Rhetorica

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June 1998

  1. Rhetoric and Pedagogy: Its History, Philosophy, and Practice: Essays in Honor of James J. Murphy ed. by Winifred Bryan Horner and Michael Leff
    Abstract

    REVIEWS Winifred Bryan Horner and Michael Leff eds, Rhetoric and Pedagogy: Its History, Philosophy, and Practice: Essays in Honor of James J. Murphy (Mahwah, NJ: Elrhaum, 1995) 337pp. This commemorative volume honoring James J. Murphy is an eclectic collection of essays authored by scholars from around the world, colleagues and former students of Murphy whose own contributions to rhetorical history are well known. The collection pays tribute to Murphy's career as scholar and teacher and celebrates historical texts and figures for their cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural contributions to rhetorical history and pedagogy. Beth S. Bennett and Michael Leff's Introduction praises Murphy for his commitment to the history of the rhetorical tradition—both discipline and profession—through his integration of teaching and scholarship as well as his role in the founding of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric. They note that ISHR, in addition to publishing the field's premier journal, Rhetorica, has held biennial conferences since 1977 leading to the publication of important articles and edited volumes on Western rhetorical history and historiography "from the end of the Roman Empire through the 16th-century" (3). The intellectual status of rhetorical studies was thus elevated through Murphy's efforts. The collection's eighteen chapters are grouped chronologically into four sections: I. Theory and Pedagogy in the Classical and Medieval Traditions, II. Renaissance Textbooks and Rhetorical Education, III. Continuity and Change in 18th-Century Rhetorical Education, and IV. Rhetoric and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present. The Introduction forecasts the recurrence of three themes throughout the volume: "(a) Murphy and his work are 305 RHETORICA 306 ahead of their time; (b) Murphy not only studies rhetoric but also uses it to promote a communal effort; and (c) Murphy adopts a comprehensive view that opens an old tradition to future inquiry" (2). Bennett and Leff describe the ways in which each of the essays that follows illuminates one or more themes. They also advocate reading "across" chapters to trace the ways in which certain topics and controversies have evolved and enduring throughout rhetorical history. This way of reading, they suggest, can yield "the sense of unity in diversity" (16) that exemplifies Murphy's teaching and scholarship. The six essays in part one concern such topics as Aristotle's enthymeme as a doxastic rather than syllogistic form of reasoning (Lawrence D. Green), Cicero's criticism of philosophers (Robert Gaines), distinctions between Cicero's published court speeches and their oral presentation (Jerzy Axer), attitudes toward textual authority and ownership of ideas into the Christian era (George A. Kennedy), the use of poetry in the teaching of rhetorical tropes during the Middle Ages (Marjorie Curry Woods), and the contrasting missions and pedagogical practices at the universities of Oxford and Bologna in the late Middle Ages (Martin Camargo). Against long-held misperceptions of the "medieval fragmentation" of the classical rhetorical tradition, this first group of essays re-envisions the rhetorical tradition's passage from a "golden" to a "dark" age. Rather than "confused and confusing" (Woods 73), this early period in the history of rhetoric is rehistoricized as a period in which the study and practice of rhetoric flourished in new and various shapes, "each appropriate for its particular time and place" (Camargo 94). The second group of essays, the most esoteric in the collection, extends discussions of pedagogy into the Renaissance. John Ward s essay on Guarino da Verona includes lengthy discursive notes and references to primary texts as well as Latin excerpts for the specialized reader of Renaissance rhetoric. As scholar, teacher, and rhetor, Guarino contributed "toward the definition of 15th-century Italian paideia ...educative of the whole man", capable of developing his human, moral, social, and civic potential (101). Jean Dietz Moss's essay on Ludovico Carbone follows, offering a summary of the contents and significance of Carbone s On the Nature of Rhetoric and Eloquence", the first Reviews 307 book of his De arte dicendi (On the Arts of Speaking), a work organized as a series of disputations with classical rhetoricians. William A. Wallace's essay on Antonio Riccobono and rhetorical pedagogy in 16th-century Padua shows the persistence of such issues as whether rhetoric is an...

    doi:10.1353/rht.1998.0015

March 1998

  1. Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception by Kathy Eden
    Abstract

