Rhetorica

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June 2015

  1. Caesar’s De Analogia. Edition, Translation, and Commentary by Alessandro Garcea
    Abstract

    324 RHETORICA these canons of rhetoric and Aristotle's treatment of them (p. 148). Those qua­ lifications noted, what is done with the analysis of rhetoric in the Iliad is clearly impressive and a contribution. Another positive feature of Homeric Speech is the study of rhetoric in works that appear after Homer. Knudsen's treatment of Archaic poetry is a contribution that shows the use of rhetoric in poetic discourse. Her work helps us to see that the bright dividing lines that traditionally have existed between rhetoric and poetry need to be reconsidered (pp. 126, 152). It is unfortunate that Knudsen choose not to expand her study to include a more thorough examination of tragic rhetoric, sophistic speeches, and the Socratic dialogues of Plato because a more detailed analysis of these topics would have helped to view the relationship of rhetoric and poetics by providing a better understanding of the relationship of mimetic and non-mimetic dis­ course (pp. 136-37). Extending the contributions of this work into the areas mentioned above also would have enriched such observations as those made by Walker: "'Poetry' stands to 'rhetoric' as one of its major divisions, and as the eldest form of epideictic eloquence, along with the newer 'free verse' forms of historical, philosophical, panegyric, and declamatory logoi, which are descended from Homeric narrative, Hesiodic wisdom-lore, and the varie­ ties of lyric praise and blame" (Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity, p. 120). Homeric Speech and the Origins of Rhetoric is clearly a contribution enrich­ ing our understanding of Homer, the use of rhetoric prior to the Classical Period, and a better understanding of the relationship between rhetoric and poetics before they evolved into separate disciplines. Knudsen's objective, as stated in the closing chapter, is to show that "Homeric techniques of per­ suasion—although they appear within a mythic narrative—are often the same as the intricate techniques of persuasion used by speakers in the Athe­ nian assembly and taught by the sophists, handbook-writers, and Aristotle himself" (p. 155). I believe that Knudsen attained this objective, but greater attention to the items pointed out in this review would have enhanced the fulfillment of her objective to an even greater degree. Richard Leo Enos Texas Christian University Alessandro Garcea, Caesar's De Analogía. Edition, Translation, and Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), xiv+304 p. ISBN 9780199603978 Il prezioso volume in questione è frutto della rielaborazione del travail inédit presentato, secondo le consuetudini francesi, all'esame di abilitazione alia Sorbona nel 2007: Garcea (G.), ora professore nella medesima prestigiosa umversità e allora Maître de conférences, dopo aver brillantemente svolto la sua preparazione all'Università di Torino sotto la guida di un'esperta di Reviews 325 grammatica romana come Valeria Lomanto (allieva a sua volta di Nino Marinone), dal 2007 al 2010 ha rielaborato la sua tesi e l'ha tradotta dal francese all'inglese cosí da assicurarle una broader audience e l'accoglimento presso uno dei più esclusivi editori intemazionali. Un ulteriore segno, se si vuole, del venir meno di quella parità ira le lingue europee di cultura che aveva caratterizzato gli studi classici e che viene ora sempre di più spazzata via dal totalita­ rismo anglofono; ma G. ha agito pragmáticamente (anche sotto altri aspetti, 10 vedremo subito) ed è difficile dargli torto, anche se resta, almeno in chi scrive, il rimpianto per un mondo delle lettere più democrático (e soprattutto per la conoscenza della bibliografía non in inglese da parte di chi parla solo fingiese, ormai una chimera anche presso i classicisti). L'unico vero appunto che si puô muovere a G. è che il sottotitolo che annuncia edizione, traduzione e commente è riduttivo e ingannevole: quasi metà del libro (p. 3-124), infatti, è occupata da un saggio introduttivo in due parti che costituisce un contribute di straordinario pregio e che per la sua ampiezza e ricchezza sta stretto nelle vesti dei "Prolegomeni all'edi­ zione"; paralelamente, chi è abituato all'edizione critica tradizionale e ricorda le essenziali 14 pagine dedicate da Funaioli a Cesare (C.) nei GRF rischia di perdersi in una mise en page in cui a testo ed apparato non è riconosciuta la tradizionale centralita, quasi...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2015.0019

March 2015

  1. The Politics of Eloquence: David Hume’s Polite Rhetoric by Marc Hanvelt
    Abstract

    Reviews 215 Hanvelt, Marc, The Politics of Eloquence: David Hume's Polite Rhetoric, Toronto, University of Toronto Tress, 2012. 217pp. ISBN 978-1-44264379 -6 In this closely reasoned and commendably lucid book Marc Hanvelt acknowledges more explicitly than most historians of eloquence that his study of the rhetorical past is shaped by a preoccupation with the poli­ tics of the present. Hume's thinking about persuasion is important to him not only because it is unusually subtle, philosophically grounded, and dis­ tinctive in its own time, but also because it can tell us something about how we might better conduct our politics today. A key to Hume's thought, Hanvelt argues, is his enduring hostilitv towards a religious and political fanaticism which "has its parallels in our contemporary world" (p. 6). We need Hume's "accurate, just, and polite rhetoric" as an alternative or, as Hanvelt puts it, "antidote" (p. 75) to the "low rhetoric" of zealotry and fac­ tion which threatens to undermine the balanced opposition of interests on which modern democracies depend. As Hanvelt explains, the conclusions Hume reaches in his philosophical writings, which famously emphasize the relative weakness of reason as an influence in human nature, commits him to a conception of rhetoric in which the passions must play a lead­ ing role. But unlike the rhetoric of the zealots, Hanvelt argues, Hume's is an appeal to the passions modified bv politeness. Transferred from its eighteenth-century context, and stripped of its restrictive associations with an elitist code of manners, this "polite rhetoric" refuses to manipulate its audiences by oversimplifying or closing down choices, respects their capac­ ity for making judgements, and engages them on equal terms in sociable discourse. Other scholars have commented on what Arthur Walzer well de­ scribes as "Hume's rhetoric-friendly epistemology" and have assessed its eighteenth-century influence. Hanvelt's ambition is to proceed a step further and retrieve a coherent conception of rhetoric from Hume's own writings. Although he does not restrict himself to Hume's philosophical works, and indeed examines the later volumes of the History as an important source for Hume's thinking about rhetoric, the philosophy of mind Hume formulates in the Treatise and Enquiries is at the heart of his study. In its central chapters (2-5) Hanvelt teases out the rhetorical implications of Hume's conception of belief as a "lively idea" and elucidates Hume's view that eloquence can reproduce the "feeling" of belief that is more usually derived by means of association from custom and experience. By raising vivid and forceful ideas in the mind eloquence excites the passions and operates on the will. What, then, sets Hume's conception of rhetoric apart from the oratory of the fanatics (Hume's and, one infers, Hanvelt's antagonists) who work singlemindedly on the passions of their audiences? Hanvelt finds the answer to this question in Hume's conception of politeness, a moderating influence which equips the orator with the gentlemanly attributes of trustworthiness of character, conversational ease, and enlarged views. With the arguments of 216 RHETORICA Adam Potkay's The Fate ofEloquence in the Age ofHume (1994) in mind, he ac­ knowledges that in the eighteenth century "the polite virtues of manners and moderation . . . were generally considered to be incompatible with impas­ sioned rhetoric" (pp. 54—55). But Hume's politeness, like Hume s rhetoric, was distinctive. He associated politeness with moderation but unlike his friend Adam Smith he did not conceive of moderation as necessarily dis­ passionate. Politeness modified but did not repudiate the models of ancient eloquence, which Hume held in high regard. While Hume "distrusted impo­ lite rhetoric," Hanvelt concludes, he did not distrust rhetoric 'because it is impolite' (p. 76). The clarity with which Hanvelt disentangles complex ideas and explains how Hume differed from contemporary rhetoricians such as Campbell and Smith is one of the strengths of this book. He demonstrates beyond doubt that the idea of eloquence was unusually important to Hume, not least as an illustration and confirmation of his discoveries in the science of mind. But the approach he has taken to reading Hume's texts is not unproblematic. Acknowledging that "Hume never laid...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2015.0027

February 2015

  1. De Dame Folie à Madame Sapience
    Abstract

    Critics have long considered Rabelais as the “last of the French Erasmians”. However, a rereading of François Béroalde de Verville's Moyen de parvenir (1614–1617) brings to light numerous rhetorical strategies reminiscent of the discourse of morosophy, or foolish-wisdom used by the character of Folly in Erasmus' Encomium Moriae. The identification of these rhetorical devices enable us to retrace the profound and complex influence of the Rotterdam humanist's writings in France at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2015.33.1.1

January 2015

  1. De Dame Folie à Madame Sapience: Stratégies rhétoriques de la satire «morosophique» de l’Éloge de la folie au Moyen de parvenir
    Abstract

    Critics have long considered Rabelais as the “last of the French Erasmians”. However, a rereading of François Béroalde de Verville’s Moyen de parvenir (1614–1617) brings to light numerous rhetorical strategies reminiscent of the discourse of morosophy, or foolish-wisdom used by the character of Folly in Erasmus’ Encomium Moriae. The identification of these rhetorical devices enable us to retrace the profound and complex influence of the Rotterdam humanist’s writings in France at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

    doi:10.1353/rht.2015.0029

November 2014

  1. Review: Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse: A Cross-Historical Study by Ben McCorkle
    doi:10.1525/rh.2014.32.4.417

September 2014

  1. Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse: A Cross-Historical Study by Ben McCorkle
    Abstract

    Reviews 417 many ways, but it confirmed for me the distance between Letters to Power and Public Advocacy Without Public Intellectuals. To be sure, I want all of what McCormick has to offer: I want the letter to help us rethink rhetorical history, and I want the weapons of the weak to supply learned advocacy. I'm unsure, however, that we need to Hold these projects in tandem. Dave Tell The University of Kansas Ben McCorkle, Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse: A CrossHistorical Study. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Uni­ versity Press, 2012, xiii, 207 pp.: black and white illustration. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-8093-3067-6 At a time when media platforms for content delivery proliferate so we can stay abreast of the latest iLife gadgetry; many scholars in both rhetorical studies and new media studies have been tracking the resurgence of interest in "delivery"-both in terms of the technical apparatuses that deliver content and in the rhetorical affordances of such platforms. Rhetoricians as diverse as James Porter and Kathleen Welch tout a new era of delivery, even the ascendancy of delivery as the rhetorical canon needing attention and study in the digital age. Such, at least, is the opening premise of rhet/comp and new media scholar Ben McCorkle's first book, Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Dis­ course: A Cross-Historical Study, which takes stock of this "revived" interest in delivery and notes how it has assumed a position as the "central element of the rhetorical process" (xi). But McCorke's interest in delivery is not just to help assert its current eminence; rather, he seeks to examine "the dynamic that has historically existed between rhetorical delivery and...technological shifts in our society" (2). More bluntly, he argues throughout the pages of this ambitious and wide-ranging book that "delivery's status can be read as an indicator of Western culture's attempts to come to terms with newly emerging technics, media forms, and technologies" (2). To demonstrate how delivery has been key to navigating shifts in literacy and the acquisition of new communications tools and platforms, McCorkle takes a broad view, examining over 2500 years of technological innovation in writing and composing across media. We move quickly through the shift from orality to alphabetic literacy in ancient Greece, to the Ramist rhetorics of the latel5th and early 16th centuries and the birth of European printing, to the belletristic and elocutionary movements of the 18th and 19th centuries and the rise in mass printing and literacy, to the advent of mass and digital media in the early and late 20th century respectively. Each historical moment becomes a "case study" of a technological innovation in writing or literacy that McCorkle invites us to re-imagine as an example of how the 418 RHETORICA canon of delivery comes to the fore to help navigate the transition. In the process, McCorke redefines delivery as a "technological discourse" in that "theories of delivery have historically helped to foster the cultural reception of emergent technologies of writing and communication by prescribing rules or by examining and privileging tendencies that cause old and new media forms to resemble one another" (5). Take the emergence of textual literacies in ancient Greece as an exam­ ple. Writing about Plato's dialogues, McCorkle notes how they "are not faithful transcriptions of oral events"; rather, any given dialogue comprises a "conceptual remediation of an oral discursive practice that functions by borrowing the generic conventions of a prior mode of communication, ac­ complishing the dual task of making writing appear more like speech and speech more like writing" (61). While the move to print literacies might have coincided with a declining overt interest in oral delivery, those modes of delivery were nonetheless recaptured in the new technology of writing. In this fashion, McCorkle's analysis avoids technological determinism by emphasizing the interplay of older modes of delivery with newer technolo­ gies. For instance, when analyzing the rise of the elocutionary movement with the spread of mass printing and increasing literacy in the nineteenth century, he describes how oral delivery and printing conventions began to resemble one another: "Yet another mechanism of remediation, the elocu­ tionary movements advocated...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2014.0006

March 2014

  1. The Genuine Teachers of This Art by Jeffrey Walker
    Abstract

    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...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2014.0011
  2. Thomas De Quincey: British Rhetoric’s Romantic Turn by Lois Peters Agnew
    Abstract

    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...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2014.0016
  3. Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women’s Tradition, 1600-1900 by Jane Donawerth
    Abstract

    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...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2014.0013

