Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian all theorize comparison by calling attention to the persuasive artistry of Socrates, notably his use of arguments by comparison to provoke interlocutors without challenging them directly. Understanding and explaining these rhetorical theories of comparison is the primary task of this article.
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Reviews 207 some women to break the written silence of earlier times"(Travitsky, xviii). How much more accurate would Pender's introduction have been, had she used the modesty trope of conversation instead of the combative figure of the crow. Jane Donawerth University ofMaryland Lois Peters Agnew, Thomas De Quincey: British Rhetoric's Romantic Turn, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. 165 pp., ISBN: 978-0-8043-3148-2 Although rhetoricians often stress the lack of innovation in early nine teenth-century rhetorical theory and practice, Lois Agnew shows through the case of Romantic author Thomas De Quincey that rhetoric was still a ver satile resource for literary authors in the period. De Quincey, best known for Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822), redefines rhetoric as "a detached investigation of multiple perspectives" (p. 10), and Agnew examines his mul tifaceted theory and practice in her monograph. Extending her conclusion from Outward, Visible Propriety (2008), Agnew approaches De Quincey as an example of "rhetoric's transition to the modern era" from a unifying civic discourse to varied arts of style (p. 1). In this monograph, she builds on Jason Camlot's argument that "a previously coherent tradition of prag matic rhetoric is ... redistributed into the diverse localized sites of individual [nineteenth-century] periodicals" and traces how De Quincey revises the the ory and practice of rhetoric in his career as a magazine contributor? Because De Quincey demonstrates that rhetoric "need not be connected to practical decision making," Agnew argues that he reinvents rhetoric for the modern world as a form of intellectual inquiry and multiperspectival display (p. 15). For Agnew, De Quincey is a rhetorician because he treats writing as social interaction even though he divorces rhetoric from political ends: His "perspective on language and public life is grounded in classical rhetorical traditions, yet radically distinct from those traditions in ways that reflect his attention to the cultural circumstances in which he finds himself" (p. 2). De Quincey, according to Agnew, synthesizes classical rhetoric, eighteenthcentury Scottish rhetorics, and Romantic poetics. Because he combines tradi tions to create an art of rhetoric that orchestrates multiple perspectives, Ag new compares De Quincey's "dialogic" rhetoric to the theories of twentiethcentury literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin. Like Bakhtin's ideal novelist, De Quincey "produces a vision of rhetoric ... in which the speaker/writer interacts constantly with listeners who hold differing points of view and 1 J- Camlot, Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic: Sincere Mannerisms (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2008), 14. 208 RHETORICA imaginatively integrates those perspectives" (p. 13). De Quincey anticipates the multivocal techniques of Victorian fiction when he extends rhetoric to the interplay of multiple perspectives in early nineteenth-century Britain. In the first chapter, Agnew introduces De Quincey and the Romantic era to rhetoricians. She makes a convincing case for the ubiquity and utility of rhetoric in this period: Not only was rhetoric an available resource for classically-educated authors, but they also needed rhetoric to respond to new audiences, publishing practices, and political situations. Agnew recounts elements of De Quincey's life that are familiar to Romanticists, like his piecemeal education, opium addiction, and tense relationship with William Wordsworth, and explains that De Quincey responds to a society "embroiled in the conflicting impulses of market-driven production and intellectual play" (p. 41). The instabilities of early nineteenth-century British society demanded a rhetorical approach to authorship and a reconsideration of rhetoric's functions, and De Quincey's life and writing exemplify these changes. In the next three chapters, Agnew examines De Quincey's "dialogic" rhetoric. She "track[s] key themes that emerge through the course of De Quincey's writings," including an embrace of open, philosophical questions over limited, political cases; an emphasis on the "eddying of thoughts" over the communication of facts; and a conversational dynamic that makes readers fellow participants in the discourse (p. 103). Agnew recovers his rhetorical theory from scattered, occasional essays like a review of Whatley's Elements ofRhetoric (1828), "Style" (1840), and "On Language" (1847). While De Quincey performs what he theorizes in these pieces, Agnew applies his theories to famous works such as;Confessions. For example, he "creates a narrative in which the...
