Rhetorica
1293 articlesMarch 2023
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Abstract
Largely disparaged by readers since the eighteenth century but revered before then as a guide to living and dying well, the Tusculan Disputations has throughout its long reception been acknowledged as the most rhetorical of Cicero's dialogues. This essay takes as its point of departure not only this acknowledgment but the principal interlocutor's key comparison between finding the appropriate status or "issue" in a legal case and selecting a circumstantially sensitive strategy when offering consolation for the loss of a loved one. It argues, with the help of Cicero's rhetorical works, that he deploys rhetorical status, with its three questions (conjectural, definitive, and qualitative), to structure the conversation, thereby redressing the perceived failure of Plato's Phaedo to provide adequate guidance for navigating life's vexations, including pain, depression, anxiety, and death.
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Rhetoric and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Purity, Covenant, and Strategy at Qumran by Bruce McComiskey (review) ↗
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Reviewed by: Rhetoric and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Purity, Covenant, and Strategy at Qumran by Bruce McComiskey Robert M Royalty Jr. Bruce McComiskey, Rhetoric and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Purity, Covenant, and Strategy at Qumran. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021. 231 pp. ISBN 978-0-271-09015-3. This book is a detailed rhetorical analysis of six of the sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls discovered at Qumran. Each chapter, focusing on one or two of [End Page 204] the texts, employs a different rhetorical strategy for analysis based on what McComiskey has identified as the "rhetorical ecology" of the text, incorporating the changing material, discursive, and historical elements of the Qumran community rather than only the more static rhetorical situation of each text. The chapters proceed in a roughly historical order. The book achieves its aims of introducing rhetorical scholars to the sectarian scrolls and, with its "case study" approach, religious scholars to new strategies of rhetorical analysis. Key points are the emphasis on rhetorical ecology as an interpretive lens and the argument for hermeneutics/rhetoric in chapter 6. While McComiskey places the diachronic rhetorical development of these texts in the social and political history of the Qumran community, this is a rhetorical, not historical, study. The Introduction argues for the importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls not only for Second Temple Jewish history but also for analysis by rhetoricians, given the relative paucity of rhetorical studies of the texts and their evolving rhetorical ecologies. Chapter 1 analyzes the early epistle from the future leader of the Essene Qumran community to the high priests of the Jerusalem Temple called Miqṣat Ma'aśeh ha-Torah, "Some Precepts of the Torah" (4QMMT, following Dead Sea Scroll convention for identifying texts by cave number and site, here Qumran). 4QMMT uses the rhetorics of identification, distinction and persuasion to distinguish the two parties' positions and to try to convince the Temple priests of the validity and urgency of Essene views on the impurity of the Temple. The rhetorical ecology of the text is as important as the rhetorical situation: "only the understanding of texts as situational and ecological will further our understanding of ancient texts such as 4QMMT" (46, McComiskey's italics). The rhetorical ecology of the community shifts dramatically in the next 50 years as the letter does not achieve its persuasive goals. The Essene community, under the leadership of the "Teacher of Righteousness," the putative author of 4QMMT, dissociates from the Jerusalem hierarchy and indeed all non-Essene Jews, founding a desert community outside of Jerusalem by the Dead Sea. Drawing on the speech act theory of J. L. Austin, chapter 2 then analyzes the foundational Rule of the Community (1QS), a performative text using infelicitous speech acts to condemn the Jerusalem authorities and felicitous speech acts to form the Yahad, or congregation, as the Essene community referred to itself. The document ends with a serious of curses, which McComiskey labels as preventing infelicitous speech acts within the initiated community, although he parses the curses, treating the ones for material actions in chapter 4, weakening his analysis. Chapter 3 then analyzes the dissociative rhetoric of the Damascus Document, a text discovered in the Cairo Genizah almost 40 years before copies were found at Qumran, hence called CD. Although the origins and purposes of CD remain less clear than 1QS, the text addresses members of the community who live in "camps" or communities among non-Essene Jews away from Qumran. Using Perelman and Olbrecht-Tyteca's The New Rhetoric on "the dissociation of concepts," McComiskey shows how CD addresses the incoherence of Essenes living among Jews who [End Page 205] are not "real" Jews.1 He shows how CD divides central concepts of Jewish identity, such as humanity, Israelite, remnant, and Essene, into "real" and "apparent." This rhetorical strategy resolves incoherence for "real" Essenes living among "apparent" Israelites. Chapter 4 turns to the central theme of ritual purity at Qumran. McComiskey chooses two texts focusing on purity, the Purification Rules (4QTohorot A, B) and the Temple Scroll (11QT), which he analyzes using material rhetoric, an alternative to representational approaches to models for words. The symbolic material actions of inspiriting...