September 2013

  1. Five Chapters on Rhetoric: Character, Action, Things, Nothing, and Art by Michael S. Kochin
    Abstract

    Reviews Michael S. Kochin. Five Chapters on Rhetoric: Character, Action, Things, Nothing, and Art. University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State Univer­ sity Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-291-03455-3 The selections in this hook are best read as a series of loosely connected essays, situated within political science, informed bv scholarship in the rhetoric of Greek and Roman antiquity They build, in a leisurely way, toward a theory of rhetoric as an art of persuasive speech especially suited to the task of the politician—the construction of political advice. In his introduction, Michael Kochin proposes to use the diffusion of ideas in scientific communities as a model of political persuasion: "the politician seeks an understanding of policy through his or her operations within political institutions, just as the scientist seeks understanding through his or her operation wdthin political institutions. Scientific knowledge is thus created and distributed throughout the netw'ork: it is not merely diffused through it from center to periphery. I appeal to this clear case to explain the unclear case of public life: because the social structure of science is well studied, the rhetorical concepts I want to explicate are more clearly visible in it" (11). That w'ould have been an interesting book, but it is not the one Kochin ended up writing. Five Chapters forgets all about scientific communication for chapters on end, and the ideas that it develops about political communication are a very mixed bag. It is, for all that, an engaging and stimulating book. Kochin offers fix e topics for the investigation of political persuasion: character (or ethos), action (or stasis), things (the creation of facts), nothing (communication that maintains relationships) and art (specifically rhetoric as a means of understanding artful speech). Issues of argument and affect are dismissed in the introduction: political persuasion, according to Kochin, depends on the credibility of the speaker and the telling power of facts, and emotion is "a junk category" (15). Both the topics that Kochin has chosen and those he has left aside offer a reader fair warning that the ride ahead will not be a trot through familiar territories. The chapters on character, action, things, and nothing approach issues of political persuasion from different directions. Character takes up the Aristotelean traits of knowledge, benevolence, and virtue, treated here under the topics of competence, identification, and empathy. The chapter also Khetorica, Vol. XXXI, issue 4, pp. 445-464, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . T2013 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.2013.31.4.445. 446 RHETORICA discusses the ways in which political leaders "empty" their personalities of idiosyncracies, the better to reflect common values (40). He critiques theories of ethos that see it as artificial, connecting Aristotle's rhetorical ethos to his political ethos. And he introduces a theme that will connect these four chapters: any program that favors "measures, not men" as the focus of political discourse fails to take into account the public's need to judge measures by the men who advocate them. The chapter on action is an extended reading of Demosthenes' "On the Crown," taken as a model for political advocacy in its orientation to the future, and to the possible. Kochin insists that the Athenian audience's approval of the speech is an extension of its judgment of Demosthenes as a competent, benevolent counselor who represents the collective interests of the Athenians. Judgments based on motives or on the results of actions are necessarily flawed, incomplete, or irrelevant. Kochin illustrates this analysis with examples from American political discourse, including the first of many positive citations of Calvin Coolidge, a president I do not ordinarily associate with rhetorical skill. The chapter on things is one of the strongest in the book. Kochin de­ velops an account of enargeia in a discussion of political speeches that deploy facts, statistics, vivid narratives, and images. The range of examples, from Begin to Coolidge (again!) is impressive; Kochin connects the persuasive force of...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2013.0004

August 2013

  1. From Elocution to New Criticism
    Abstract

    The similarity between elocution and New Criticism in method of analysis, or hermeneutics, seems patent: because elocutionists taught reading aloud, they necessarily considered a text word by word; New Critics revolutionized literary study through a similar if more sophisticated method of textual analysis, an approach which also necessitated a certain vocalizing of the words. And the two groups were curiously alike in their fumbling attempts to describe the nature of literature, its ontology, as a kind of experience. The progression from elocution to New Criticism actually forms an episode in the ongoing dispersal of rhetoric as an academic subject.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2013.31.3.297

June 2013

  1. From Elocution to New Criticism: An Episode in the History of Rhetoric
    Abstract

    The similarity between elocution and New Criticism in method of analysis, or hermeneutics, seems patent: because elocutionists taught reading aloud, they necessarily considered a text word by word; New Critics revolutionized literary study through a similar if more sophisticated method of textual analysis, an approach which also necessitated a certain vocalizing of the words.And the two groups were curiously alike in their fumbling attempts to describe the nature of literature, its ontology, as a kind of experience.The progression from elocution to New Criticism actually forms an episode in the ongoing dispersal of rhetoric as an academic subject.

    doi:10.1353/rht.2013.0011

May 2013

  1. Ῥυθμός rhythmos et numerus chez Cicéron et Quintilien. Perspectives esthétiques et génériques sur le rythme oratoire latin
    Abstract

    The strong connection between rhythm and number is one of the most significant features of Aristotle's theory of rhythm. It equally underlies Cicero's rhetoric; and hence he translated the Greek notion of ῥυθμός into numerus. However, this terminology gives cause for concern; since numerus, like ῥυθμός may be relevant not only to rhythm in oratory, but also to musical rhythm. This is why Cicero was suspected by some Atticists of confounding music and discourse, although in fact the distinction between song and speech is prominent in his treatises. Quintilian addressed this problem and proposed a new terminology: for him, numerus referred only to rhythm in oratory, whereas rhythmos evoked the idea of musical rhythm.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2013.31.2.133

March 2013

  1. Rhetoric Beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages ed. by Mary Carruthers
    Abstract

    Reviews Carruthers, Mary, ed., Rhetoric Beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in theArts oftheMiddleAges. (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, ed. Alastair Minnis). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xii + 316 pp. ISBN 9780521515306. Carruthers' edited collection shows how rhetorical theory informs and is informed by the visual, mechanical, and performative arts of the Mid­ dle Ages, with origins in the classical rhetorical tradition. This collection is groundbreaking in several ways: 1) by demonstrating the interconnected­ ness of medieval genres of rhetoric, 2) by expanding the canon of rhetorical texts, from classical origins to later adaptations, and 3) by suggesting av­ enues for further research across disciplinary lines. Thus, it transforms our understanding of rhetoric and expands it to new areas, especially oral and written performance in the Middle Ages. This collection will also appeal to those interested in medieval cultural studies through the study of verbal, visual, and performative arts as rhetoric. Paul Binski's essay, "'Working by words alone': the architect, scholas­ ticism and rhetoric in thirteenth-century France," opens the collection by relating thirteenth-century scholastic and rhetorical discourse and architec­ ture as influential on High Gothic architecture. Not only were architectural terms imported into rhetorical treatises, but also the architect as auctor, cre­ ator, master of a craft, was elevated to a new plane of authority. Central to this authority is that of planning, envisioning in the mind, foreknowing the work to be constructed, a skill required of both rhetor and architect. In "Grammar and rhetoric in late medieval polyphony: modern meta­ phor or old simile," Margaret Bent takes cross-disciplinary applications of rhetoric into the realm of performance by exploring intersections among terms employed in medieval music and grammar and rhetoric. Shared terminology, such as definitions, metaphors, and similes parallel musical structures. Other correspondences between rhetoric and music include the parts of an oration in arrangement and punctuation in notation, rhetoric in and as performance art. "Nature's forge and mechanical production: writing, reading and per­ forming song" continues this theme. Elizabeth Eva Leach develops the metaphor of the forge through collaborative invention in song, challenging Rhetorica, Vol. XXXI, Issue 2, pp. 220-237, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2013 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.2013.31.2.220. Reviews 221 a common assumption that pieces were written first by a solitary composer or lyricist and then rehearsed by singers. Instead, she argues for "viewing the musical trace as a series of more or less precise memorial notae from which singers invent a collaborative (simultaneous) performance" (72). Her findings corroborate research on early modern theatre, as she explains in the latter half of her essay, thus broadening and transcending genre lines through a concept of composing process with parallels in two performance arts. Lucy Freeman Sandler's essay, "Rhetorical strategies in the pictorial im­ agery of fourteenth-century manuscripts: the case of the Bohun psalters," in­ troduces rare evidence of a rhetorical appeal from artists to patrons, through illuminations of psalters commissioned by the Bohun earls of Essex in the fourteenth century. Two artists, both Augustinian friars, employ images that relate biblical scenes to social and political matters relevant to their pa­ trons, thereby providing moral and theological counsel in devotional prac­ tice. Thus, the rhetoric of the art mirrors that of the drama, in which reader becomes actor: "For the Bohuns, reading and recitation of the psalms or the Hours of the Virgin, a devotional exercise that was repeated over and over, was associated with study of the fundamental narratives of human and sacred history in the Old and New Testaments in pictorial form" (117). This parallel opens pathways for research on intersections among private devotion, art and drama. Similarly, in "Do actions speak louder than words? The scope and role of pronuntiatio in the Latin rhetorical tradition, with special reference to the Cistercians," Jan M. Ziolkowski takes up the theme of performance in the Latin rhetorical tradition through actio (gesture) and pronuntiatio (elocution...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2013.0022
  2. Signs of Light: French and British Theories of Linguistic Communication, 1648–1789 by Matthew Lauzon
    Abstract

    226 RHETORICA Matthew Lauzon, Signs ofLight: French and British Theories ofLinguistic Communication, 1648-1789, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010.256 pp. ISBN 9780801448478. Matthew Lauzon's Signs ofLight: French and British Theories ofLinguistic Communication, 1648-1789 explores a broad array of Enlightenment perspec­ tives on discourse, from seventeenth-century discussions of Native Amer­ ican eloquence and animal communication to the longstanding debate over the relative merits of English and French that continued up to the French Revolution. Arguing that historians of the period, who overemphasize the impact of Locke's view of language, "have therefore tended to ignore both the period's tremendous engagement with the broader social implications of different languages that prevailed across the European republic of let­ ters and the ways in which such an engagement involved much more than issues of semantic and logical clarity" (p. 4), he surveys a wide range of treatises, literary works, reports, and studies to demonstrate the diversity of Enlightenment views concerning language and human community. The book is divided into three primary sections, each comprising a pair of chapters. Part I, "Animal Communication," seeks to fill the gap left by historians who have neglected "the suggestion by some in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that animals might communicate more clearly and therefore more effectively" than humans (p. 9). The first chapter in this section, "Bestial Banter," takes up Enlightenment claims of the potential su­ periority of animal communication developed by relatively obscure figures such as Marin Cureau de la Chambre and John Webster, as well as more well-known theorists such as John Hobbes and Jean Jacques Rousseau. The second chapter, "Homo Risus: Making Light of Animal Language," features Enlightenment critiques of animal languages, both real and imaginary, that elucidate the complexity of human discourse and attempt to destabilize the virtue of clarity developed in the previous chapter. Lauzon provides analyses of Bernard Mandeville's The Fable ofthe Bees: Or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, part 4 Four of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and Guillaume-Hyacinthe Bougeant's Amusement philosophique sur le langage des betes. Part II, "Savage Eloquence," explores "how late-seventeenth-century missionary concerns about the sincerity of American Indian conversions gen­ erated a particularly positive representation of savage speech" (p. 6). Chap­ ter 3, entitled "Warming Savage Hearts and Heating Eloquent Tongues," emphasizes the seventeenth-century Puritans' and Jesuits' praise of the elo­ quence of Native American converts to Christianity. Featuring a series of works produced by John Eliot and his missionary colleagues, Lauzon ar­ gues that the Puritans were impressed by the pathos of Native American Christians, whose words reflected the "Christian grand style" originally identified by Augustine. Through analyses of texts from the Jesuit Relations, which recorded seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit activities in the New World, Lauzon demonstrates that Jesuit missionaries also praised what amounted to that style in the emotional appeals of Native American converts, Reviews 227 who communicated far more movingly than conventional touchstones of Jesuit rhetoric like Cicero" (p. 90). Chapter 4, "From Savage Orators to Sav­ age Languages/' marshals subsequent Enlightenment treatments of the per­ ceived energetic quality of Native American languages as further critique of Locke's rather single-minded emphasis on clarity. The final section of Szy/zs ofLight, "Civilized Tongues," features "discus­ sions about how the French and English languages reflected and reinforced distinct national practices of enlightened communication" (p. 7). Chapter 5, "French Levity," treats the spirited argument for the superiority the French language set forth bv advocates such as François Charpentier, Nicholas Beuzée, Antoine de Rivarol, Denis Diderot, and Dominique de Bouhours, based on criteria such as clarity, the sweetness of its soft sounds, the "light­ ness" of its lexicon (p. 146), the wit of the bel esprit, and its universality. The final chapter, "English Energy," provides the corresponding arguments in praise of the English tongue, which emphasized its phonotactic qualities, its syntax, its gravity, and its ability to express natural passions. Lauzon's Coda, "French Levity and English Energy in the Revolutionary Wake," extends the issues raised in chapters 5 and 6 through and beyond the French Revolution. The particular strengths of Signs ofLight are the extensive range of works and...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2013.0024
  3. Ῥυθμός, rhythmos et numerus chez Cicéron et Quintilien. Perspectives esthétiques et génériques sur le rythme oratoire latin.
    Abstract

    The strong connection between rhythm and number is one of the most significant features of Aristotle’s theory of rhythm. It equally underlies Cicero’s rhetoric; and hence he translated the Greek notion of ῤυθμός into uumerus. However, this terminology gives cause for concern; since numerus, like ῤυθμός, may be relevant not only to rhythm in oratory, but also to musical rhythm. This is why Cicero was suspected by some Atticists of confounding music and discourse, although in fact the distinction between song and speech is prominent in his treatises. Quintilian addressed this problem and proposed a new terminology: for him, numerus referred only to rhythm in oratory, whereas rhythmos evoked the idea of musical rhythm.

    doi:10.1353/rht.2013.0018

February 2013

  1. Isocrates on paradoxical discourse
    Abstract

    It has long been stated that, in Isocrates' Helen, there seems to be an open contradiction between the author's harsh criticism of logoi paradoxoi and the simple fact that his own encomia of Helen and Busiris appear to be specimens of that very genre. Traditionally, this contradiction has been explained by Isocrates' need to distanciate his own work from that of his predecessors. This paper undertakes a different approach. Isocrates' criticism of paradoxographic literature is based upon observations about what is and what is not allowed in moral epideictic discourse. Isocrates' specific instructions about proper and improper moral argumentation can function as hermeneutical tool to analyze Helen and Busiris. Only in Helen does he observe the rules of argumentation formulated in that very discourse. In Busiris, however, Isocrates adopts the typical modes of argumentation in paradoxographic literature as represented in the works of Gorgias or Polycrates. In consequence, his arguments in Busiris prove to be unconvincing when measured by his own standards formulated in the proemium of both Helen and Busiris. Consequently, the discourse ends in an apology of these arguments which is, once again, defective. In his corresponding discourses Helen and Busiris, Isocrates implictly demonstrates the moral and technical defects inherent in paradoxical discourse. He explicitly reflects these defects in the proemia and epilogues of both speeches. Helen and Busiris should, therefore, be understood as Isocrates' manifesto for moral discourse as opposed to paradoxographic showpieces.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2013.31.1.1