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In this paper I examine the application of the status-theory in some controversiae of Seneca the Elder's declamatory collection. The analysis of a number of significant examples shows that the declaimers not only perfectly mastered this complex rhetorical doctrine, but were also able to discuss some points of it and in case modify it, adapting the rules given by the rhetorical handbooks to the specific requirements of each single case. This leads us to the conclusion that the didactic value of the declamatory exercise never failed entirely, and in the rhetorical schools of the early imperial age it remained the fundamental instrument by which future orators learnt to put into practice the precepts transmitted in the rhetorical teaching, not only for the elocutio, but also and especially for the inventio.
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200 RHETORICA in un determinato ámbito della precettistica retorica, collegando le finalitá e i procedimenti espressivi che le sono propri e non altri (pp- 212—213 n. 814). Alessandro Garcea Paris Jane Donawerth, Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Pall ofa Women's Tradition, 1600-1900. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. xi-xv +205 pp., ISBN: 978-0-8093-8630-7 In her introduction, Jane Donawerth identifies the research gap that her new book seeks to address. Over the past thirty years, historians have inves tigated women's involvement in rhetorical theory in terms of its absence— "why there wasn't any" (p. 2). Furthermore, much of the conversation has tended to underscore rhetorical practices and not rhetorical theories. Don awerth asserts that scholars need to ask new questions: "How did women theorize communication, and if they did not do it in rhetoric and composition textbooks, where did they do it" (p. 2). Women theorized rhetoric based on their gendered experiences and on the genres that they were reading. Thus, women's rhetorical theory has centered on conversation—not oratory—as the basis for all discourse. In significant ways, Donawerth's book extends and complements her 2002 anthology, Rhetorical Theory by Women before 1900, which made avail able to scholars, teachers, and students extensive primary texts of women's rhetorical theory. Her new book builds on this collection by including an analysis of conversation as an important tradition in women's rhetorical the ory. In addition, she incorporates new women, particularly those defending women's right to preach, and she provides more analysis of the historical context and its influence in shaping this aspect of women's rhetoric. To construct her argument, Donawerth examines women's rhetorical theory from a variety of sources, including humanist works defending women's education, conduct books, defenses of women's preaching, and elocution manuals. In so doing, she introduces readers to the works of various women theorists during this three-hundred-year span. However, she contends that in the 1850s, when women started writing composition and rhetoric textbooks for male as well as female students, these "theo ries of conversation-based discourse gradually disappeared, or rather, were absorbed into composition pedagogy" (p. 2). To theorize rhetoric in this way, in her introduction Donawerth clarifies that she defines rhetorical theory as "writing about the nature and means of communication" (p. 7). She also situates her argument, outlines her historical method, and explains how she defines other terms relevant to her study. With its detailed framing of Donawerth's argument, the introduction should be helpful to those just beginning to navigate the field and to engage in these Reviews 201 discussion. Donawerth s book and several mentioned in her introduction are from the Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms series, which demonstrates the significant scholarly contribution this series has made. Given the constraints of this review, I will focus on the first and fourth chapters since they feature a sampling of the diverse texts examined, and the fourth chapter aligns with some of my research interests. Chapter 1 provides a start for the book's focus by analyzing women's theorizing of conversation in humanist dialogues and defenses of women's education during the seven teenth century. It does so by examining the writing of Madeleine de Scudéry, Margaret Cavendish, Bathsua Makin, and Mary Astell. During this period, humanist and classical rhetorical education were available only for men; however, there were some "exceptional women" who managed to receive such training (p. 19). With this education, these women fashioned theories of communication, and they published in humanist genres, including "dia logues, epistles, print orations, and encyclopedias" (p. 19). Donawerth argues that these four women theorists "radically revised classical rhetoric by cen tering their theories on conversation rather than public speech" (p. 39). In so doing, they challenged some of the limits conventionally associated with gendered discourse of this period. in chapter four, Donawerth contends that sentimental culture, associ ated with "the public display of emotion" and with women, found its perfect outlet in elocution (p. 105). The chapter investigates the ways nineteenthcenturv elocution manuals incorporated into this tradition of conversation "a theoretical consideration of women's bodies...