    RHETORICA 230 unify. As in the past, he continues to argue for the multiple moments of composition theory. George Pullman Georgia State University Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 119 pp. Those interested in the evolution of particular discursive practices that helped shape antiquity, especially the theoretical relationship between reading and interpretation, will benefit from this study in locating classical antecedents that ally rhetoric and hermeneutics. Unlike most studies of hermeneutics that spring from the Germanic tradition of Schleirmacher and Dilthey or the recent perspectives of Gadamer or Riceour, this study prizes the rhetorical precedent of an ancient mode of reading, known as interpretatio scripti, as crucial to the development of the field study of hermeneutics. By tapping into this rhetorical tradition largely overlooked in philological studies, Eden historically discerns and synthesizes a convincing case for the recognition and study of interpretatio scripti as a meaning making agent common to both the rhetorical and hermeneutical enterprises that have gained renewed prominence in humanistic inquiry today. In what may be the most valuable portion of the book, the first chapters construct the significance of interpretatio scripti as a model of reading that Roman rhetoricians inherited—from the Hellenistic rhetorical tradition—as "a loosely organized set of rules for interpreting the written materials pertinent to legal cases" (p. 7). As a point of origin, Eden moves decisively to Cicero, particularly De inventione and De oratore, in contextualizing how transforming character of interpretatio scripti often complicates treatments of proof and style in his rhetorical manuals, and plays a deciding role in appropriating legal arguments between the intention (voluntas) and the letter (scriptum) of an author or text under scrutiny. Interpretation, to Cicero, is understood in terms of controversy; thus interpretation theory (and by later implication Reviews 231 hermeneutics) finds a habitual home in rhetorical theory. Eden notes that while Cicero was not the first one to do this, his work has enjoyed the widest reception and can be seen as a generative point from which to track the influence of interpretatio scripti in her book's subsequent chapters. Such a discursive heredity becomes convincing as Eden links the interpretive principles of interpretatio scripti to the classical arts of poetry and grammar as seen through Plato, Aristotle and Plutarch. The prerequisite study of grammar, in classic times, is seen to develop similar concerns as its rhetorical counterpart in the coordinating and complementary notions of decorum and oeconomia which prove crucial in "underlying the hermeneutical concept of contextualization, historical and textual, respectively" (p. 41). Eden extends her coverage of the influence of interpretatio scripti through the Christian appropriation of classical culture, in Basil, Paul and most notably in Augustine. Amidst this backdrop of Patristic hermeneutics, Eden achieves a fine sense of dialogue between the concepts of Cicero, Quintillian and Augustine, and accommodates both a spiritual and historical order that extends into the rehabilitating humanism of Erasmus. Though less substantial than the first part of the book, the final few chapters bring the selected work of Philip Melanchthon and Flacius's Clavis scripturae sacrae into the interpretive landscape as a whole. In the end, this book serves a vital role in establishing the credibility of classical scholarship in legitimizing what Ricoeur would call the hermeneutics of tradition. As a centerpiece in the debate between the role of equity and spirit in the ancient act of reading, interpretatio scripti emerges as a meaningful landmark in charting the never-ending task of interpretation, and suggests an expansion in the intellectual history of both hermeneutics and rhetoric. As an instalment in the Yale Studies in Hermeneutics, this book works an effective balance between written economy and great scholarly depth. Such a stylistic blend should provide ample access points for both experts and novices interested in theories of interpretation, antiquity and rhetoric. RICHARD A. MILLER Bowling Green State University ...

    doi:10.1353/rht.1998.0032
  2. The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces by Thomas P. Miller
    Abstract

    RHETORICA 236 Thomas P. Miller, The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces, (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1997), x + 345 pp. Thomas Miller's excellent work The Formation of College English examines a strand in the development of English studies—the civic domain of rhetoric—neglected in other important histories of the discipline: Gerald Graff's Professing English Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), Franklin Court's Institutionalizing English Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), and Robert Crawford's Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). In the role of respondent to the 1997 Conference on College Composition and Communication session "Octalog II: The (Continuing) Politics of Historiography", Miller stressed the "civic sense of the work that lies before us" as historiographers of the discipline of composition and rhetoric. In particular, he praised historical research based on a "civic philosophy of teaching that links critical understanding with collaborative action toward social justice" and applauded archival work "that take[s] up the project of reconstituting the experiences of those who have been erased from accounts of the dominant tradition." In The Formation of College English, Miller "takes up" the little examined "provincial traditions that introduced modem history, politics, rhetoric, literature, and science into the college curriculum as case studies of how the teaching of culture functions as a means of social reproduction and transformation" (p. 19). He offers a comprehensive and unique treatment of territory introduced in recent institutional accounts of the development of American classes in rhetoric/composition, including Nan Johnson's Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in American Colleges (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992) and Winifred Bryan Homer's Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric: The American Connection (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993). Miller asks "from a historical perspective, what then are the practical values of rhetoric and composition?" (p. 285). The answer: studying parallels between "historical situations" leads to Henry Giroux's conception of "teachers as transformative intellectuals" who strive for self-awareness and view "education as a public discourse" (p. Reviews 237 288). Beginning with an examination of the "civic domain, where rhetoric concerns itself with popular values in political action," Miller applies key concepts defining Antonio Gramsci's rhetorical theory ("civil society," "cosmopolitanism," "organic and traditional intellectuals") to his exploration of "how the humanities can prepare students to become productively involved in political debates over popular values in practical action" (p. 7). In the first chapter, Miller points to print economy and the resulting expansion of the reading public as the driving force responsible for effacing rhetoric: "Professors...de-emphasized the composition of public discourse and concentrated on teaching taste to adapt higher education to the mission of instilling a common culture in the reading public" (pp. 60-61). In chapter two, Miller examines the role of professors at the elite English universities, the "antiquarians who divorced the learned tradition from the needs of contemporary learners", in an attempt to preserve English culture against change (p. 64). Conversely, the utilitarian approach to education characteristic of the dissenting academies and subsequently the provincial colleges introduced modem culture into higher education. The new pedagogy at these institutions was based on the belief that "free inquiry would advance liberal reform, economic progress, and rational religion" (p. 85). The next three chapters closely examine the development of the "new rhetoric" at: the Dissenting Academies, which encouraged students to assume a critical perspective on received beliefs; the provincial Scottish Universities, which reformed the university curriculum against a critical reexamination of classicism; and the colonial Irish "contact zones", where outsiders had to teach themselves the proprieties of English taste and usage. Miller's investigation of the classical tradition in Ireland, focusing on the elocutionary movement and English studies outside the university, represents a novel and fascinating contribution to rhetorical studies of this period. Miller devotes the following chapters to closely appraising the contributions to rhetorical theory and practice of perhaps the three most influential figures and movements of the period—Adam Smith and the rhetoric of a commercial society, George Campbell and the "science of man", and Hugh Blair and the rhetoric of belles lettres. In the final chapter, Miller examines the expansion of higher...