January 2013

  1. The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in the Age of Eloquence by Carla Mazzio
    Abstract

    Reviews Carla Mazzio, The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in the Age of Eloquence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. 349 pp. ISBN 978-0-8122-4138-9 From Longinus to Cicero, Quintilian to Dryden, Susenbrotus to Priestley, vehement emotion was embodied in murmuring and mumbling, fits and starts, paroxysms of the inarticulate: aposiopesis, for example, denoted "some affection" that "breaks off... speech before it be all ended" (John Smith, The Mysterie ofRhetorique Unvail'd [1656], 148); it signified shame, fear, or anger, a "sodaine occasion" rupturing or impugning a speech or a story. An “auricular figure of defect," a "figure of silence, or of interruption," according to George Puttenham, aposiopesis was "fit for phantasticall heads" (The Arte of English Poesy [1589], 139). Should "phantasticall heads" prevail, figures flourish: as Dryden observed, "interrogations, exclamations, hyperbata, or a disordered connection of discourse" naturally convey fervid, enthusiastic, rancorous speech. "By me," the character 'Aposiopesis' says in Samuel Shaw's Words Made Visible (1679), "wise men stop themselves in the very career of their passion," and "do not tell you half of what they'l make you feel" (168). A taut ensemble of figures embody vehemence or incoherence, fre­ quently asyndeton (acervatio dissoluta), hyperbaton, and aposiopesis, but all staccato, inflamed, or interrupted speech—devoted to 'feeling' rather than 'telling'—has a robust somatic component. Passion is expressed by voice (pronuciatio) and gesture (actio), the fifth, and perhaps most important, canon of rhetorical invention, as some, following Demosthenes, have argued. Deliv­ ery is a "sort of language of the body" (Cicero, Orator, 17.55), and where but in the theatre might such a language have more power? Orators might learn from actors (see Quintilian, 11.3 ff.): making an effective speech, whether to the pit or in the court, enjoins eloquence of the head and arms, hands and eyes as well as invention, disposition, bold figures (as Joseph R. Roach, The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science ofActing [Cranburgh, New Jersey: Asso­ ciated University Presses, 1984], has argued). The inarticulate is a species of performance, to which the 'age of eloquence' devotes significant resources. Carla Mazzio's erudite and stimulating The Inarticulate Renaissance does not explore actio or pronunciatio (she cites neither Roach nor Noel Malcolm's The Origins of English Nonsense [London: Fontana, 1998], which treats early Rhetorica, Vol. XXXI, Issue 1, pp. 111-133, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2013 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.2013.31.1.111. 112 RHETORICA modern poetic nonsense). While she briefly engages Thomas Wilson s Ci­ ceronian Arte of Rhetorique and Abraham Fraunce's Ramist Lawiers Logike (unaware that Fraunce paraphrases rather than 'cites' Ramus [121]), Mazzio s sense of the rich and variegated history of rhetoric in the period is akin to her uneven treatment of humanism—partial or monolithic, jejune or stultifying, depending on her argument. She is rarely sensitive to the revisions underway in rhetorical inquiry in the period, where former vices (aenigma, for example) are redescribed as virtues, by playwrights schooled in humanist rhetorical canons, eager to ignite their increasingly sophisticated audiences. Instead, her focus is "alternative foims of perception, expression, and agency that were occasioned by departures from verbal coherence and efficacy" (216 n. 2). In six parts, The Inarticulate Renaissance deftly and subtly examines an eclectic ensemble of 'departures': Reformation polemic and emergent na­ tionalism, Ralph Roister Doister and Hamlet, the haptic in Thomas Tomkis' play Lingua (1607) and the politics and poetics of revenge in Thomas Kyd. Her notes and bibliography (more than one third of the text) gather an im­ pressive array of contemporary scholarship, and her readings of various texts are sophisticated, even virtuoso. Her chapter on Kyd's Spanish Tragedy (1592), for example, suggests that the play "fails to fully synthesize classical and contemporary materials" (95); the resultant "confusion" speaks to the ways in which Kyd exposes the "less than articulate underside of imperial ambition and Protestant proto­ nationalism" (96) as well as...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2013.0031
  2. Isocrates on paradoxical discourse An analsysis of Helen and Busiris
    Abstract

    It has long been stated that, in Isocrates’ Helen, there seems to be an open contradiction between the author’s harsh criticism of logoi paradoxoi and the simple fact that his own encomia of Helen and Busiris appear to be specimens of that very genre. Traditionally, this contradiction has been explained by Isocrates’ need to distanciate his own work from that of his predecessors.

    doi:10.1353/rht.2013.0027

November 2012

  1. Power and Discourse: Silence as Rhetorical Choice in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior
    Abstract

    Relying heavily on Michel Foucault's discussions of meaning-making artifacts and Cheryl Glenn's 2004 book-length work on silence, this essay places Kingston in the context of post-structuralism while also emphasizing that her “silent” form reflects the culture and power structure within which her characters live and from which Kingston comes. Kingston's The Woman Warrior expresses silence in three distinct ways: suppression by self-restraint, suppression by force, and suppression in translation. Using these three avenues of exploration, I argue that rhetorical theorists must address the silence(d) parts of language exchange in order to create fuller understandings of the meaning-making attributes of signified language use and as a means of reducing the privilege of the spoken/written. A re-exploration of a previously discussed text such as Kingston's is relevant to provide insight into this newly rejuvenated conversation about silence in rhetorical play.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2012.30.4.375
  2. Alcune riflessioni sull' ἐνάργεıα dall' Ars rhetorica di Pseudo-Dionigi di Alicarnasso
    Abstract

    Many modern scholars have studied in detail the phenomenon of vividness (gr. ἐνάργεıα; lat. evidentia) in ancient rhetorical texts; however, they have neglected to examine two important testimonies included in an Ars rhetorica ascribed to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, but in fact to be ascribed to an anonymous rhetorician who probably lived in the third century AD. In these two passages the anonymous rhetorician faces some issues concerning the stylistic evidence that have not been previously studied. He analyzes the relationship between the vividness of the text and the use of everyday language, aimed to enhance realistic effects of discourse. This paper aims to present a detailed analysis of the comments offered by the anonymous rhetorician, that will help to define some peculiar aspects of stylistic vividness of the language in discourse.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2012.30.4.339
  3. Review: Classical Greek Rhetorical Theory and the Disciplining of Discourse, by David M. Timmerman and Edward Schiappa
    Abstract

    Book Review| November 01 2012 Review: Classical Greek Rhetorical Theory and the Disciplining of Discourse, by David M. Timmerman and Edward Schiappa David M. Timmerman and Edward Schiappa. Classical Greek Rhetorical Theory and the Disciplining of Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 192 pp. ISBN 9780521195188 Rhetorica (2012) 30 (4): 457–460. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2012.30.4.457 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: Classical Greek Rhetorical Theory and the Disciplining of Discourse, by David M. Timmerman and Edward Schiappa. Rhetorica 1 November 2012; 30 (4): 457–460. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2012.30.4.457 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. © 2012 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2012.30.4.457

September 2012

  1. Classical Greek Rhetorical Theory and the Disciplining of Discourse by David M. Timmerman and Edward Schiappa
    Abstract

    Reviews 457 Disagreements are often treated as differing appearances or perspectives on a singular reality (after Perelman and Obrechts-Tyteka, for example) or as prompts for the invention of an agreement or unity to come. However, building on Canpanton's example, Dolgopolski's work develops a sustained and insightful construction of what might be termed Talmudic rationalism where the ontological entailments of expressions are drawn from the careful and charitable articulation of disagreements. As such, What is Talmud? is an important new contribution to the study of rhetoric. In addition, What is Talmud? is a necessary reorientation and elaboration on current studies of Rabbinic discourse and textuality, which has been dominated by praise for Rabbinic tolerance and appreciation of polysemy. What is Talmud? puts on the table the possibility that in accepting the Talmud as the historical anchor (if not the core symbol) for an appreciation of polysemy and multiple truths, we have done so at the expense of Talmudic understandings of disagreement. David Metzger Old Dominion University (Norfolk, Virginia) David M. Timmerman and Edward Schiappa. Classical Greek Rhetor­ ical Theory and the Disciplining of Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 192 pp. ISBN 9780521195188 Traditional accounts of rhetoric's emergence in fifth-century Greece have encountered many recent challenges and revisions. Among these challenges, Edward Schiappa's prolific scholarship on classical rhetoric has always been exceptional. In this vein, Schiappa has long argued for the importance of a later origin of rhetoric as a distinct discipline than has been presumed. It arose as a discipline, that is - something that could be studied - he says, in the fourth-century in the wake of Plato's invention of the term rhetorike. This latest volume, coauthored with David Timmerman, continues to provoke the reader to question accepted rhetorical histories and is located well within the scholarly trajectory of Schiappa's earlier work, in particular, the Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). However, by emphasizing the role of "terms of art," Classical Greek Rhetorical Theory and the Disciplining of Discourse adds a refined focus on discourse in the formation of rhetoric as a discipline. Timmerman and Schiappa explain "terms of art as bits and pieces of disciplinary jargon that have "specialized denotative functions" (p.l) for those within a distinct knowledge community. Their introductory chapter provides a nuanced theoretical and historical explanation of such terms in the context of the history of rhetoric. The authors contend that the emergence of this kind of technical vocabulary is evidence of the expansion of the available "semantic field" and of corresponding "conceptual possibilities" (p. 6) available to rhetorical practitioners. Terms of art, in this way, are a 458 RHETORICA fundamental marker of discrete knowledge communities (i.e. disciplines). Consequently, they shape "the pedagogical, political and intellectual goals of rhetorical theory" (p. 2). Rather than simply revealing the historical importance of terms of art, however, Timmerman and Schiappa endeavor also to make a "methodological intervention" in the field of history of rhetoric (p. 171). They contend that the use of terms of art as an analytic framework has the advantage of shifting "our focus to the relevant pedagogical and theoretical texts to examine how the relevant terms ... are employed in those texts" (p. 172). The origin of rhetorike as a term in the fourth century (rather than fifth) has even further implication, for the authors, when understood in this light. In this context, Rhetorike is not merely Platonic shorthand, but an essential component in the technical development of the entire rhetorical knowledge community. The book takes up a variety of case studies that are united by their focus on terms of art. The first of these studies concerns dialegesthai (dialogue or dialectic) and its assorted meanings. In considering these variations, Timmerman and Schiappa demonstrate the ways in which words can be contested in technical contexts as terms of art. By synthesizing and analyzing the philological evidence, the authors contend a sophistic conception of dialegesthai was an established term of art for the Athenian intelligentsia. Thus, Plato's refinement of the term into what we understand as dialectic challenges this earlier technical usage. Parsing the similarities and differences that emerge in...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2012.0012
  2. Power and Discourse: Silence as Rhetorical Choice in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior
    Abstract

    Relying heavily on Michel Foucault's discussions of meaning-making artifacts and Cheryl Glenn's 2004 book-length work on silence, this essay places Kingston in the context of post-structuralism while also emphasizing that her "silent" form reflects the culture and power structure within which her characters live and from which Kingston comes. Kingston's The Woman Warrior expresses silence in three distinct ways: suppression by self-restraint, suppression by force, and suppression in translation. Using these three avenues of exploration, I argue that rhetorical theorists must address the silence(d) parts of language exchange in order to create fuller understandings of the meaning-making attributes of signified language use and as a means of reducing the privilege of the spoken/written. A re-exploration of a previously discussed text such as Kingston's is relevant to provide insight into this newly rejuvenated conversation about silence in rhetorical play.

    doi:10.1353/rht.2012.0002
  3. Abusive Mouths in Classical Athens by Nancy Worman
    Abstract

    Reviews 451 Nancy Worman, Abusive Mouths in Classical Athens. Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 2008. 385 + xii pp. ISBN 9780521857871. Insult and character assassination have a long and entertaining history in the annals of rhetoric. Not only do they generate theoretical meditation but they can provide scholars and amateurs alike with the guilty (and for Aristotle, vulgar) pleasures of nicely turned invective. Nancy Worman's fascinating study allows classicists and those with more general interests in ancient rhetorical forms to follow patterns of defamation from Homer and the beginnings of preserved Greek literature to Aristotle and Theophrastus at the end of the fourth century B.C.E. Of the two possibilities adumbrated above, her work facilitates the austere rewards of the theoretical rather than enjoy­ able indulgence in multiple examples of splenetic venting. For the latter one might settle down with Thomas Conley's Toward a Rhetoric ofInsult (Chicago 2010), which, in addition to quotation of virtuosic and delectable passages of invective (starting with Cicero and proceeding through the Flugschriften of the Reformation to end with Monty Python and modern political cartoons), does a useful job in sketching multiple patterns of defamatory language and specifying the factors that constrain their operation. Conley surveys how slurs connected with social status, gender, ethnicity, sexual habits, and the practices of eating and drinking (among others) recur in multiple cultures. He is interested in how invective can be used to create group identity through assertion of communal values, but also in the use of insult to interrogate per­ ceived hierarchies. This generalist orientation makes the book a valuable introduction to the invective mode, and thus, coincidentally, an interest­ ing counterpart to Worman's specialist study. W. carefully maps out how a discourse of abuse developed around public and professional speakers in Classical Greece. This discourse was rooted in practices of commensality associated with banquet and symposium, and was further extended in drama, until it became part of the rhetorical arsenal in the public oratory of Demosthenes and Aeschines. W.'s narrative of a gradual elaboration of a critique of public speaking and the move of this critique into ancient oratory make this an important book. The body of the book is divided into six chapters, charting the devel­ opment of an iambic discourse ranging over a variety of genres. W. uses the ideas of Bourdieu, Bakhtin, and Barthes to trace the operations of social performance and figuration in invective, relying in particular on a central notion of metonymy, so that the mouth acts as an emblem (Barthes' "blazon") of behavioral excess. After a scene-setting introduction, Chapter 1 looks at iambic literature in Archaic Greek epic, lyric, and Classical tragedy, where the language of invective is deployed to regulate excess and is regularly as­ sociated with ravenous mouths and dangerous types of consumption. Thus we encounter rapacious and aggressive kings (Agamemnon in Homer is a people-eating king," 29), harsh talk connected with (potentially cannibal­ istic) battlefield savagery, and clever speaking conceived as a trade-off for food. Greed leads both to uncontrolled aggressive speech and sly rhetorical 452 RHETORICA manipulation. These two possibilities will crystallize throughout the course of the book into two broad and recurring types: on the one hand the braggart and voracious politician characterized by crude consumption, and on the other the decadent and manipulative sophist. Chapter 2 explicitly juxtaposes these two types: voracious demagogues are set against glib, effete, and decadent sophists in the comedies of Aristo­ phanes, where "male protagonists engage the culinary as the primary metaphorical register in relation to the regulation of the appetites" (81). No accident, then, that the figure of the comic butcher or cook (mageiros) also becomes prominent. Whether effete or a braggart, an excessive speaker can be imagined as one who cooks up feasts of (deceptive) speech. Yet Worman also complicates (fruitfully) her model by considering how her types are measured against female appetites. In Greek comedy, women are cautionary models for men in their desires for sex, food, and wine; thus the prattling and decadent speaker is also feminized. Sexual appetite becomes an impor­ tant factor in the figuration of public speaking, not only in terms of female desire, but also...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2012.0010
  4. Institutio Oratorio. Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza by Jan Rothkamm
    Abstract