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202 RHETORICA mainstream composition studies, especially in the model of conversation for pedagogy" (p. 127). Examples of an exception as well as this merging are explored in texts by women such as Mary Augusta Jordan and Gertrude Buck, respectively. As noted, the conclusion argues that the tradition s de cline is linked to women starting to write rhetoric and composition textbooks for mixed-gender audiences. I would have liked to see more discussion of this claim, particularly related to the discussion of Buck. For instance, Buck's texts emerged directly from the all-women classes she taught at Vassar Col lege, and many examples in her books are targeted specifically at women. Although Buck's case may have been atypical, perhaps these differences could have been explored. In addressing new questions related to women's theorizing of rhetoric, Conversational Rhetoric is to be commended for enacting the new directions that historians and feminist scholars in the field have urged (Royster and Kirsch 2012; Gold 2012). In so doing, it illuminates a significant tradition of women theorizing conversation and introduces us to women with whom we may be unfamiliar. The book also suggests the need to investigate other examples of how women have theorized conversation and other potential ways that women have conceptualized communication. In spanning three hundred years and investigating such a wide array of texts, the book also is exemplary in terms of the breadth and depth that Donawerth brings to such an analysis. Suzanne Bordelon San Diego State University Stephen Pender and Nancy Struever eds, Rhetoric and Medicine in Early Modern Europe, Farnham: Ashgate, 2012, ix, 299 pp., ISBN: 9781 -4094-3022-6 Rhetoric and Medicine have been compared since antiquity. Both are eminently practical arts, requiring their practitioners to work with the vari ability of human experience, on the basis of a growing but still contestable body of theory. Both are intimately concerned with persuasion and with the emotions. Rhetoric and Medicine in Early Modern Europe is a collection of ten essays, introduction and afterword, based on panels from the 2003 annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America. This is a thought-provoking collection, including some excellent essays, which explores the relations be tween medicine and rhetoric from many different points of view and in relation to a range of different types of subject-matter. Stephen Pender in troduces the collection with an analysis of the physician's different needs for persuasion (rational and emotional). His own essay "Between Medicine and Rhetoric (revised from his 2005 article in Early Science and MLedicine} surveys the relations between rhetoric and the art of medicine in Plato's Phaedrus and Reviews 203 Gorgias, Aristotle s Rhetoric and the early modern English physician John Cotta's A Short Discoverie of the Unobserved Dangers ofSeverall Sorts ofIgnorant and Unconsiderate Practisers of Physicke in England (1612). Focusing on the uncertainty of medical diagnosis and treatment enables Cotta to align the physician's pragmatic flexibility with the prudence of the orator: "a practical, prudential interpretation of probable signs directed toward intervention.. .is at the heart of medical practice" (p. 59). Jean Dietz Moss analyses five local physician's descriptions of the health giving properties of the waters of Bath, which aimed to promote the attrac tions of the spa, written between 1572 and 1697. She analyses the rhetori cal techniques employed by these publicists, discussing their deployment of narratives, authorities and evidence in order to extol the divinely pro vided health-giving properties of the spa. Richard Sugg analyses the use of the metaphor of anatomy in a range of sixteenth and seventtenth-century titles. Andrea Carlino resituates Andreas Vesalius within the humanist mi lieu of 1540s Padua and particularly within the Accademia degli Infiammati. He argues that the title of Vesalius's famous work De humani corporis fab rica libri septeni (1543) alludes through the word fabrica both to Cicero's De natnra deorum and to architectural works such as Sebastiano Serlio's Sette libri d'Architettnra. He documents Vesalius's connections with members of the Accademia degli infiammati, including a letter to Benedetto Varchi in which he mentions the recent publication of Daniele Barbaro's commentary on Aristotle's Rhetoric. He...
February 2014
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Abstract
Durant les dernières décennies, la recherche sur la rhétorique en Bulgarie s'est intensifiée, ce qui est la conséquence à la fois de l'intérêt porté à la rhétorique sur le plan international et de raisons propres à l'histoire du pays. Les chercheurs bulgares ont réexaminé divers aspects du discours et ont ouvert de nouveaux champs d'enquête et de publication. Le présent article propose un panorama des progrès récents de la recherche bulgare dans le domaine de la rhétorique ancienne et moderne, depuis l'Antiquité gréco-romaine et orientale jusqu'à la période contemporaine, et présente un choix de publications parues dans ce domaine.