    doi:10.1353/rht.1998.0035

March 1997

  1. L’effet sophistique by Barbara Cassin
    Abstract

    Reviews 215 expediency. Jean-Louis Labarrière treats Aristotle's remarkable compari­ son of deliberative oratorical style to skiagraphia, or chiaroscuro, in painting. In Section IV, Alexander Nehamas, in an essay that first appeared in Rorty's 1992 collection on the Poetics, writes on pity and fear in the Rhetoric and Poetics, while André Laks (following influential essays by G. E. R. Lloyd, J. Lallot, and I. Tamba-Mecz and Paul Veyne) attempts a unifying interpretation of Aristotle's theory of metaphor. We have here, then, a formidable collection of essays by students of ancient philosophy, one which future scholars of rhetoric will need to take into account. If the shadow of Plato looms large behind most of the essays, that should come as no great surprise. As is the case with all col­ lections, it would be easy to fault this one for what is omitted or ignored here: it would have been valuable, for example, to have such a group of philosophers comment in more detail on the presocratic / sophistic back­ ground of the Rhetoric. But that would be to miss the virtues of what is included. I prefer, as I have indicated, to take the publication of this col­ lection as an auspicious omen for the philosophical study of rhetoric in general, and of the Rhetoric in particular. John T. Kirby Barbara Cassin, L'effet sophistique (Paris: Gallimard, NRF Essais, 1995), 693 pp. To readers who are not quite acquainted with the idiosyncrasies of French publishing, the release by Gallimard of Barbara Cassin's L'effet sophistique may seem unremarkable. However, for such a mainstream publisher to take the major step of printing nearly seven hundred pages of rhetorical analysis, even in a series devoted to philosophy (NRF Essais), is most remarkable. It means, in terms of France's intellectual landscape, that "rhetoric" has broken into a different field of readership, more accus­ tomed to reading (and giving credence to) Jean-François Lyotard than, say, Marc Fumaroli. Setting aside this strategic effect, L'effet sophistique bears all the charac­ teristics of being a major work on at least three counts. Firstly, it heralds a shift in French philosophy from denying history of rhetoric the status of a discipline to its reincorporation in philosophical debates. However, Cassin's work keeps its distance from both deconstruc­ tion and history of ideas (as in De Romilly's Les grands sophistes dans 216 RHETORICA l'Athènes de Périclès [Paris: De Fallois, 1998]). Secondly, L'effet sophistique has the merit to question sources and to provide new translations and insights into mistranslations (Cassin also heads a team working on a Vocabulaire européen des philosophies). A main tenet of Cassin's method is to immerse her reading-as-translation into the history of readings of particu­ lar texts such as Gorgias' Praise of Helen or Sextus Empiricus' Aduersus mathematicos VU, 65-87, or Galen's Libellus de captionibus and excerpts from Lucian as well as the remains of Antiphon the Sophist. Thirdly, it offers conceptual tools to formulate a theory of political or civic discourse not unrelated to current debates on the nature of democracy, diversity, and human rights. In this respect, L'effet sophistique truly does justice to the art of rhetoric by inscribing an analysis of the Sophists in the history of their reception by ancient and modern philosophy and in "current affairs." What is most topical is the way Cassin articulates the opposition of what she terms "Arendts' Greece" and "Heidegger's Greece" (pp. 248-69), by way of conclusion to a chapter on "City as Performance." She elucidates how Arendt constructs the primacy of politics over philosophy by resort­ ing to Protagoras. L'effet sophistique formulates one central question: in the conflict between the two logoi that haunts ancient thought, between ontology and logology, between the Sophist and the Philosopher, how did the First and the Second Sophistics position themselves as key operators in the inven­ tion of "fictionality"? Can we reconstruct the rhetorical history of that "Other" of philosophy and of good Politics, the Rhetor—either Protagoras, Gorgias, and Antiphon or Philostratos, Ælius Aristides, Lucian, and Longus—and, in the process, obtain a...