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Reviewed by: Sexual Labor in the Athenian Courts by Allison Glazebrook Katherine Backler Allison Glazebrook, Sexual Labor in the Athenian Courts. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2021. 240pp. ISBN 978-1-4773-2441-7. This book offers a short, focused, thoughtful analysis of how prostitution functions rhetorically in Athenian legal speeches. In each of the five chapters, Glazebrook takes us through a forensic speech in which what she [End Page 209] calls "sexual labor" is at issue and analyses its rhetorical strategies to draw out ways in which Athenians used the figures of "sexual laborers" to articulate and negotiate social values. Each chapter's argument develops the last. The first chapter discusses Lysias 4, a dispute between two men over a prostituted woman they allegedly agreed to "share" but whom one is using exclusively. Glazebrook shows how the speaker repositions the unnamed woman from sex-object to subject, a manipulative influence on his opponent and the trial. The second shows how Isaios 6's portrait of a prostituted woman named Alke suggests the ramifications of her alleged influence by moving her from brothel to tenement-house to household, Peiraieus to Kerameikos to astu, playing on Athenian anxiety about "concepts of oikos and polis and … the roles of enslaved persons, non-Athenians, and even women in these places" (49-50). The third examines the more dramatic (almost panhellenic) mobility of Neaira in Against Neaira, and her more serious supposed threat to the Athenian family, citizen body, and religion. The fourth, on Lysias 3, changes focus to prostituted boys and men, considering how the speaker uses Plataian teenager Theodotos to mark out acceptable and unacceptable expressions of male homosexual desire and behaviour. The fifth, on Aischines's Against Timarchos, uses male prostitution to work through what it means to be a decent, democratic, Athenian citizen—or not. Sexual Labor is refreshingly clearly written. Glazebrook briefly but helpfully explains relevant technical points (for example, on legal processes) and key concepts (like the important but fuzzy ideological distinction between pederasty and prostitution), avoiding over-simplification and acknowledging problems and contradictions. She will offer a variety of scholars' opinions and either pick out the one closest to hers or identify the "bottom line," for example, on what it means to "commit hubris against one's own body" in Aischines 1 (140). The description of Athenian courts (9-13) offers a dynamic, basic introduction to Athenian law but also considers the law-courts as a performance context. The book is useful on terminology, demonstrating that orators use words like pornē, hetaira, and pallakē not so much to denote categories as to evoke a set of connotations to make a point. For example (37), "At two key points [in Lysias 4] … when the speaker accuses the opponent of feigning his injuries and when he asks for the jurors' pity, he refers to [the woman] as pornē (4.9, 19)" which is "both degrading and inaccurate": seemingly she "has been living with the opponent as his personal hetaira or even pallakē (long-term partner)." Further, she argues that the avoidance of the labels pornē and hetaira for Alke in Isaios 6 unmoors her from fixed place-associations (brothel for pornai; oikos for wives and pallakai; symposion for hetairai), allowing her to move within the cityscape, transgressing and disrupting the social order. Glazebrook makes her argument particularly effectively on p. 150 where, through and informing her analysis of Against Timarchus, she shows that as Aeschines "uses kinaidos as a lifestyle and identity for Demosthenes, [he] employs pornos to indicate a lifestyle and personality for Timarchos. His concern is not to show that Timarchos has practiced a profession—no concrete proofs … are offered—but to show that he embodies an identity." [End Page 210] There are some problems. On p. 40, Glazebrook writes that "many of the jurors … may have been familiar with the pornē in the brothel and on the streets, [but] the sex laborer who mixed with citizens at elite symposia … was beyond their immediate circle." This sits awkwardly with her statement on p. 70 that "many Athenians would have experienced [symposia] or at the very least would have been familiar with [their] entertainments and the women...