    436 RHETORICA with are the values advocated by partisans in the public discourse of the writers' polities. The work of literature is to re-present the speech of that discourse at some distance from the exigencies of decision that it responds to and attempts to create, in the cooler, more contemplative medium of writing that "wards off the decisiveness of the tongue ... and asks us to try out its words on our tongues, so that we might develop our sense of what is at stake in the process of our decision making" (p. 265). Shifting our position in literary eloquence from that of the judge listening to the calls of deliberative or forensic arguments to decide now, we would step back to the epideictic position of the theoros, critical observer, witnessing the representation of conflicting claims without an immediate call to choose, reflecting on those representations, and taking them to heart in a way that might shape our future decisions. Bevis not only rhetoricizes the principles of New Criticism; he also exemplifies a practice of close reading that brings to the fore his authors' ambivalent responses to the public oratory of their times and links their formal devices to their rhetorical criticism. New Critical preferences for ambiguity and indirection and indecision in literature return but with a crucial difference. Sometimes the only way to voice a sufficiently complex attitude is to say two things at once; sometimes an alternative meaning can only shadow the words that declare something else; sometimes the only way to suspend unreflective calls to decision to resort to aporia—that shibboleth of the deconstructive variant of New Criticism. Professors of rhetoric and of literature have much to learn from Bevis's rhetorical criticism and from the rhetorical criticism in the literary texts he explicates. They are well worth working with and, to cite a phrase Bevis cites from Empson, well worth "working out." Don Bialostosky University of Pittsburgh Jan Rothkamm, Institutio Oratorio. Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leiden: Brill 2009, 539 pp. ISBN: 9789004173286 The idea that rhetoric since the time of Plato has been foreign to philoso­ phy is antiquated today. Philosophy isn't aiming at empirical knowledge but providing certain conceptual distinctions by means of elucidations, which are introduced with the help of tropes and figures. An important question is how early modern philosophers reflected on the rhetorical use of language Reviews 437 to express their ideas. The book answers this question with respect to Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes and Spinoza, who appear successively on the philosophi­ cal scene in the short period from 1561 to 1679, as is shown in the instructive svnchronopsis". It was only natural that Bacon used the study of style to demonstrate his high level of education. Not originality, but familiarity with established values was a commonly accepted measure of skill. In order to adhere to good style, Descartes relied on the counsel of a rhetorician like Aemilius. At the same time Latin wasn't completely unchallenged as the one and only language of the educated anymore. Especially French proved to be an exceedingly serious competitor to the ancient languages. Spinoza's in part deliberately idiosyncratic use of Latin wasn't necessarily seen as a defect of his texts. Like many modern scientists, he committed himself to the ideal of the autonomous thinker and not of the educated reader (p. 364). Thus method is one of the most important fields of hidden effects of rhetoric in early modern philosophy. The most important result of this book is that all these effects of rhetoric are to be understood against the background of education. Bacon was well educated in oratory (p. 85). The influence of Roman rhetoric especially shows where Bacon insists on a balance between indicium and elocutio, logos and pathos, and relies on the efficiency of schemes and precepts. This fits with Bacon's strong inclination against the preference of words above matter in the "schools". The answer to "Aristotelism" had to be a new a conception of rhetoric which was at the same time dwelling on passions and actions. Rhetoric should persuade the hearer to undertake actions. The aim of rhetoric consequently is to "apply Reason to Imagination", enabling "a...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2012.0005
  5. Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought. Cambridge: Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature by Christopher D. Johnson
    Abstract

    Reviews 439 century (p. 517). Can we also conclude that classical early modern philos­ ophy did contain a (hidden) philosophy or philosophies of rhetoric in the sense of attempts to justify rhetoric? This question is important, especially with respect to Descartes and Spinoza. The answer must be negative. The results clearly show that rhetoric does not contribute to the meaning of signs in the work of these authors. Only Bacon, who grew up under nearly ideal circumstances with respect to humanist education and rhetoric, arrives at something like a philosophical theory of rhetoric. To a much lesser extend, this can still be said with respect to Hobbes, who is much more than Bacon a critic of rhetoric, but still in search of an new rhetoric. In Descartes and Spinoza we still find rhetorical education and many reflections on rhetoric (it is one of the great merits of this book to have shown this). At the same time they were convinced that rhetoric constrains the expressive power of language. The conclusion must be that the way the early modern thinkers distinguish between res and verbiuu prevents them from providing a pow­ erful theory of meaning which is the cornerstone of a philosophy of rhetoric. Not a prejudice against rhetoric, but the idea that language only provides a deficient expression of thought proves to be inconsistent with the very idea of a philosophy of rhetoric. In Descartes and Spinoza these effects are enforced by the rationalist assumption that thought is a sphere of reality to which the mind has access independently of linguistic expressions. This book thus proves to be a strong contribution to the literature. Rothkamm enables us to see the real limitations of early modern rationalism with respect to rhetoric much clearer than before. Temilo van Zantwijk Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena Christopher D. Johnson, Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought. Cambridge: Harvard Studies in Comparative Lit­ erature, 2010. 695 pp. ISBN: 9780674053335 According to Christopher Johnson the hyperbole is the "most infamous of tropes, whose name most literary criticism does not praise, and whose existence the history of philosophy largely ignores" (1). As a result of this neglect "no full-scale defense has been made of the Baroque's most Baroque figure. This book aims to remedy that lack" (16). And what a remedy it is. To say that this is a study on a grand scale is certainly not hyperbolic. In nearly 700 pages Johnson "moves from the history of rhetoric to the extravagances of lyric and then through the impossibilities of drama and the aporias of philosophy" (521). The grand scope of Hyperboles is made necessary by the protean role of hyperbole in discourse: "as a discursive figure integral to the success of classical and Renaissance epic, Shakespearian tragedy, Pascalian apology, as 440 RHETORICA well as the viability of the Cartesian method, it can be narrative, dialogic, or structural" (8). Thus hyperbole is no mere figure of speech but rather, says Johnson, following the lead of Kenneth Burke, it is "a 'master trope,' one that vies with metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony for our attention (3). Indeed, Burke's approach to the four "master tropes" in A Grammar of Motives might serve as a preview of Johnson's method in Hyperboles. Say Burke: "my primary concern with them here will not be with their purely figurative usage, but with their role in the discovery and description of 'the truth.' It is an evanescent moment that we shall deal with—for not only does the dividing line between tne figurative and the literal usages shift, but also the four trope shift into one another" (Grammar ofMotives, 503). The hyperbole, now rechristened a "master trope" supersedes the merely figurative. It is more than a stylistic device, so much more that at times it is difficult to say what a hyperbole is—or what it is not. It is a figurative element, to be sure, but hyperbole is also an argumentative tech­ nique, an inventional device, a philosophical critique, and ultimately a world view. In establishing the hyperbole a "master trope" Johnson begins with an examination of the place of hyperbole in the rhetorical theory of Aristotle...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2012.0006
  6. What is Talmud? The Art of Disagreement by Sergey Dolgopolski
    Abstract

    454 RHETORICA speakers moved (along with a comic lexicon of abuse) from drama to oratory, surfacing also in the Platonic dialogue (although ignored for the most part by Aristotle) and proliferating in Theophrastus. Although for the sake of clarity I have focused in this review on the central opposition between the aggressive versus and the weak and decadent speaker, W. is clear that these two types exist at opposite ends of a continuum and that characteristics of one type can slide into another. Particularly welcome is her insistence that the iambic mode transcends genre. This enables her to make wideranging and successful connections between comedy, satyr play, tragedy, philosophy, and forensic rhetoric. One of the pleasures of the book is to trace the various instantiations of the paradoxical figure of Socrates from Aristophanes to Plato and Theophrastus. Socrates does not occur explicitly in the last of these, but the cumulative force of W.'s analysis compels the reader to give serious consideration to her suggestion that he is a shadowy presence in several of Theophrastus7 caricatures, the product of "a tradition of characterization that wittily assimilates to intemperate types a teacher who used his famous recalcitrance to disparage and tease haughty, boastful elites" (317). Individual readers will, of course, find places where they could desire reformulation or areas where further questions arise. I, for example, am not entirely comfortable with the contention (22) that Plato adopted the language of insult from dramatic genres—this seems to me to be perhaps an overly reductive way of formulating a process that was surely more complex. This leads in turn to problems about how informal practices of insult bleed into and from the rhetoricized versions we find in our literary texts (a reading of the treatment of invective found in Plato's Laws 934-936 would be useful here). Yet it is no insult to suggest that the book presents opportunities for future reflection; some discomfort is a small price to pay for such thoughtful and productive work. Kathryn A. Morgan University of California at Los Angeles Sergey Dolgopolski. What is Talmud? The Art of Disagreement. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009. xii + 333 pp. ISBN: 9780823229345 This book joins an increasing body of work devoted to the study of Jewish discourse. The study of Jewish rhetoric has found a place in the work of rhetoric and composition scholars who are turning their attention to the subject of non-Western or alternative rhetorics (Carol Lipson and Roberta Binkley's Ancient Non-Greek Rhetorics), as well as scholars who imagine that the conceptual integrity of the notion "Jewish perspectives" can be coherently expressed as a book (Andrea Greenbaum and Deborah Holstein's Jewish Perspectives in Rhetoric and Composition). What is Talmud? Reviews 455 also shares a concern with work in Jewish studies devoted to pedagogy (Simcha Assaf), rabbinic literary activity (Daniel Boyarin, Jeffrey Rubenstein, David Stern), historiography (Ismar Schorsch), systematic Hebrew rhetorics (Isaac Rabinowitz, Arthur Lesley) and the hermeneutical activity of textbased communities (Moshe Halbertal). While there are resources enough from which to construct a course on "Jewish discourse," the idea of teaching and studying "Jewish rhetorics" is still problematic inasmuch as there is a sense that organizing the considerable scholarly activity devoted to "Jewish discourse" under the phrase "Jewish rhetorics" is at best an anachronistic projection and, at worst, an act of violent appropriation. One way to avoid the charges of appropriation or anachronism would be to treat "rhetoric" as a set of methodologies that could be productively applied to any "text." The problem with this approach is that often the methodologies that fall under the heading of rhetoric were produced in support of philosophical or historical investigations. For this reason, others have chosen to treat rhetoric as a set of concerns, or even a predisposition to ask certain kinds of questions. The idea of "Jewish rhetorics" might, in that instance as well, avoid the violence of appropriation, but "rhetoric," then runs the risk of simply being another name for something that is being productively and more accurately examined as "discourse" or "literary activity." The concept of "Jewish rhetorics" may encounter some resistance because, in avoiding the charges of anachronism or violence, "Jewish...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2012.0011