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Book Review| February 01 2014 Review: Between Worlds: The Rhetorical Universe of Paradise Lost by William Pallister William Pallister, Between Worlds: The Rhetorical Universe of Paradise Lost (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). ISBN 978-0-8020-9835-1; Daniel Shore, Milton and the Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). isbn: 978-1-107-02150-1 Rhetorica (2014) 32 (1): 88–91. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2014.32.1.88 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Review: Between Worlds: The Rhetorical Universe of Paradise Lost by William Pallister. Rhetorica 1 February 2014; 32 (1): 88–91. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2014.32.1.88 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2014 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Book Review| February 01 2014 Review: Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric by Paddy Bullard Paddy Bullard, Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 272 pp. ISBN 978-1-107-00657-7 Rhetorica (2014) 32 (1): 85–88. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2014.32.1.85 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Review: Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric by Paddy Bullard. Rhetorica 1 February 2014; 32 (1): 85–88. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2014.32.1.85 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2014 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Review: Ramus, Pedagogy and the Liberal Arts: Ramism in Britain and the Wider World by Stephen J. Reid and Emma Annette Wilson, eds. ↗
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Book Review| February 01 2014 Review: Ramus, Pedagogy and the Liberal Arts: Ramism in Britain and the Wider World by Stephen J. Reid and Emma Annette Wilson, eds. Stephen J. Reid and Emma Annette Wilson, eds., Ramus, Pedagogy and the Liberal Arts: Ramism in Britain and the Wider World (Ashgate) 2011. 256 pp. ISBN: 978-0-7546-6794-0 Rhetorica (2014) 32 (1): 83–84. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2014.32.1.83 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Review: Ramus, Pedagogy and the Liberal Arts: Ramism in Britain and the Wider World by Stephen J. Reid and Emma Annette Wilson, eds.. Rhetorica 1 February 2014; 32 (1): 83–84. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2014.32.1.83 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2014 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Abstract
In Golden Age Spain, religious art functioned within the boundaries of a time-honoured corpus of ecclesiastical and rhetorical theory on the image, which attempted to prevent immoderate iconic veneration aided by metaphors taken from the well-known world of portraiture, themost imitative of pictorial genres. Counter-Reformation theologians and preachers also sought to reduce the artwork's impact on irrational sensibility by urging artists to avoid the undesirable effects of awkward or lascivious images. This article will explore howthe laws of decorumequipped Post-Tridentine Spanish imagery with aesthetic values meant to reconcile delectare with docere and movere, and how this finally resulted in a dispute between high culture and popular taste, between an art favored by royal collectors (painting) and another much more generalized as a result of ecclesiastical patronage (sculpture).
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Book Review| February 01 2014 Review: The Complete Prose Works of John Milton by Don M. Wolfe The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82); Raphael Lyne, Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 267 pp. ISBN 978-1-107-00747-5; Jenny C. Mann, Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare's England, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2012. 249 pp. ISBN 978-0-8014-4965-9; Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare's Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. 202 pp. ISBN 978-0-8122-4378-9; Garry Wills, Rome and Rhetoric: Shakespeare'sJulius Caesar, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011. 186 pp. ISBN 978-0-300-15218-0 Rhetorica (2014) 32 (1): 91–97. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2014.32.1.91 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Review: The Complete Prose Works of John Milton by Don M. Wolfe. Rhetorica 1 February 2014; 32 (1): 91–97. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2014.32.1.91 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2014 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Review: Gabriele Pedullà (a cura di), Parole al potere: Discorsi politici italiani by Gabriele Pedullà ↗
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Book Review| February 01 2014 Review: Gabriele Pedullà (a cura di), Parole al potere: Discorsi politici italiani by Gabriele Pedullà Gabriele Pedullà (a cura di), Parole al potere: Discorsi politici italiani, Milano: Rizzoli BUR, 2011. CCXXII + 870 pp. ISBN978-88-17-02520-1 Rhetorica (2014) 32 (1): 75–79. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2014.32.1.75 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Review: Gabriele Pedullà (a cura di), Parole al potere: Discorsi politici italiani by Gabriele Pedullà. Rhetorica 1 February 2014; 32 (1): 75–79. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2014.32.1.75 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2014 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
January 2014
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Ramus, Pedagogy and the Liberal Arts: Ramism in Britain and the Wider World ed. by Stephen J. Reid and Emma Annette Wilson ↗
Abstract
Reviewed by: Ramus, Pedagogy and the Liberal Arts: Ramism in Britain and the Wider World ed. by Stephen J. Reid and Emma Annette Wilson Maureen Fitzsimmons Stephen J. Reid and Emma Annette Wilson, eds., Ramus, Pedagogy and the Liberal Arts: Ramism in Britain and the Wider World (Ashgate) 2011. 256 pp. ISBN: 978-0-7546-6794-0 Maureen Fitzsimmons University of California, Irvine Copyright © 2014 by the International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved
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Abstract
Durant les dernières décennies, la recherche sur la rhétorique en Bulgarie s’est intensifiée, ce qui est la conséquence à la fois de l’intérêt porté à la rhétorique sur le plan international et de raisons propres à l’histoire du pays. Les chercheurs bulgares ont réexaminé divers aspects du discours et ont ouvert de nouveaux champs d’enquête et de publication. Le présent article propose un panorama des progrès récents de la recherche bulgare dans le domaine de la rhétorique ancienne et moderne, depuis l’Antiquité gréco-romaine et orientale jusqu’à la période contemporaine, et présente un choix de publications parues dans ce domaine.