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Reviewed by: The Orator Demades: Classical Greece Reimagined through Rhetoric by Sviatoslav Dmitriev Gunther Martin Sviatoslav Dmitriev, The Orator Demades: Classical Greece Reimagined through Rhetoric. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2021. 354 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-751782-6. The sub-title reveals that this book is not a biography of the orator Demades; it does not describe the work, life, and character of a leading politician in the waning days of Athenian independence. One may instead call it an anti-biography in that it undertakes the deconstruction of nearly all existing evidence about Demades's life and rhetoric. Far from being purely negative, it offers a thorough study of the way in which the rhetorical culture from the Hellenistic to the Byzantine Era constructed and moulded its own "Demades," subjecting this phantasmagoria to its own ideas about [End Page 212] the social, moral, and rhetorical qualities of good and bad orators and to its own purposes in propagating these ideas and the concomitant values. Literary sources paint a picture of Demades as a major force in "pro-Macedonian" politics in Athens after the battle of Chaeroneia in 338, i.e., a proponent of a non-confrontational relationship with Philip II and Alexander the Great. The many witticisms ascribed to him show a teller of truth, fearless in the face of monarchs and the democratic mob, making him immensely quotable. While previous biographies of Demades have struggled to distinguish trustworthy information from fanciful anecdotes and to assign the former their historical setting, Dmitriev proposes to cut the Gordian knot by discarding all evidence that is not from Demades's lifetime as fabrication of the later rhetorical educational system, in which progymnasmata and declamations drew on classical (pseudo-)quotes and (often historically impossible) scenarios. His argument is based on an impressive array of material that exposes many of the quotes as stock material ascribed to different characters by different ancient authors, the anecdotes as tropes, for example about corruption, dealing with the masses or flattery. What is left is a small number of references in the Attic orators and epigraphic evidence. One inscription (IG II2 1623, B 166-167), which appears to show Demades's commitment in an operation directed against Macedon in 341/340, is viewed as proof that Demades was by no means a supporter of appeasement or even pro-Macedonian. Dmitriev's scepticism deprives us of many cherished sources, such as Plutarch's Lives of Demades's contemporaries. But if Plutarch was indeed so steeped in the culture of his days that he fell for the inventions of the rhetorical school, so be it: we should be grateful for the purge of misleading material. However, despite the impressive cumulative power of Dmitriev's parallels and his construction of a largely coherent picture of the transformation through rhetorical culture of "Demades," the pendulum swings too far to the side of scepticism (not of the Pyrrhonian kind) when all the later testimonies are discarded as products of a later age. The evidence may be rejected as unreliable, but Dmitriev insists that it is definitely fabrication. Sometimes, however, tropes and clichés may not be pulled out of thin air, and he rarely asks where information may have come from and for which reasons one may have invented biographical snippets (other than the needs of the school room and the self-affirmation of the educated class). Plutarch often drew on contemporary (now lost) sources, not only historians such as Theopompus but also compilations of personal attacks from comedy. The trope of Demades having been a sailor would be in line with Aristophanes's mocking description of Cleon as a tanner. Moreover, in his dismissal of the literary sources, Dmitriev even doubts the authenticity of Hyperides's Against Diondas and both his and Dinarchus's Against Demosthenes. Methodologically problematic is the dismissal of tropes as late because of their "rhetorical tone": that seems to presuppose that the polemicists of the fourth century—i.e., the orators, the "rhetorical" historians, and the comedians—did not adopt a rhetorical tone. (Dmitriev himself, by the way, slams those who accept alleged quotes by Demades on the basis that they sound authentic.) [End Page...
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Reviewed by: The Rhetorical Arts in Late Antique and Early Medieval Ireland by Brian James Stone Conor O'Brien Brian James Stone, The Rhetorical Arts in Late Antique and Early Medieval Ireland, Knowledge Communities. Amsterdam, NL: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. 275 pp. ISBN 978-94-6298-445-5. This is a volume in the history of rhetoric, rather than the history of Ireland. The author's aim, apparent from the first page, is to introduce the [End Page 214] intellectual riches of early medieval Ireland to fellow scholars of the rhetorical arts and to make the case that Irish writings deserve serious attention from historians of rhetoric interested in the development of the discipline in the post-Roman West. The assumed audience of the book knows little about early medieval Ireland or its intellectual history, and indeed may have been seriously misled by the portrayal of Ireland in previous work on early Irish rhetoric which relied on out-dated ideas of the island as some untouched bastion of Celtic culture, removed from the rest of Latin Europe. Stone is well aware that the past decades have seen these Celtic mists blown away from the study of early Irish intellectual history and he sets out to do the same for early Irish rhetoric in this book. Consequently, the first two chapters of the book essentially summarize much of our existing knowledge about Ireland in its late antique and early medieval context and provide an overview of the evidence for education, learning, and scholarly activity in Ireland between the fifth and the ninth centuries. Little here will be new to historians of the early Middle Ages, but clearly such information is a necessary prelude to Stone's rhetorical analysis of particular primary sources that forms the bulk of the text. Nonetheless, I