June 2012

  1. Reason’s Dark Champions: Constructive Strategies of Sophistic Argument by C. W. Tindale
    Abstract

    Reviews 323 C. W. Tindale, Reason's Dark Champions: Constructive Strategies of So­ phistic Argument (Studies in Rhetoric/Communication), The Univer­ sity of South Carolina Press: Columbia, 2010. 184pp. Renewed interest in the Sophists may have achieved an unbiased, if not fully acknowledged, rehabilitation of their philosophical ideas, yet what is likely their most extensive contribution to Classical civilisation, mastery in rhetorical argumentation, has so far lacked any comprehensive summary, let alone a comparison with modern theories of reasoning. Tindale analyses the standard textual evidence on the sophists' practice of reasoning to describe those strategies which may specifically be cate­ gorised as part of their rhetorical techne. However, the inherent difficulty of separating sophists and their occupation from their contemporaries and supposed opponents (as, for example, the relevant works of Isocrates and Alcidamas indicate) makes any such endeavour, however valuable it may be, necessarily tentative. The title, Reason's Dark Champions, may seem surprising, perhaps even paradoxical, considering that the essence of sophistic argumentation required public engagement and an open display of rational discourse. In the book T. follows a dual division with the first part being devoted (one would say - almost compulsorily) to the justification of sophistic practice in the face of its often distortive Platonic and Aristotelian representation, whilst the second part brings forward an appreciative account of several individual strategies. Although this may be a practical approach, it still reflects a somewhat defensive scholarly position in studying the Sophists, which may not be justified and so necessary anymore. The introductorv chapter contrasts the opinions of key classical authors and modern scholars with a view to clear the term "sophistic" of the semantic thicket that overgrew it in the past couple of centuries, as exemplified by Xenophon's De Venatione 13. He presses ahead with his point early on that all too often eristic argumentation a la Plato's Euthydemus has become the standard label for sophistic reasoning. However, refusing to understand the positive philosophical assumptions behind strategies such as the contrasting arguments will result in overlooking the relatively solid and extensive counterevidence from Gorgias to Euripides on the legitimate use of logos to reflect the contingent nature of the world and human actions. In the second chapter T. counters the regular (albeit rather vague) charge against the Sophists that they made a weaker argument the stronger. In a lu­ cid analysis of how mistranslating "make" with "make appear could mask Aristotelian or Platonic epistemological preconceptions, T. demonstrates on a particularly vivid example the general tendency of denying the Sophists of a legitimate sceptical standpoint in judging the truth of opposing claims. In fact, the arguments in Antiphon's model speeches and Protagoras's On Truth make it clear that the sophists applied pragmatic strategies, such as probabilistic arguments, to deal with matters without an appeal to abstract principles. 324 RHETORICA The next two chapters focus on the representation of sophistic tech­ niques in selected works of Plato and Aristotle. First, T. shows how the Protagorean measure-maxim and the resulting oratorical or dialectical practice focused on persuasion was incompatible with the absolutistic epistemology of Plato, which relied on dialogue and strategies such as the elenchus to clear the way for eternal Truth. The much-reviled fallacies in the Sophistical Refutations and the Euthydemus not only demonstrate the difference be­ tween the practices of real and apparent refutations, but (more importantly) bring out the conflicting approaches to reality by the sophists and Plato. In the end T. offers a highly interesting comparison of the two kinds of refuta­ tions, showing that despite fundamental differences arising from contrasting epistemological positions both strategies show striking formal similarities. In the second major part of the book T. aims at offering a list of in­ dividual techniques that could set apart the Sophists as unique innovators of argument. Confronting the problem of distinguishing sophistic practice from later rhetorical studies T. accepts rather uncritically Schiappa's distinc­ tion between the two theories of rhetoric and logos to draw a line between the Aristotelian and Protagorean idea of persuasion. That concept, although seemingly attractive, nevertheless raises more questions about the system­ atic description of evidence on Greek sophists/rhetoricians/philosophers than it solves. The...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2012.0020
  2. Outward, Visible Propriety: Stoic Philosophy and Eighteenth-Century British Rhetorics by Lois Peters Agnew
    Abstract

    312 RHETORICA relato del libanés. Lafabula docet podrá obtenerla mi lector sin necesidad de mucho batallar mental. José Calvo González Malaga Lois Peters Agnew, Outward, Visible Propriety: Stoic Philosophy and Eighteenth-Century British Rhetorics (Columbia, SC, University of South Carolina Press, 2008. 211 pp. The thesis of Lois Peters Agnew's Outward, Visible Propriety: Stoic Philos­ ophy and Eighteenth-Century British Rhetorics is a bold one: "This book argues that the history of British rhetoric cannot be understood without attending to Stoic strains in influential language theories of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries" (p. 1). Since Stoicism hardly appears in scholarly works on eighteenth-century British rhetoric, we must conclude that these histories are wanting. The narrative that Agnew in part contests has two parts and is as follows: First, the empirical epistemologies of Locke, Hume, Hartley, and Reid offered a new account of cognition and emotional response that had implications for rhetorical theory. Campbell and Priestly, recognizing the importance of these ideas, incorporated them into their theories. In their new epistemologicalpsychological accounts, rhetoric moved away from in its civic function as the means for reaching decisions in social, political settings and toward an inter­ est in the way an individual formed ideas, became emotionally engaged, and then acted. Rhetorical theory became concerned with providing a description of the way an individual processes sense impressions at the expense of the Classical concern with public deliberation. Second, the rhetorics of Smith, Karnes and Blair replaced an emphasis on helping students create speeches with developing students' receptive capacities—with developing students' taste—and establishing standards of judgment for all the types of discourse that constitute belles lettres. Taking these changes together, some scholars have depicted eighteenth-century rhetoric as abandoning rhetoric's tradi­ tional political mission and transforming rhetoric into a technical, psycho­ logical, and instrumental science in the service of bourgeois individualism and self-improvement. Agnew does not contest specifically that the overtly political is no longer thematized in eighteenth century rhetoric; nor does she deny that eighteenth century rhetoric is different. She does deny, however, that a social mission vanishes in the theories she analyzes. She insists that eighteenth-century rhetorical theorists were themselves anxious about movements tow ard indi­ vidualism, secularism, and scientism and developed their theories of rhetoric not to accommodate these movements but to ameliorate their effects. Her ar­ gument is that the concepts central to eighteenth-centurv rhetoric-—common Reviews 313 sense, taste, and propriety—constitute a technical vocabulary that, if cor­ rectly read in the context of Stoic concepts familiar to the eighteenth-century theorists, are the basis for a social theory of rhetoric. Agnew's "Introduction" and first chapter, "Stoic Ethics and Rhetoric," offer a short summary of Stoicism that attempts to complicate some of the stereotypes that readers may hold of it. While Agnew acknowledges that Stoicism has a long, complex history, she is not much concerned with nu­ ance or the ensuing historical complications. Rather, she mines the tradition for Stoic themes that serve her purposes—a somewhat circular way of pro­ ceeding but forgivable since the eighteenth-century rhetorical theorists who are her concern would themselves be interested in Stoicism as appropriators . She is interested in dispelling or complicating stereotypes of the Stoic wise man who stands above the social norms, proudly beyond influence by others, and practices at best a disciplined sympathy, cultivating an austere self-command that hardly seems social. And of course the Stoics had notori­ ously little use for rhetoric. But as Agnew points out, the wise man has a civic obligation, and she highlights themes of civic duty and responsibility, in Roman Stoicism especially. With regard to rhetoric, Cicero, who faulted the Stoic attitude toward rhetoric while advocating Stoicism, judged the impoverished Stoic theory of language and rhetoric a remediable deficiency. In Chapter 2, Agnew traces the concept of commonsense in Shaftesbury, Hutchenson, and Reid to Stoic antecedents. The three eighteenth-century theorists had, among themselves, distinctly different understandings of the meaning of commonsense, which Agnew acknowledges while maintaining that their different articulations are similarly motivated to find in human innate cognitive and moral capacities an argument against skepticism and the basis for...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2012.0017

March 2012

  1. Rhetoric, Science, and Magic in Seventeenth-Century England by Ryan Stark
    Abstract

    Reviews Ryan Stark, Rhetoric, Science, and Magic in Seventeenth-Century Eng­ land. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2009, pp. vii-234. ISBN: 978-0-8132-1578-5 Ryan Stark has written what is in many ways a charming book, right down to its physical presentation whose quaint details give it the look and feel of an earlier age—the age evoked by Stark's title. That title, however, is a bit misleading since his proper subject is the enduring controversy over seventeenth-century prose style, namely, the causes of its arguable shift from Jacobean and Caroline exuberance to Restoration "plainness." Stark himself takes leave to doubt that any formal shift actually took place because the prose literature of the later seventeenth century, including that of experimental science, demonstrably retains the figured language of its predecessors—although, significantly, not to the same florid degree. In this opinion, he departs from critics like R. E Jones, Robert Adolph, and now apparently Ian Robinson, who would yet persuade us that this literature does not and should not employ figuration, owing to the alleged influence of the "new" science. Needless to say, the attempt to abolish metaphor is at least as old as Aristotle, not to mention a linguistic impossibility since we rely on tropological usage when we want to express new ideas and practices like those science itself is perpetually producing—a point Stark makes. Nonetheless, this particular bout of expressive austerity has as its locus classicus in Bishop Sprat's curiously authoritative misreading of Bacon in his History of the Royal Society, whom he represents as strenuously averse to figurative speech against every indication to the contrary, beginning with the "sensible and plausible elocution" that Bacon recommends in The Advancement ofLearning for the transmission of human knowledge. If in Stark's formulation one pole of the stylistic controversy is again represented by experimental science, the novelty of his argument comes from experimentalism's presumptive opponent—magic or occult knowledge— with which Stark contends the practitioners of the new science saw their own empirical and mechanical innovations in immediate and urgent competition. Such competition in his view generated the later seventeenth-century's focus on prose decorum and specifically what Stark calls occultism s charmed rhetoric," "enchanted tropes" and "numinous language," to which he argues Rhetonca, Vol. XXX, Issue 2, pp. 199-219, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . U2012 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.2012.30.2.199. 200 RHETORICA the virtuosi of the Royal Society and their supporters in the larger culture of the Restoration took concerted exception. Accordingly, the book begins by invoking Donne's First Anniversary where "new philosophy" forever "calls all in doubt," and proceeds to describe yet again how Francis Bacon allegedly dismantled the pre-modern world of platonizing similitude, familiar to us from Foucault and before him, Huizinga. Stark then extends Bacon's enterprise of disenchantment to the chemist Daniel Sennert and Joseph Glanvill, interspersed with a generically invidious comparison of Browne's notionally "occult" rhetoric in the Religio Medici with Hobbes' account of "scientific" usage in Leviathan, from which Stark concludes that the evidence for a stylistic shift is ideological as against formal. That is, the issue of prose decorum stands for other epistemological and partisan commitments in the seventeenth century, as indeed it always has, which Stark rather loosely associates with the Restoration's abiding suspicions of republicans, dissenters and the papacy. Although Stark does not spell out the precise semantics of either party, he attributes to the experimentalists an insistence on the evident, ordinary and apparently conventional sense of speech, construed as undertaking the "rhetorical cure" of occultism's glamorous delusions, which aspired to reveal the secrets of things hidden from the Fall, if not from the beginning of the world. By setting such strict bounds to the signification of speech, it is Stark's thesis that seventeenth-century science sought not only the disenchantment of Nature but...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2012.0029
  2. The Imperfect Friend. Emotion and Rhetoric in Sidney, Milton, and Their Contexts by Wendy Olmsted
    Abstract

    204 RHETORICA trattandoli come fígli. Gli viene proposto, come figlio di Dio, di imitare la condotta di quest'ultimo. É «la legge della liberta» . Liberta per il servizio di Dio, sancito nell'alleanza, espresso nella vita e nel culto. Dall'esodo trae origine anche il rito pasquale. Nelle epoche successive, i figli di Israele avrebbero via via composto e cantato i sette salmi della «lode di Pasqua» (Sal 113-118) e della «grande lode» (Sal 136), poi ripresi nella celebrazione famillare della festa. Attraverso «gli inni alia liberta» la parola delLuomo e quella di Dio entraño in un reciproco scambio, costitutivo del rito. E' utilmente premesso al volume un essenziale Lexique des termes techniques (pp. 17-19), sulla terminología retorica piú frequentemente utilizzata dall'A. Sommario Prefazione. I. II dono della liberta. 1. II passaggio del mare (Es 14). 2. II Canto del mare (Es 15). II. La legge di liberta. 3. II Decálogo del libro delLEsodo (Es 20,2-17). 4. II Decálogo del libro del Deuteronomio (Dt 5,621 ). 5. Perché due Decaloghi? III. Inni alia liberta. 6. «Chi é come il Signore nostro Dio?» (Sal 113). 7. «Che hai tu, mare, per fuggire?» (Sal 114). 8. «Israele, confida nel Signore!» (Sal 115). 9. «lo credo» (Sal 116). 10. «Lodate il Signore, tutti i popoli!» (Sal 117). 11. «La destra del Signore é esaltata!» (Sal 118). 12.«Si, per sempre la sua fedeltá» (Sal 136). Francesco Pieri Facoltd Teológica dell'Emilia-Romagna, Bologna Olmsted, Wendy. The Imperfect Friend. Emotion and Rhetoric in Sidney, Milton, and Their Contexts, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. xi+293 pp. ISBN 978-0-8020-9136-9 Interdisciplinary interest in emotion as a critical category of thought has led to a range of scholarship discussing the ways in which affect permeates all discourse, shaping identity and behavior within private, professional, and public spheres. Wendy Olmsted's book, The Imperfect Friend, contributes to this conversation by exploring the rhetorical management of emotion evident in early modern texts. Focusing on the attempts of friends to persuade each other, Olmsted's exploration of the "gentle strand in the history of emotional persuasion" provides insight both into the organization of early modern affect as well as the role of emotion in rhetoric generally (p. 20). Like her other historical work, it is characterized by close attention to the textual basis for her claims about the practice of rhetoric and about early modern identity and culture. Olmsted traces a general distrust of strong emotion among early modern writers, as well as a distrust of the use of force or coercion to impose Reviews 205 agreement. Against the backdrop of these doubts and the powerful hope among Renaissance rhetoricians that public "eloquence could compel people to follow the laws" (p. 20), Olmsted identifies friendship as an alternative space where eloquence is used to gain assent and build emotional stability without the threat of coercion. Olmsted commits chapters to legal and religious discourse, poetry, justice, honor, and, finally, marriage. Tracing the rhetorical means of persuading emotion in these contexts reveals how, for instance, Protestant writers could envision "friendship ... as a model for ideal marriage" in order to promote marital harmony (p. 176). Olmsted finds social relationships represented in early modern literary texts and prose treatises as "nearly utopian site[s] where one friend appeals reasonably to the heart of the other" (p. 5). According to Olmsted, these texts display "historically and culturally specific topoi for producing [and regulating] emotion" (p. 6). Hospitality, for instance, emerges as one of the central topoi in Sidney's texts through which discourse on emotion is reproduced. Expecting an individual to be a good host no matter the context or guest, for instance, promoted the regulation of extremes of love, anger, and grief. Each era, Olmsted suggests, has its own cultural resources through which emotion is managed, resources that are an understudied aspect of rhetoric. As other scholars have concluded as well, emotion, far from being irrational, is open to persuasion. What Olmsted adds to our understanding of emotion is the way in which early modern culture made it possible for individuals to effect such persuasion through temperate means. Olmsted looks primarily...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2012.0031