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Reviews 85 Paddy Bullard, Edmund Burke nud the Art of Rhetoric, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 272 pp. ISBN 978-1-107-00657-7 In Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric Paddy Bullard "proposes a theory of Burke's rhetoric" (p. 3). Bullard approaches the question "of the artfulness with which Burke wrote and spoke" (p. 21) not by superimposing the \ ocabularv of classical rhetorical handbooks on Burke's performances; not by using Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful as a source of technical, critical vocabulary; but bv looking to Burke's oeuvre to identify the rhetorical questions that preoccupied Burke and how he addressed the questions throughout his career. Readers will witness enactment of Burkean rhetorical virtues as Bullard examines Burke from perspectives as broad as classical and early modern thinking about rhetoric, to the practical occasions and stakes of Burke's political writing and speaking, to the textual dynamics of his rhetoric. The result is a compelling analysis of Burke's rhetoric that deserves to be read by scholars of eighteenth-century rhetorical theories and practices, and by any scholar interested in generating theory based on practice—indeed anv scholar who wants to read exemplary rhetorical criticism. Broadly speaking, the central question or issue that preoccupies Burke is the nature of the speaker-audience relationship. Bullard describes Burke's rhetoric as a "rhetoric of character," concerned with "who is addressing whom, on behalf of whom" (p. 5; see also pp. 7, 11). Bullard captures the dynamic nature of the relationship when he describes Burke's art of rhetoric as "an art of moral equipoise" (p. 10; see also p. 22). Put differently, "A well-established ethos giv es a speaker licence to be urgent, to abjure false delicacy, and to resist neutrality, and it allows him to do all this without renouncing the claims of equity" (p. 9). The speaker earns the audience's trust by displaying knowledge of characters and his own political judgment, and the audience grants the speaker a license to advocate with zeal. Bullard develops his analysis and argument in an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion. In the introduction Bullard defends his objects of study and critical vocabulary. He chooses to focus on "the relatively small number of treatises and speeches that Burke authorized as his own (either through publication or private endorsement), while the texts of his publicly reported speeches are treated with caution" (p. 21). Readers will almost certainly find the arguments for the selection to be sound, the central one being that Burke calls for attention to, and Bullard attends to, stylistic detail because this is where the action is—where audiences experience rhetorical effects. In chapters 1 and 2, Bullard covers standard topics in writing the history of rhetoric, namely Burke's intellectual context for thinking about rhetoric and the place of rhetoric in Irish education. This is not a routine history of rhetoric that broadly covers the usual suspects but instead focuses on clas sical, seventeenth-century and contemporary writers who explored the idea that is at the heart of Burke's rhetoric of character: that orators are best able to 86 RHETORICA secure a good moral character in the minds of their audience by demonstrat ing their understanding of what moral character is" (p. 28). Bullard covers Aristotle's treatment of rhetorical ethos and its guises in Roman thinkers in cluding Cicero and Quintilian. He uses Locke as a critical prompt to discuss writings by Hobbes, Edward Reynolds, and La Bruyère and to trace "how the rhetorical category of ethos returned to relevance during the seventeenth century as part of a popularized prudential moralism" (p. 42) in history, psy chology, and character-writing. He traces the Aristotelian model's adaptions in writings about pulpit eloquence and their secular processes in Shaftesbury and Smith. Similarly, the history of eighteenth-century rhetoric education among English speakers is not commonplace but instead advances the claim that "there are several important respects in which the Irish, rather than the Scots, should be seen as the real pioneers of this new development ["the study of literature in modern vernacular languages"] in the art of rhetoric" (p...