    doi:10.1353/rht.1997.0023
  2. Ciceronian Rhetoric in Treatise, Scholion and Commentary by J. O. Ward
    Abstract

    Reviews 219 J. O. Ward, Ciceronian Rhetoric in Treatise, Scholion and Commentary, Typologie des Sources du Moyen Âge Occidental, 58 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995), 373 pp. Ward's work on Ciceronian rhetoric in treatise, scholion, and com­ mentary constitutes the fifty-eighth fascicule in a typological series whose aim is "établir la nature propre de chaque genre de sources (Gattungsgeschichte) et arrêter les règles spéciales de critique valable pour chacun." Despite the "centrality," as W. daims, of the art of rhetoric in mediaeval culture, no previous work has surveyed the relevant texts as a group. Texts transmitting Ciceronian rhetoric in mediaeval and Renaissance culture, however, resist classification as a single genre on account of their broad diversity of contexts and application. Therefore, W. restricts his examination to texts designed to impart "theoretical" as opposed to "applied" knowledge—that is, texts whose purpose is to instruct the student in the classical art of general persuasion. Included within this sub-division are texts devoted to colores, etc. Artes poetriae, artes dictaminis, artes praedicandi, and artes orandi, on the other hand, are exam­ ined separately by other scholars in fascicules 59, 60, and 61. At the outset of his work, W. leaves his reader in no doubt regarding the significance of a study of these texts. These texts not only offer an insight into mediaeval and Renaissance ideas about rhetoric and literary styles, but they also help to reveal the "didactic curriculum that must have come to influence most writers and articulate thinkers in the period." W., therefore, eschews the oblique angle from which most previous scholars, in their preoccupation with theological, dialectical, and grammatical issues or concerns, have traced the Fortleben of classical texts. By contrast, W. val­ ues the commentaries of the period as "intrinsically interesting artefacts of cultural history" providing evidence with which to "assess the role played in mediaeval and Renaissance culture by a hybrid ars rhetorica." After providing an extensive bibliography, W. engages in a stimulat­ ing discussion of various general issues. He advances cogent arguments, for example, to explain why the mediaeval and Renaissance treatment of generalized preceptive rhetorical theory is so heterogeneous, suggesting inter alia that the different types of text reflect the attitudes of society to the knowledge enshrined in that text, with commentaries canonizing the past text, thereby confining its progress, and treatises bearing much more the individual stamp of the transmitter. In recognition of the problems inher­ ent in assessing such a heterogeneous genre, W. creates his own division of the extant material into four rough (and occasionally overlapping) sub­ categories: 1) independent treatises; 2) commentaries and glosses on classi­ cal texts or on texts included in 1); 3) continuous or occasional comments, etc., in the form of interlinear / marginal glosses, etc.; and 4) paraphrases, 220 RHETORICA explications, or translations presented without texts themselves. The main section of the book is devoted to a survey of the extant rele­ vant material organized (on the whole successfully) according to the four sub-divisions noted above and within three chronological periods. By far the least successful portion of W/s work is his survey of the first chrono­ logical period, namely the fourth to the eleventh centuries, for the follow­ ing reasons. Firstly, the treatment of these centuries as though they consti­ tuted a homogeneous period seems to ignore certain clearly distinct politi­ cal and cultural phases. Secondly, insufficient relevant historical informa­ tion is provided for this "period" to establish a context within which the texts can be fully appreciated. Thirdly, the organization of W.'s survey breaks down when W., justifying his inclusion of late antique writers because of their strong influence in the mediaeval and Renaissance peri­ ods, concentrates almost exclusively on this later influence rather than on the creation and consumption of the texts in their own chronological con­ text. Fourthly, W. is forced to rely rather heavily in this section on palaeographical , codicological, and stemmatological evidence, with which he is clearly less at home than with historical evidence. In describing the ninthcentury manuscript Leningrad Publich. Bibl. F vel 8 auct. class, lat. as "unrepresentative" in the extent of its glossatory activity, for example, W. ignores the clear evidence of...

    doi:10.1353/rht.1997.0024