January 2012

  1. Reading and Rhetoric in Montaigne and Shakespeare by Peter Mack
    Abstract

    Reviews 97 catharsis and his writing vividly about his "gasping-gagging-gulping" and other persistent ailments. Hawhee's suggestive conclusion raps up her argument by focusing on Burke's famous formulation of the motion/action opposition in the eighties. Not the least of Hawhee's many accomplishments in Moving Bodies is her complication of this distinction, which she demonstrates is much more than a simple metaphysical opposition. Rather, the binary of nonsymbolic motion and symbolic action serves Burke as the basis of a "multidirectional theory" that, while positing an irreducible distinction between body and language, nonetheless shows the two terms to be parallel and complementary in the extreme (p. 166). Again and again in Moving Bodies, Hawhee chronicles how Burke worked rhetorically through the body in different discursive fields. Burke thought literally about the body and its causal relation to language, and he thought figuratively with the body in his descriptions and explana­ tions of cultural production and reception. Indeed, within Hawhee's inci­ sive rhetorical biography, the static/moving and functional/dysfunctional body emerges as the very condition of possibility for understanding Kenneth Burke as a theorv-proving, symbol-using animal. Moving Bodies deserves praise not onlv for its full-bodied picture of Burke as language thinker but also for its proposal of an alternative materialist model for doing rhetorical history. Steven Mailloux Loyola Marymount University Peter Mack, Reading and Rhetoric in Montaigne and Shakespeare, London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010. 210 pp. Peter Mack sets himself an ambitious task in this short impressive book: to compare the ways Montaigne and Shakespeare composed essay and speech, respectively, following intellectual habits and practices acquired in their humanist grammar school education-and to explain why knowing this makes a difference. He begins by reviewing the reading and composition training of the schools—topical analysis from Agricola, culling of sentences, proverbs, and figures from Erasmus to furnish copious words and matter; learning the progymnasmata from Aphthonius to build complex verbal structures—then goes on to demonstrate how this training gave the writer a formal grammar by which to register the movements of a thinking mind. Thus an artificial method of reading and writing enabled the mimesis of natural human discourse. Mack adroitly showcases this insight through a close reading of De I inconstance de nos actions, whose very theme signals Montaigne's manner of stating a position—his own or his author s—then responding defensively or critically with historical and poetic examples, 98 RHETORICA contemporary anecdotes, Latin verses, and personal reflections, each of which subtly modifies its predecessor. He is Montaigne still, but becomes much more legible as we recognize the tools he's using to form his judgment. When he cited other men's words, Montaigne wrote, they were no longer theirs but his. In Chapter 2, "Montaigne's Use of His Reading," Mack shows in fine detail how Montaigne manipulates his sources to elaborate themes, strengthen them, and fashion oppositions that open them to fresh consideration. Sometimes he will wrest a line slyly from its context, as in Que philosopher c'est apprendre à mourir, where he quotes Ovid's "When I die I would like it to be in the middle of my work" to reinforce the wish that death might come amidst ordinary toil; in Amores 2.10.36, the work is sexual. In De la vanité, he quotes Horace at length on exercising moderation so as to owe little to Fortune, then drains that stance of self-satisfaction by warning, "But watch out for the snag! Hundreds founder within the harbour." More powerfully still, in Des coches he uses material from Lôpez de Gômara's Histoiregénéralle des Indes occidentales to turn its boastful message of conquest into a critique of European cruelty in the New World. In Chapter 3, "Montaigne's logic of fragment and sequence," Mack walks us through the temporal accretions and logical structures of two early essays, Book I's Des menteurs and Par diverse moyens on arrive a pareille fin, then focuses on the intellectual and emotional logic of a section of the longer De la vanité of Book III. Diagramming all three essays, he provides us with...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2012.0039

September 2011

  1. Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts ed. by Mary Ellen Lamb, Karen Bamford
    Abstract

    440 RHETORICA visivamente in maniera efficace, mediante il frequente accostamento dei testi su due colonne afffiançate. Il volume è rivolto in egual misura a studiosi di retorica e medievisti: i primi apprezzeranno l'ampio spazio dedicato al ruolo svolto dal trattato nella storia dell'ars dictaminis e ai rapporti intrattenuti con la tradizione retorica precedente nonché il piglio técnico e specialistico che caratterizza l'illustrazione delle problematiche principali proprie del genere; per i secondi risulterà intéressante la ricostruzione delle dinamiche culturali dell'ambito cassinese, lo studio del riutilizzo delle fonti e il confronto testuale con autori del tempo. In ogni caso il volume di B., grazie alla mole di informazioni fornite nei Prolegomena e nelle note, si profila come uno strumento indispensabile e imprescindibile per lo studio della retorica epistolare medievale, ma anche per quello più generale della figura di Alberico di Montecassino. Non resta che auspicare, per un testo che ne è ancora privo, una traduzione italiana, che potrebbe risultare utile per chi si accosti a quest'opera con interessi non legati esclusivamente alia storia della retorica o del Medioevo. Vera Tufano University di Napoli Federico II Mary Ellen Lamb and Karen Bamford, eds, Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2008. 250 pp. ISBN 978-0-7546-5538-1 As its title suggests, this collection of essays includes a wide range of approaches, some distinctly literary, others verging on the sociological. It is divided into three parts. Part I, /z'Our Mothers' Maids': Nurture and Narrative," comprises four essays, Part II, "Spinsters and Knitters in the Sun," five, and Part III, "Oral Traditions and Masculinity," again five. The Introduction, by one of the editors, Mary Ellen Lamb, follows a list of brief biographies of the contributors. The Afterword is by Pamela Allen Brown. The work has a useful bibliography and a satisfactory index. The frontispiece, reproduced on page 86, is from Richard Braithwait's "Art Asleepe, Husband? A Boulster Lecture" published in London in 1588. Pages 122 and 123 show illustrations of the criers of London from the late sixteenth century, one from a woodcut and the other from an engraving. The contributors include some who are already leaders in their field and some very promising younger scholars. Most of the contributors hold po­ sitions at universities in the United States, though one is at Oxford and one at Groningen in The Netherlands. Canadian universities are well represented, with contributions from Mount Allison, Waterloo, and Guelph. A persistent consideration for those of us who work with the texts of the past is the question of how far modern theories can illuminate the practice Reviews 441 of earlier times. Although some modern theories can indeed suggest useful ways of approaching the literature of the past, there is still the ever-present danger of the kind of anachronism that treats the values of our own times as normative. Some of the essays in this collection seem to me to fall into this trap: these are for the most part exercises in misguided ingenuity, neither illuminating the texts themselves, nor establishing the usefulness of the theory. Yet some contributors use modern theory to very good effect, notably Eric Mason, whose use of Derrida's theory I shall discuss below. Many of the essays discuss classic literary texts: there are three on works by Edmund Spenser and three on plays by Shakespeare. However, some deal with texts much less generally familiar, and many of the most interesting essays are on topics closer to popular culture or social history. Notable here are two essays in Part II: Fiona McNeill's "Free and Bound Maids: Women's Work Songs and Industrial Change in the Age of Shakespeare," and Natasha Korda's "Gender at Work in the Cries of London." It is especially encouraging to see discussions of the importance of music, both in these essays and in "'When an Old Ballad is Plainly Sung': Musical Lyrics in the Plays of Margaret and William Cavendish" by James Fitzmaurice. Demonstrating as it does the importance of pathos, the use of music and also the musical element in oral discourse should be of particular interest to rhetoricians. It is impossible, given...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2011.0006

May 2011

  1. Review: Rhetoric and the Republic: Politics, Civic Discourse, and Education in Early America, by Mark Longaker
    Abstract

    Book Review| May 01 2011 Review: Rhetoric and the Republic: Politics, Civic Discourse, and Education in Early America, by Mark Longaker Mark LongakerRhetoric and the Republic: Politics, Civic Discourse, and Education in Early America. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2007. xx + 266 pp. ISBN 978-0-8173-1547-4 Rhetorica (2011) 29 (2): 208–211. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2011.29.2.208 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: Rhetoric and the Republic: Politics, Civic Discourse, and Education in Early America, by Mark Longaker. Rhetorica 1 May 2011; 29 (2): 208–211. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2011.29.2.208 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. © 2011 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2011.29.2.208

March 2011

  1. Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity by Nancy S. Struever
    Abstract

    218 RHETORICA Nancy S. Struever, Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 158 pp. ISBN 9780226777481 This book is not easy to characterize. In Rhetoric, Modality, Moder­ nity Nancy Struever shapes over a decade of methodological reflection on Hobbes, Vico, Peirce, and Heidegger into a bold historical argument about the limits of philosophy and our most basic modes of being. Methodologi­ cally Struever is closest to C. S. Peirce on beliefs that generate habits of action and Bernard Williams on the limits of philosophy, but ultimately her project exceeds both because it mobilizes rhetoric first, and thus it narrates from the margins with utterly novel results for our understanding of rhetorical topics, inquiry modes, politics, and history. Within the field of rhetorical studies per se Struever's work is polemic in so far as it argues the contempo­ rary historiography of rhetoric is "the location of speculative vigor" rather than the practice (p. 98). In terms of rhetoric and philosophy the work of Michel Meyer is probably closest, though Struever's historical erudition dis­ tinguishes her work along with uncommon familiarity in Anglo-American, French, German, and Italian scholarship. Though she wastes no time rehears­ ing the standard intellectual biographies or reviewing the marginal literature, Struever builds crucial elements of her argument from the ground up, defin­ ing her terms carefully and summarizing periodically'. When Struever tells us "any study of modality must attempt to deal with rhetorical operations; any rhetorician must refine his definitions of modalitv" (p. 73) we must take her seriously indeed. Struever gives us a fresh Hobbes and Vico, now central to the modern project understood in terms of new styles of inquiry, while at the same time explaining why Hobbes and Vico have been marginalized in a tradition of political philosophy that starts from the presuppositions of moral rectitude. On Struever's polemic reading, Hobbes and Vico "could challenge, from within the Anglophone, or Western, discussion, the begged questions of the hegemonous terms and propositions: an exasperating hegemony that seems planetary" (p. 66). Discreet references to "tolerance, complexity" (p. 67) distinguish her treatment of these "pessimistic" figures—especially Hobbes—from the Straussian trajectory most recently articulated in Brian Garsten's Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgnieiit, but more could be said. Along the way Struever takes a stab at theoretical debates around agency, showing cleverly with Hobbes how "will" is procedural and how the "impersonal" does not mean without personality (pp. 42, 54). Starting with Hobbes' crucial bridge concept "natural logic" (p. 33) Struever articulates the relationship between life science, rhetoric (as social science broadly understood), and modality (typically associated with ab­ stract domains of logic, mathematics, grammar theory). But how is Struever's life science (p. 15) distinguished from the Lebensphilosophie ridiculed by Heidegger in his rhetoric lectures that provide Struever a critical touch­ stone (Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophic: Marburger Vorlesun^ Som­ mer Semester 1924)7 Struever offers a nice explanation when she shows how Reviews 219 the animal account for Hobbes "reveals another, possible world of great explanatory value; its force trumps, its plots encompass narratives of Hu­ manistic capacity" (p. 18). In other words the human/non-human is topical (among other things), not just a matter of some extra-physical vitalis. We get another intriguing formulation when Struever writes "the web of political life is an emotional, but also a problematic, uncertain texture" (p. 19) sug­ gesting how a vibrant life science would make room for political possibility undeterred by the human/nonhuman divide. Thus Struever clearly moves beyond statistics and philosophical modality insofar as the field is subject to evaluation: "Possibility as realized in time, fills time: gives it significance and pathos in the accounts of the direction and force of civil movements" (p. 71). Fields of possibility are subject to "the essential rhetorical task of praise and blame" (p. 73) which is to say epideictic. And with this turn to epideictic rhetoric we are reminded of a traditional claim critiqued by Jeffrey Walker in Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity: prag­ matic discourse or what can be seen as civic oratory is the primary form of rhetoric in its preconceptual state, before it emerges into history...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2011.0028
  2. Debating the Slave Trade: Rhetoric of British National Identity, 1759–1815 by Srividya Swaminathan
    Abstract

    206 RHETORICA côté du marchand, du ménestrel, ou du pèlerin reste toujours l'impécunieux poète. Ainsi, de la vantardise des troubadours belligérants aux monologues des valets à louer, MJ tisse un réseau de significations, où la liste n est plus tant un trope qu'un outil conceptuel qui permet de renouveler la connais­ sance de ces poètes. Le lecteur peut regretter la place un peu trop grande que prend la figure du poète devant la question plus proprement rhétorique ou poétique du fonctionnement de la liste; il peut regretter la composition mo­ nographique des derniers chapitres et les choix qu'elle conditionne (corpus des fabliaux très rapidement évoqué). Mais, il ne peut, en dernière analyse, que reconnaître la finesse, la pertinence et l'utilité des analyses autant pour le médiéviste que pour celui qui travaille sur d'autres époques. Catherine Nicolas Université Paul-Valéry (Montpellier III) Srividya Swaminathan, Debating the Slave Trade: Rhetoric of British National Identity, 1759-1815. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. xiii + 245pp. ISBN 9780754667674 The proliferation of scholarship on the multi-national and multi-era debate over slavery, on the part of scholars from multiple disciplines, has created an embarrassment of riches; because there is so much scholarship, work tends to specialize by country, era, genre, method, and topos. That is, with the exception of David Brion Davis' extraordinary work, scholars gener­ ally write about the debate over the slave trade or the abolition of slavery, and almost always within a single nation. And they generally further specialize by focusing on the proslavery or antislavery position, most commonly the latter. Finally, although the slavery debate itself violated generic categories— with poems, plays, sermons, political speeches, paintings, and songs either attacking or defending slavery—scholarship has most commonly accepted a visual versus verbal split, as well as a split within written discourse between literary and political discourse. Thus, somewhat paradoxically, students of the slavery debates are currently well-served in terms of specific studies, but have fewer broad brush treatments. While Srividya Swaminathan's Debating the Slave Trade: Rhetoric ofBritish National Identity, 1759—1815 can hardly be called broad brush—one of its many virtues is the grounding of her arguments in close textual analysis— it does transcend many of the boundaries that unhappily limit the area. A study of the debate within Britain, the book places that debate within the larger context of the debate within and from the colonies, as well as the burgeoning anti-slavery movement in the United States. As well as polemical pamphlets, slave narratives, speeches, and sermons, Swaminathan considers Reviews 207 literary texts such as Mary Birkett's A Poem oil the African Slave Trade, James Boswell's No Abolition of Slavery, and the collection Poems on the abolition of the slave trade. Briefly, Swaminathan s book has two significant points for scholars of the history of rhetoric. First, her work nicelv complicates the pro- and antislavery dichotomy. She is very persuasive that there was, after a certain point, very little true "proslavery" rhetoric in the British debate, and that, therefore, the term "regulationist" is a much more accurate one. That is, defenders of the slave trade initially tried to denv the brutality of the conditions in which slaves were transported, but quickly abandoned that approach. They moved to the argument that there were flaws in current practices, but that they could be ameliorated, that better regulation would sufficiently improve conditions. In effect, they tried to coopt the language of reform—the very discourse on which abolitionists relied so heavily—by arguing for reforming rather than abolishing the slave trade. Second, she argues that, while the abolitionists were politically success­ ful in achieving the abolition of the slave trade and then the abolition of slavery within Britain, to describe the end result of the debate in purely po­ litical terms, or to attribute causality solely to the abolitionists, is to miss the larger cultural consequences of the arguments made by both sides. Instead, Swaminathan argues, the slavery debate was framed as an issue about the identity of the British and the nature of their empire: "The dialogue...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2011.0024
  3. Rhetoric and the Republic: Politics, Civic Discourse, and Education in Early America by Mark Longaker
    Abstract