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Between Worlds: The Rhetorical Universe of Paradise Lost by William Pallister, and: Milton and the Art of Rhetoric by Daniel Shore ↗
Abstract
88 RHETORICA who seek a history of rhetorical theory that teaches, delights, and moves will find it here. Beth Innocenti University ofKansas William Pallister, Between Worlds: The Rhetorical Universe of Paradise Lost (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). ISBN 978-0-80209835 -1; Daniel Shore, Milton and the Art ofRhetoric (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 2012). isbn: 978-1-107-02150-1 Two books published in the last few years each have much to offer on the subject of how the English poet and statesman John Milton (1608-74) employed rhetoric in his various works and particularly in his epic poem Paradise Lost. William Pallister reminds or perhaps informs Miltonists of the centrality of rhetoric in the Renaissance and its utility both for persuasion and morality. He argues that contemporary criticism has overlooked the formal poetic and rhetorical presentation of Milton's ideas (7-8). Pallister's particu lar focus is Paradise Lost and the rhetorical issue of future contingency, which he traces through Milton's epic poem in terms of three distinct rhetorics, of hell, of heaven, and of paradise, the paradisal one being the most rhetorical because the most contingent. Pallister divides his book into two equal halves. His first five chapters are heavily documented demonstrations of Renaissance rhetoric, its clas sical roots, and Milton's engagement with it. In chapter one, Pallister first identifies contingency and probability as key issues in deliberative rhetoric and locates their discussion in such authors as Augustine, Boethius, Ock ham, Aquinas, Valla, Pomponazzi, Erasmus, Luther, and Calvin. He then demonstrates how Milton's theological concerns for free will in Paradise Lost are reflected in his preservation therein of future contingency. Chap ter two surveys the classical rhetoricians who had written on contingency, such as Isocrates, Aristotle, and Cicero, since Milton cites these authorities in his short pedagogical tract, Of Education (1644) rather than any of the educational theorists of his own period. Chapter three surveys Renaissance rhetoric in terms of its focus on eloquent style and its prescribed utility in politics, ethics, poetry, and theology, and in chapter four demonstrates how Milton's own prose identifies eloquence as "none . . . but the serious and hearty love of truth" (80; An Apology against a Pamphlet, Yale Prose 1: 948-49), a love that Pallister associates with Milton's "humanistic faith in the power of eloquence to captivate its audience and compel them to accept Christian values" (10). Chapter five considers rhetoric's relation to Christian theology and particularly the Bible as a rhetorical text, preaching as a rhetorical art, and God as a rhetorical and especially a poetic speaker. Reviews 89 With this foundation laid, Pallister proceeds in the second half of his book to investigate the rhetorical nature of Paradise Lost. In chapter six, he takes us to the poitions of Milton s epic that take place in heaven. Since there is little contingency possible in God's omniscience, the master tropes of hea\ en aie polugtoton and especiallv conduplica110, and the favored genus dieendi is epideixis, especially praise. Chapter seven surveys Satan's presentation as an orator in various authors before and including Milton, whose Satan is an accomplished orator, and chapter eight identifies the master trope of hell as demotes, or rhetorical cleverness, by which Satan not only deceives others but “tricks himself into seeing a contingent future that no longer exists for the defeated angels" (176). Chapters nine and ten treat rhetoric in the Carden of Eden, “the hub of Milton's rhetorical universe, [where] the theological, dramatic, and discursive conditions exist for rhetoric to thrive on all levels" (197) and where it comes most into its own as a agent of moral persuasion in the psychomachia of man's inner being (198). Pallister's text is a manifestly learned, monograph-length discussion of how Renaissance rhetoric, and particularly deliberative rhetoric, informs the greatest epic in the English language. Elis volume is well worthy to have won the Modern Language Association of America's Prize for Independent Scholars in 2009. Like all sublunary publications, however, it is not always perfect. Its extensive surveys in the first half are sometimes more trees than forest and might have benefitted from more signposting...
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Abstract
In Golden Age Spain, religious art functioned within the boundaries of a time-honoured corpus of ecclesiastical and rhetorical theory on the image, which attempted to prevent immoderate iconic veneration aided by metaphors taken from the well-known world of portraiture, the most imitative of pictorial genres. Counter-Reformation theologians and preachers also sought to reduce the artwork’s impact on irrational sensibility by urging artists to avoid the undesirable effects of awkward or lascivious images. This article will explore how the laws of decorum equipped Post-Tridentine Spanish imagery with aesthetic values meant to reconcile delectare with docere and movere, and how this finally resulted in a dispute between high culture and popular taste, between an art favored by royal collectors (painting) and another much more generalized as a result of ecclesiastical patronage (sculpture).
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Abstract
Reviews Gabriele Pedidla (a cura di), Parole al potare: Discorsi politici Italian!, Milano: Rizzoli BUR, 2011. CCXXII + 870 pp. ISBN 978-88-17-02520-1 The review of this volume was commended to the late Giorgio Tedel (1950- -2011), Professor of Political Communication at the University ofPavia. One ofthe youngest of his colleagues accepted to write the review, which is dedicated to the memory of Giorgio Fedel [note of the Associate Editor]. Tema del volume sono le peculiarita del linguaggio della leadership politica in Italia, analizzate attraverso una corposa rassegna di 61 discorsi pronunciati alia Camera dei Deputati dalle principali personality che hanno ricoperto ruoli di vertice, dall'Unita all'avvio della "Seconda Repubblica" (1994). In questo settore di ricerca, se, per un verso, numeróse indagini hanno isolate alcuni attributi specifici dell'oratoria politica in corrispondenza delle differenti scansioni storiche (una retorica Iontana dal discorrere quotidiano della grande maggioranza dei sudditi del Regno in época post-unitaria, oppure il crescente ricorso al cosiddetto "politichese" da parte dei leaders dei partiti di massa, specialmente democristiani, negli anni Sessanta e Settanta del Novecento); vanno anche sottolineati, nonostante la ricchezza delle informazioni , il ridotto tasso di interdisciplinarietà nello stesso prolifico filone di studi e la scarsa cumulatività dei risultati ottenuti. All'interno di questo quadro, il volume curato da Gabriele Pedullà (d'ora in poi GP) prefigura meritoriamente un significativo avanzamento verso la costruzione di una tipología del discorso politico in grado di tagliare trasversalmente rispetto ai confini disciplinari. Lo testimonia l'articolato saggio che introduce l'antologia dei testi, Breve storia dell'oratoria politica nelTItalia imita (pp. IX-CCXXII). Al centro dell'interesse di GP sta il rapporto tra letteratura e politica, focalizzato sull'oratoria politica qua genere letterario. Grazie a tale punto di vista, GP documenta l'affiorare di una pluralité di fenomeni comunicativi: 1) l'ambizione dei politici a padroneggiare la lingua italiana alia maniera dei classici, cioè a plasmare un discorso rispondente ai canon; stilistici propri dell'opera letteraria di pregio; 2) il progressivo distacco della classe politica repubblicana dai topoi dell'arte declamatoria; infine, negli sviluppi piú recenti, 3) la vacuité della retorica politica denunziata degli intellettuali, ovvero 4) il drástico mutamento di contenuto e modalité di trasmissione dei Riietorica, Vol. XXXII, issue 1, pp. 75-99, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . 02014 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprmtlnfo.asp. DOI. 10.1525/RH.2014.32.1.75. 76 RHETORICA messaggi politici destinati ai cittadini, per effetto della tecnología applicata alie comunicazioni. In questa successione di eventi, la cesura fondamentale è rappresentata dalla seconda guerra mondiale: dal 1861 al 1945 si dispiega una lunga fase il cui denominatore comune risiede nell'intendere la "politica corne lettera tura", secondo un duplice significato, l'uno particolare e l'altro generale. Cominciando dal primo, GP allude alla frequenza eccezionale con la quale, in questo arco temporale, eminenti figure di letterati e di artisti apparvero sul proscenio politico, per nomina regia al Senato (Manzoni, Verdi, Carducci, Fogazzaro e Croce, tra gli altri) oppure attraverso la discesa diretta nell'agone e Felezione alia Camera (da De Sanctis a D'Annunzio). Si tratta di conseguenze della politica di massa post-Rivoluzione Francese, che implica sia lo slittamento del potere decisionale dalla corte all'assemblea deliberante (Parlamento), sia il mutamento nei criteri di selezione áe\Yélite (dal favore del sovrano alia regola elettorale, che rende decisiva la capacité di conquistare il sostegno dei votanti). Entro i confini nazionali, entrambi i dinamismi si palesarono con inedita forza all'indomani della proclamazione del Regno d'Italia: richiamando il dispregio con il quale Max Weber qualificava il connubio tra lettere e politica (nei termini di "ascesa del de magogo"), GP descrive con dovizia di particolari la raffinata eloquenza con la quale scrittori, poeti e artisti approdarono al seggio parlamentare, "Tutti certamente giunti a guadagnarsi la fiducia dei votanti anche grazie alie doti di fini dicitori" (p. XXIV). Agli albori della nostra storia unitaria, i confronti verbali ospitati...