    208 RHETORICA appears to have read every relevant primary and secondary text, so that the book serves as an excellent introduction to the topic. A further virtue of Swaminathan's book is that it elegantly models how rhetorical and literary analysis can be interwoven for a nuanced presentation of the complexities of social change. The puzzle about slavery is, as Swaminathan says, that "Great Britain dismantled this profitable trade, albeit unevenly and in a fraught manner, seemingly for the benefit of principle" (p. 213). It is a striking instance of effective rhetoric. Yet, it was not a case of a single text having done that considerable cultural work. Although some texts might have been more popular, and possibly more effective, than others, the abolitionists were successful because of a long series of arguments and counterarguments. They were successful because various topoi were repeated across genres, and not just in what we traditionally think of as "political" discourse. The book usefully reminds us of the breadth of rhetoric, and, hence, the potential breadth of rhetorical scholarship. Patricia Roberts-Miller University of Texas, Austin Mark Longaker, Rhetoric and the Republic: Politics, Civic Discourse, and Education in Early America. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2007. xx + 266 pp. ISBN 978-0-8173-1547-4 While in the past five years we have seen a number of books chal­ lenging and diversifying our understanding of rhetorical education in late nineteenth-century United States, including David Gold's Rhetoric at the Mar­ gins: Revising the History ofWriting Instruction in American Colleges, 1873-1947, Jessica Enoch's Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African Amer­ ican, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865—1911, and Brian Fehler's Calvinist Rhetoric in Nineteenth-Century America. The Bartlet Professors of Sa­ cred Rhetoric ofAndover Seminary, relatively little work has examined rhetor­ ical education within colonial America. Indeed, Mark Garrett Longaker's Rhetoric and the Republic is likely the most important work to do so since Thomas P. Miller's The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces. Unlike works bv Gold or Enoch, the primary virtue of Longaker s research does not come from his examining underrep­ resented communities, nor does his work take us to different parts of the university as does Fehler s. Rather, Longaker's work is important because it asks us to fundamentally reexamine our historiography at the same time that it challenges us to think harder about some of our pedagogical practices. Revising accounts by Miller, Halloran, and Clark (Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Transformations in the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric), Longaker argues that "early American republicanism was a con­ tested political terrain" which allowed for a number of conflicting peda­ Reviews 209 gogical ideals and practices to emerge in its name (p. xviii). This historical narrative in turn allows Longaker to demonstrate the anemia of the republi­ can revival which has been championed by both contemporary American academics and politicians alike. Since at least the 1950s, scholars represent­ ing various disciplines have called for a revival of civic republican political discourses as a counterweight to the hegemony of liberal political discourse. Indeed, in the United States, civic republicanism represented something of an academic third way between Soviet-inspired communist totalitarianism and American-inspired liberal capitalism. Whereas liberalism promoted negative liberty, legal proceduralism, and the interest of autonomous individuals, re­ publicanism promoted positive liberty, substantive values, and civic virtue. Finding a way of reviving civic republicanism would help revive active citi­ zenship, or so we believed. But the truth of the matter has always been that the sharp division between republicanism and liberalism was itself a prod­ uct of the Cold War, and one that was unsustainable when examining the eighteen and nineteenth centuries, a point Longaker brings home especially well in his analvsis of John Witherspoon. Oddly enough, Longaker never makes that argument explicitly and in­ stead spends most of his book demonstrating, through the use of Gramscian articulation theory, the various ways early American republican theory lent itself to very different political and economic discourses. So much the better for us, the real value of the book as far as this reader is...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2011.0025

January 2011

  1. Between Grammar and Rhetoric: Dionysius of Halicarnassus on Language, Linguistics and Literature by Casper C. de Jonge
    Abstract

    108 RHETORICA thinkers? No wonder Kirby opines “Quot lectores, tot Platones": There are as many Platos as there are readers of him. McCoy's reading of various dialogues is "partial" both in the sense of partisan and less-than-the-whole. But so are all readings of Plato. To disagree with McCoy over particulars strikes me as simply reflecting the fact that her Plato is not my Plato. I suspect many readers may be persuaded that the most consistent means by which Plato distinguishes sophists from philosophers is by their moral purpose without accepting that Plato's account is true (something McCoy does not claim), and perhaps insisting that the most compelling reading of certain dialogues requires us to accept that Plato did, in fact, try to distinguish the two on other grounds, including by method and doctrine. It is to McCoy's credit that she demonstrates familiarity with a broader body of literature than most philosophers who deal with Plato. Readers of Rhetorica will appreciate McCoy's account as a healthy counterpart to the long tradition ofbooks by philosophers that take every opportunity to equate sophists and rhetoric to the detriment of both. Her book should encourage historians of rhetoric who have not examined certain dialogues as part of the canon of rhetorical theory to include a greater variety of Plato's texts. Lastly, by portraying Plato as a sophisticated rhetor, McCoy facilitates a more candid assessment of what she describes as his most consistent theme. After all, if one does not believe in the forms (that is, if one is not a Platonist), then the only difference between sophist and philosopher is the latter's authentic concern for other people. The fact that Plato's rhetoric privileges Socrates in this regard no longer seems a compelling reason for us to do the same. Edward Schiappa University ofMinnesota Casper C. de Jonge, Between Grammar and Rhetoric: Dionysius of Hali­ carnassus on Language, Linguistics and Literature (Mnemosyne Supple­ ments 301), Leiden: Brill, 2008. xiii + 456 pp. ISBN 9789004166776 Dionysius of Halicarnassus was a Greek intellectual active in Rome in the last decades of the first century bce. Not all of his writings have survived, but those that do include (as well a lengthy work on Roman history) a substantial and interesting corpus of literary and rhetorical criticism, including studies of the classical orators and Thucydides, and a treatise on style (On Composition). Modern scholarship has often treated him with scant respect, but he has begun to be taken more seriously in recent decades. Building on that work, and contributing a distinctive anci original approach of his own, de Jonge has achieved a remarkable further advance in our understanding. His focus is on Dionysius' integration of ideas from the whole range of language disciplines—philology, technical grammar, philosophy Reviews 109 and rhetoric; metrics and musical theory also make appearances, though they are less central to de Jonge's enquiry. After an introductory chapter, de Jonge examines Dionysius' general conception of the nature of language; his treatment of the grammatical theory of the parts of speech, and his critical application of this theory; the theory of natural word-order; similarities and differences between poetry and prose; and Dionysius' use of experimental alterations to word order (metathesis, or "transposition") as a tool of practical criticism. One of the study's aims is to use Dionysius as a source for the state of the language disciplines in the late first century (for the most part known only from sparse fragments), and in particular to illustrate the close connections between these disciplines. But in reconstructing the intellectual context of Dionysius' work, de Jonge prudently resists the temptations (traditionally irresistible to classicists) of Quellenforschung: "instead of assigning partic­ ular passages from Dionysius' works to specific 'sources', I will point to the possible connections between Dionysius' discourse and that of earlier and contemporary scholars of various backgrounds" (pp. 7-8). This restraint does not preclude good observations on specific influences: in particular, there is a powerful argument for the view that Dionysius had read, and been influenced by, Cicero (p. 15, pp. 215-16). A second methodological commitment is the adoption of an "external rather than an...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2011.0037

June 2010

  1. Science, Literature and Rhetoric in Early Modern England ed. by Juliet Cummins, David Burchell
    Abstract

    340 RHETORICA to be monitored by the community and that is balanced by an ethics, psy­ chology, and political theory emphasizing isolated, estranged, and restive individuals (pp. 142-45). The image of the modern Lockean individual that Vogt advances is that of the chastened explorer, conscious of the perils of the voyage of discovery undertaken with imperfect tools, but confident in his ability to overcome as yet unknown challenges. Vogt attempts to formulate a strong version of Lockean modernity in order to shed light on what he terms "the strong attack on Lockean modernity" that he perceives in the work of Burke, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche (p. 6). In those thinkers there is, for Vogt, a more precise pessimism. In their hands, Locke's nautical metaphors entail a much greater risk of disorientation. In this reading, the Burkean sublime is a chaste riposte to Locke's cheerful analogizing, a critique of even a figural empiricism's ability to deal with the measureless. Vogt reads the marine paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and J. M. W. Turner to undermine the notion that maritime life is a storehouse of figures that stand for challenges overcome. Many of the things that Vogt has to say with regard to this strong attack on the strong version of Lockean modernity are suggestive. But it is not clear that a monograph on Locke was the best place to explore these complex issues with the sustained attention that they deserve. David L. Marshall Kettering University Juliet Cummins and David Burchell (eds.), Science, Literature and Rhetoric in Early Modern England (Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity Series), Aldershot (England) and Burlington (Ver­ mont): Ashgate, 2007. 241 pp. ISBN: 9780754657811 The intent of this collection of essays is to "present new insights" about the "interaction of science, literature and rhetoric" in the development, reception, and dissemination of scientific knowledge in early modernity. The studies emanate from a symposium of scholars held at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. The editors promise in the introduction a wide angled book that will encompass the cultural, political, and social elements of the new science. This has been accomplished to a large degree, even if at times the treatment is a bit parochial in its regional view of science and narrow historical perspective. In addition, rhetoric, left undefined, permits a diffuse sense of the term, and a vague notion that it pervades discourse. But despite these shortcomings, the book offers a rich, lively, innovative collection of essays that illuminate selected literary texts of the period. Several of the essays stand out for their clarity and scholarship. Peter Harrison's "Truth, Utility, and the Natural Sciences in Early Modern Eng­ land" avoids parochialism in its treatment of changing opinions regarding Reviews 341 natural science vis a vis the humanities. Harrison begins his essay with Sir Philip Sidney's weighing of knowledge for its moral usefulness and his elevation of the particular as key to understanding the universal in "The Defence of Poesy. Earlier the studia }iu matiitutis had revamped education for its social and moral utility as well (p. 17). The essay, with apt illustrations from the writings of the virtuosi and their commentators, shows that a similar moral evaluation was being applied to the study of natural philosophy in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The discipline was thought to aid in the development of virtue through the habits of careful study required of its practitioners. And it turned minds to regard the purpose of their labors as the betterment of mankind. Thus, the moral value of the philosophers' work eventually made the occupation socially acceptable, despite critics' ridicule of experiments performed at meetings of the Royal Society. With impressive erudition, David Burchell analyzes Hobbes' style and its debt to both Seneca and Cicero. His essay, '"A Plain Blunt Man'; Hobbes, Science, and Rhetoric Revisited," has only a tenuous connection to science, but it clarifies the relation of rhetoric to science in the period. Burchell successfully rebuts those who have claimed that Hobbes rejected rhetoric and adopted instead a "clear and perspicuous" style to foster better scientific debate. Burchell shows that Hobbes had, instead, a very broad knowledge of rhetoric and used different...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2010.0011

May 2010

  1. Sermo and Stoic Sociality in Cicero's De Officiis
    Abstract

    In his avowedly Stoic De Officiis, Cicero publicizes the persuasive power of a conversational manner, a communicative style consonant with Stoicism's emphasis on human togetherness. The relationships between and among conversation (sermo), Stoicism, and rhetoric call for scrutiny, especially since in other works Cicero decries the uselessness of Stoicism to orators of res publica. By connecting Stoicism with sermo, and sermo with oratory-glory, Cicero fits Stoicism to Rome's political contours and also ushers future leaders of public affairs into both rhetorical and philosophical conversation—mild-mannered modes of discourse—during a politically turbulent time.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2010.28.2.119

March 2010

  1. Sermo and Stoic Sociality in Cicero’s De Officiis
    Abstract

    In his avowedly Stoic De Officiis, Cicero publicizes the persuasive power of a conversational manner, a communicative style consonant with Stoicism’s emphasis on human togetherness. The relationships between and among conversation (sermo), Stoicism, and rhetoric call for scrutiny, especially since in other works Cicero decries the uselessness of Stoicism to orators of res publica. By connecting Stoicism with sermo, and sermo with oratory-glory, Cicero fits Stoicism to Rome’s political contours and also ushers future leaders of public affairs into both rhetorical and philosophical conversation—mild-mannered modes of discourse—during a politically turbulent time.

    doi:10.1353/rht.2010.0013
  2. The Rhetoric of the Conscience in Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan by Ceri Sullivan
    Abstract