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The Complete Prose Works of John Milton ed. By Don M. Wolfe, and: Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition by Raphael Lyne, and: Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England by Jenny C. Mann, and: Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion by Lynn Enterline, and: Rome and Rhetoric: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar by Garry Wills ↗
Abstract
Reviews 91 my own undergraduate teaching, especially Pallister's idea that there are master tropes for heaven, hell, and paradise and Shore's denial that Milton engages in iconoclasm, and I have recommended the full texts to my graduate students. Historians of rhetoric at any institution that regularly teaches Milton or his period would do well to order copies for their libraries and also to consider acquiring copies for themselves. Jameela Lares The University of Southern Mississippi The Complete Prose Works ofJohn Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-82); Raphael Lyne, Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 267 pp. ISBN 978-1-107-00747-5; Jenny C. Mann, Outlaw Rhetoric: Fig uring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare's England, Ithaca and Lon don: Cornell University Press, 2012. 249 pp. ISBN 978-0-8014-4965-9; Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare's Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. 202 pp. ISBN 978-0-8122-4378-9; Garry Wills, Rome and Rhetoric: Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011.186 pp. ISBN 978-0-300-15218-0 Once upon a time (or so the story goes), the study of language and rhetoric in Shakespeare and Renaissance literature was dominated by con siderations of style, and style meant especially figurative language. Since then, a generation or two of critics including Joel Altman, Marion Trousdale, Thomas Sloane, Wayne Rebhorn, Frank Whigham, Victoria Kahn, Lorna Hut son, Peter Mack, and Lynne Magnusson have shown the importance for early modern literature and culture of a richer conception of rhetoric, one which understands rhetoric as a vital contributor to a wide range of intellectual, political, and social processes and agendas. In view of this work, one could be forgiven for suspecting that the prominence of figuration in the latest crop of books on rhetoric and the literature of Shakespeare's England means that literary criticism is doing the time warp again. As we will see, however, this is not quite your grandparents' rhetorical criticism, though the intervening years have changed less than one might have expected. The first of the four books under review here, Raphael Lyne's Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition argues that rhetoric in Shakespeare is a means not only of presentation and persuasion but also of thought. By "rhetoric" Lyne means primarily tropes, or figures of thought. He grounds this argument in recent research in cognitive linguistics, which probes the relationship between language (especially metaphor) and cognitive processes in the brain, and he devotes a chapter to surveying both this work and a wide range 92 RHETORICA of studies that find similar links between rhetoric, literature, and thought. Another chapter argues that early modern rhetoric manuals implicitly tie tropes such as metaphor and synecdoche to mental processes and thus constitute a "proleptic cognitive science" (50). Lyne then illustrates his thesis in chapters on A Midsummer Night's Dream, Qymbeline, Othello, and the Sonnets, concentrating on the thought patterns found in ornate speeches delivered at stressful moments. He reads Dream as a study of how metaphor works, showing the different ways that characters and groups in the play try to make sense of their experience: "Characters think differently and therefore they speak differently" (129). His study of Cymbeline shows how its characters, faced with "secrets, revelations, and impossibilities," "struggle to find the tropes by which to understand their world" (158). Othello depicts a world debased by Iago's ability to transfer his "twisted cognitive patterns" (186) to others, causing "a kind of heuristic short-circuit, where rhetoric becomes self-fulfilling and inward-looking" (163). The Sonnets show that thought can happen outside dramatic characters, while confirming that rhetoric can bring "heuristic failure" (209) as well as success. As this summary suggests, I don't find a distinctive thesis about Shake spearean thought in this book, and in noting the many critics and rhetoricians who have connected literature and rhetoric to thought Lyne undercuts his claim to originality. Possibly Lyne means his contribution to lie less in his conclusions than in his method, for he begins the Dream chapter by claiming to have found "a different way of reading some...