    236 RHETORICA Ceri Sullivan. The Rhetoric of the Conscience in Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. xiv + 275pp. ISBN 019954784X On her Web page at the University of Bangor, where she is Reader in English, Ceri Sullivan says about her publications, 'Language most shows a man: speak that I may see thee/ Jonson's confi­ dence in his ability to read through the rhetoric is a constant challenge to me in research, and my three monographs have browsed, sheeplike, over this terrain. The first [1995] dealt with whether one may persuade oneself in devotion, focusing on Catholic texts (Dismembered Rhetoric: En­ glish Recusant Writing 1580-1603). The second [2002] mused over how a merchant represents himself and reads others' representations in the real and dramatic markets (The Rhetoric ofCredit: Merchants in Early Mod­ ern Writing). A third asks whether, if the conscience is structured as a language, the consequence of the divine I AM is YOU AREN'T ... The answer to the question posed in the most recent book is this: not necessarily—or even, on the contrary. An effort to reconcile one­ self with God may lead to tears and stylistic excess. But as Sullivan shows, it also may lead to an increased awareness of the human, the other-than-divine, parts of the self. Because actions of the self in prob­ ing its inferiority employed the devices and strategies of language, rhetorical analyses of resulting documents—poetry especially—are deeply revealing about the nature of that self. In dealing with the role of the conscience in Seventeenth Century writing, Sullivan has included in her purview analysis as well as genesis, the actions of interpreting discourse as well as responding to it. In choosing as her chief examples members of what used to be called "the school of Donne," she has picked three for whom the actions of the self in attending to what the poets thought might very well be the voice of God are both problematic and significant. Of these three, Donne has the most complicated relation to the nature of the self, to his own ego—or at least it's fashionable to think so these days when we have several studies adverting to Donne's fear of death as mainly a fear of losing his individuality, his very selfhood among the faceless and innumerable dead. The conscience, so the Seventeenth Century believed, is an innate moral sense planted in our inferiority by God. Because that sense was usually thought of as a voice, the conscience was accordingly structured as a language, and rhetoric figures in it of necessity. Literally so, as Sullivan shows. Rhetoric is present in such devices and strategies as syllogism, snbjectio, enigma, antanaclasis, aposiopesis, 237 Reviews chiasmus, to cite only those named in her chapter heads. These devices and strategies show up in discourse when one confronts, negotiates with, or advises others about that invariably troublesome inner voice. Donne debated with that voice in his poems and as priest overtly addressed the conscience of his parishioners. "Peace pratler, do not lowre" begins Herbert's poem Conscience. Vaughan found his own conscience "darting" and "full of stabs and fears" (The Relapse). "Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan," writes Sullivan, "spend much time peering curiously at their consciences, wondering who it is who is confessing to guilt" (p. 17). But these confrontations with the conscience are not re-examined simply as literary features, certainly not as psychological or moral cu­ riosities. One leaves Sullivan's book having learned as much about rhetoric and intellectual history as about the poetry of this period— perhaps even more about the former than the latter. Protestantism with its emphases on virtually unaided approaches to God and on in­ dividual responsibility toward divine law set the tone for a period in which—for the first time, Sullivan insists—judicial rhetoric was em­ ployed to deal with the conscience, a rhetoric the poems often show breaking down. As indicated, each chapter centers on a particular de­ vice or strategy, in something of the following progression, to skim briefly over the chapters. Stuart manuals described the conscience in legalistic terms; casuists invariably formed their discussions as syllo­ gisms. Torturing the...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2010.0020

September 2009

  1. Dominante spaziale e struttura argomentativa nel V Discorso Sacro di Elio Aristide
    Abstract

    Aristides’ own definition of the Sacred Tales as diegesis allows us to read them using narratological categories. The work contains circular or, better, spiral-like time structures. The Fifth discourse is dominated by spatial circularity, coexisting with a paradoxical indifference for the real space itself while Aristides’ attention focuses on the oneiric one. It has an argumentative structure based on illustration and accumulation; the altered spatio-temporal axis shows that Asclepius’ intervention crosses the boundaries between time and space, dream and reality. The Sacred Tales owe their simple stylistic structure, strikingly different from other discourses of Aristides, to many factors, including their psychic and religious content.

    doi:10.1353/rht.2009.0001

May 2009

  1. The Rhetoric of Passion in Donne's Holy Sonnets
    Abstract

    Abstract In his Holy Sonnets, the English Renaissance poet and divine John Donne (1572–1631) gives voice to powerful emotional outbursts. Previous critics have mostly been concerned with the religious context and theological positions of the sonnets. This study rather attempts to isolate the psychological context of the poems by relating them to the early modern discourse on the passions. In order to grasp the pathos of Donne's Holy Sonnets, we need to consider the advice on how to handle violent emotion in such treatises as Thomas Wright's The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604) and Edward Reynolds's A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule of Man (1640).

    doi:10.1525/rh.2009.27.2.159

March 2009

  1. Influences on Peripatetic Rhetoric: Essays in Honor of William W. Fortenbaugh ed. by David C. Mirhady
    Abstract

    Reviews David C. Mirhady, ed., Influences on Peripatetic Rhetoric: Essays in Honor of William W. Fortenbaugh. Leiden: Brill, 2007. viii + 282 pp. This valuable collection of fourteen essays divides itself naturally into two parts: those which conform strictly to its title (1, 2, 3, 5, 8,11,13), and the rest, which focus on Aristotle's Rhetoric (4, 14), Rhetorica Ad Alexandrian (6) and post-Aristotelian topics (7, 9, 10, 12). Mirhady's Introduction assembles the diverse elements that inform the book very skilfully: the present state of scholarship, the historical background, a synopsis of the contents of Aristotle Rhetoric and the Rhetorica Ad Alexandrian, and summaries of the fourteen chapters. Dirk Schenkeveld, Theory and Practice in Fourth-Century Eloquence, is con­ cerned with a particular feature, mainly of deliberative oratory: the speaker's adoption of a didactic tone, usually when introducing a key narrative or ar­ gument. He does not consider whether this tone is a function of the characters of its two chief proponents, Isocrates, who was a teacher, and Demosthenes, who was famously superior in his attitude to his audiences and opponents; while the examples in Lysias look suspiciously formulaic. These character­ istics would go some way to explaining the absence of recommendations for them from the theorists. In Ethos in Persuasion and in Musical Education in Plato and Aristotle, Eckart Schutrumpf finds the latter's proposition that a speaker's good character is by itself a device of persuasion too simplistic compared with the examination conducted by Plato, in whose Gorgias and Protagoras audiences are seen as more susceptible to purely rhetorical skills than to a speaker's perceived moral qualities. Schutrumpf traces a development in Plato's attitude to persuasion, with the need to replace it by force being increasingly considered. Aristotle consistently takes a more optimistic view of human nature. David Mirhady, Aristotle's Enthynienie, Thymos, and Plato, sets out to establish the emotional content of the Aristotelian enthymeme by reference to its etymology. After admitting that the verb had come to mean no more than 'consider,' Mirhady argues that the enthymeme connotes "a form of cognitive activity that takes place in the context of emotional response.'' But the enthymeme is concerned with emotions only in so far as the human experiences from which it draws its premisses have emotional content, and for Aristotle it is always closer to logic (the syllogism) than to the irrational Rhetorica, Vol. XXVII, Issue 2, pp. 218—234, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2009 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. DO1: 10.1525/RH.200A27.2.218. Reviews 219 thoughts and actions of the thymos. In his Techniques of Proof in 4th Century Rhctoiic, Tobias Rheinhardt finds connections between Aristotle s Rhetoric, his dialectical theory' in the Topics, and the Rhetorica Ad Alexandrum in respect of arguments related to some of the standard themes of deliberative and forensic oratory; This chapter begins and ends with a welcome reassertion of the view that the birth of rhetorical theory is to be assigned firmly to the Fifth Century: a fact which can easily be established by noticing the recurrence of a wide array of technical proofs and topoi in Antiphon and the early speeches how Aristotle defines an ideal written text as one which is susceptible to oral performance, and that epideictic oratory is aimed at an audience which is both spectator and critic, who dissects a discourse and passes judgement on the question of whether the author/speaker has discovered all the possible means of persuasion. She notes that Aristotle differs from his predecessors in distinguishing between styles suitable for deliberative and forensic oratory. Her study also clarifies several of the obscurities in Aristotle's account of these styles by reconciling different parts of it. In Carl Werner Muller's Der Euripideische Philoktet und Die Rhetorik des 4. Jnhrhunderts the starting-point is Dion of Prusa's opinion that the rhetorical content of Euripides Philoctetes distinguishes it from its Aeschylean and...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2009.0016
  2. Trust in Texts: A Different History of Rhetoric by Susan Miller
    Abstract

    Reviews 233 allows for a comparison so general, one might doubt its usefulness. “Painting is really like poetry/' van Eck writes, “because both arts are inventions that make appear things that do not exist" (p. 68). Yet the point of van Eek's book is not to show how painting and architecture are the same as rhetoric, but how a culture saturated with the lessons of classical rhetoric influenced the creation and reception of visual art. In fact, rather than primarily focusing on works of visual art and architecture, the book is actually more concerned with the way early modern artists, architects, and spectators spoke and wrote about the visual arts. This is the book's strength, as example after example reveals that classical rhetorical theory provided a rich mine for both artists seeking to describe their method and spectators accounting for their reaction to the artwork. The discussion (in chapter fixe) of poetic responses to the discovery of the Lnocoon statue in 1506 is particularly interesting in this regard. The responses laud the power of the statue to move the viewer while drawing on the language of classical rhetorical theorv. As a whole van Eek's studv is a compelling and welcome contribution to the growing body of work on earlv modern visual culture, broadly defined. Through careful readings of a v ariety of early modern texts about art and architecture from England and Italy, she is able to show how rhetoric influ­ enced the theory, practice and reception of the visual arts. The book serves as a correctiv e to art historical approaches based on theories of aesthetics and style after Kant that downplay the instrumental character of much early modern art. To accomplish this, though, the variety of rhetorical theory is necessarily placed in the background to allow for the common threads that tie rhetoric to the v isual arts in van Eek's account to come into relief. For those interested in early modern European visual culture this will seem a small price to pay. James A. Knapp Eastern Michigan University Susan Miller, Trust in Texts: A Different History ofRhetoric. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008. xiv + 224 pp. This is an astute, ingenious, and inclusive survey of the contemporary Anglophone discussion that centers on what Miller considers the rhetorical core: that is, pedagogy, training for discursive performance—either in civil affairs or in "self-fashioning," techniques of representation of the practi­ tioner for both public and private motives. That is, both teaching-practice and practice-practice. Tier vital distinction is the prefix meta . rhetoric engages "multiple metadiscourses derived from ritual, imaginative, affil iative practices" (p. 1). Rhetoric as pedagogy is obviously meta-discourse, discourse about discourse; it can, or should, invest in meta-discursive 234 RHETORICA controlling, important—discourses that form and are formed by vital, specific life-interests. On the one hand, the multiple metadiscourses are practices 1) "that we trust for their well-supported and reasoned statements", or 2) "for their participation in infrastructures of trustworthiness," products of "special plane[s] of understanding, and [their] consequences" (p. 2). But, on the other hand, pedagogy, as schooling in the conditions of trust, deals also with trust, not in reason and the shared infrastructure, but with uncertainty, bad faith; it functions "symbolically and charismatically" (p. 3), it can be a "retreat to the orphic" (p. 147). Still, it is always creating "contexts for choice" in an "emergent present" (p. 3) responding—she cites John O. Ward—to "distinct market niches" (p. 4), or, preferably to universal/human, national, global niches. Thus, rhetoric is hegemonous: powerful in its contribution to "productivity and stature of the present [whatever] age," or to "the circulation of contemporary values" (p. 37). As hegemonous, omnicompetent: the study considers political ideolo­ gies, literary aspirations, social ambitions, power contests, gender definings, genre strategies. Rhetoric can be reformulated as concerned with "ad hoc, class-based, experiential, and especially educational bonds that enable per­ suasion" (p. 53). Anything, in short, "crucial to monitoring, reprocessing, and delivering the limits of trust" (p. 5). There is, as well, a very strong emphasis on the pertinent contributions of emotional as well as cognitive capacities. Indeed, a large...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2009.0020
  3. The Rhetoric of Passion in Donne’s Holy Sonnets
    Abstract

    In his Holy Sonnets, the English Renaissance poet and divine John Donne (1572–1631) gives voice to powerful emotional outbursts. Previous critics have mostly been concerned with the religious context and theological positions of the sonnets. This study rather attempts to isolate the psychological context of the poems by relating them to the early modern discourse on the passions. In order to grasp the pathos of Donne’s Holy Sonnets, we need to consider the advice on how to handle violent emotion in such treatises as Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604) and Edward Reynolds’s A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule of Man (1640).

    doi:10.1353/rht.2009.0014
  4. La fonction héroïque: Parole épidictique et enjeux de qualification
    Abstract

    The present contribution to the analysis of the rhetorical genre of eulogy and blame proposes to approach this oratorical undertaking from the point of view of its performative action on praxis. The question is to clarify the conditions of the possibility of this eminently ritual exercise of qualification of the world that attempts, by emphasizing the value of a figure that is rather singular, that of the "hero," to express the present of a community and to program passing to the act. The goal of our reflection consists in showing how the epideictic genre, by the confirmation of a meaning actualized by the speech act, strives to establish and fix the properties of things and consecrate the symbolic forms that can present themselves as justification of a collective action.

    doi:10.1353/rht.2009.0012

January 2009

  1. Arithmetic of the Species: Darwin and the Role of Mathematics in his Argumentation
    Abstract

    Historians of science resist recognizing a role for mathematics in The Origin of Species on the grounds that Darwin’s arguments are inductive and mathematics is deductive, while rhetoricians seem to oppose the idea that deductive mathematical arguments fall within the jurisdiction of rhetorical analysis. A close textual analysis of the arguments in The Origin and a careful examination of the methodological/philosophical context in which Darwin is doing science, however, challenges these objections against and assumptions about the role of mathematical warrants in Darwin’s arguments and their importance to his rhetorical efforts in the text.

    doi:10.1353/rht.2009.0024