wonder if the historian of rhetoric, coming to this material for the first time, might not have benefitted from an earlier introduction to the social significance of rhetoric and oral communication in early Ireland. Stone actually provides a very clear and useful discussion of precisely this topic in chapter six: his discussion there of the links between native and ecclesiastical learning, of the social functions of the filid (the poet class which provided Ireland's equivalent to the rhetor), of the real impact of the public performance of praise and satire, all that is both lively and insightful. Providing readers with this discussion earlier in the volume would I think have been useful for putting the enumeration of texts read and written in early medieval Ireland (of which much of chapter two consists) into a richer context. Chapters three through six provide a detailed rhetorical analysis of three primary sources: St Patrick's Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus, the Hisperica famina, and the Old Irish "Cauldron of Poetry and Learning." Stone identifies rhetorical tropes utilized, suggests sources or analogues in late antique rhetorical writings, and generally provides detailed case studies of how early medieval Irish authors used language to persuade people or reflected on the nature of a rhetorical education. Stone is less successful in contextualising these texts and explaining what rhetorical analysis can tell us about them as historic works. The problems are most obvious in the section on Patrick, whose Letter receives the most attention despite being the least Irish of the texts surveyed (Patrick was neither born nor educated in Ireland and wrote primarily, if not exclusively, for a non-Irish audience). Stone provides a lot of background discussion drawing on the vast literature on Patrick in a manner which manages to be exhausting, but not exhaustive. We have much summary of mid-twentieth-century debates about Patrick's dating, but nothing on Roy Flechner's recent controversial suggestions for Patrick's purposes in going to Ireland. The analysis of the Letter [End Page 215] itself is overall solid and convincing, but its most original claim (namely that Patrick's rhetoric serves an implicit aim of late Roman "frontier management") remains under-developed. Stone has drawn on some recent important developments in the scholarship of late antique Ireland, especially the work of Elva Johnston, but more time reflecting on the implications of his ideas and explaining...
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This article investigates whether Attic orators use prosodic and phonological effects to convey meaning (iconicity). Four hypotheses are explored: 1) heavy syllables tend to occur more often at period boundaries than within the sentence; 2) heavy syllables convey solemnity of tone and, in narrative, low dynamicity; 3) clustering of unvoiced consonants correlates with unpleasantness of tone or content; 4) alliteration is used when the author wishes to draw particular attention to the argument. Quantitative analyses for these hypotheses yield few positive results, so that we should be sceptical concerning the importance of iconicity in Attic rhetoric.
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In memoriamMarc Van Der Poel (1957–2022) Mike Edwards It is with a heavy heart that I write this personal tribute to my dear friend Marc van der Poel, who passed away on 18 December 2022. I do not need to remind readers of Rhetorica of the tremendous service Marc gave to the International Society for the History of Rhetoric over three decades, with repeated stints on Council, his long and distinguished editorship of the journal (2011–2018), and his Vice-Presidency and subsequent Presidency of the Society, which was equally distinguished and also long, being uniquely extended for a year due to the Covid crisis and forced postponement of the 2021 Biennial Conference. He bore the pressures that situation brought with his usual calmness, professionalism, and good humour. Away from ISHR, Marc was a distinguished Professor of Latin. Born on 4 February 1957 in the Dutch town of Geldrop, just east of Eindhoven, Marc read Classics at the Catholic University of Nijmegen (now Radboud University). After graduating in 1979 he studied for a Diplôme d'Études Approfondies at the University of Tours before taking his Masters cum laude at Nijmegen in 1983, with a dissertation on Seneca the Elder. He was already deeply interested in Neo-Latin and went on to study for his doctorate under the supervision of Jan Brouwers and his friend and mentor Pierre Tuynman. Marc was awarded his PhD in 1987, with a thesis (in Dutch) entitled The 'declamatio' among the humanists. Contribution to the study of the functions of rhetoric in the Renaissance. This was the beginning of a long and highly productive career dedicated to the study of the humanists and humanist rhetoric, in particular Rudolf Agricola, which took him immediately to the USA on a Fulbright award and a two-year post at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut. Further research posts followed at Nijmegen and at the Constantijn Huygens Institute in The Hague, accompanied by books in French and English on Agricola, until his appointment as Professor at Nijmegen in 1999. While continuing to research and publish extensively, Marc [End Page 111] was also dedicated to the teaching of Latin language and culture, and on numerous occasions we discussed his heavy teaching load, which he was always determined to carry out to the very best of his not inconsiderable ability. He supervised seven PhD students, while performing the other duties of a Professor, including being Head of Department and Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts. On one of his annual summer visits to Oxford when already in his early nineties, Jerry Murphy asked me if I would help to ensure that his project on Quintilian would come to fruition, should anything happen to him. I was of course deeply honoured and very happy to agree, especially because it afforded me the opportunity to collaborate closely not only with Jerry but also with Marc. He and I spent many happy hours together editing the submissions to the Oxford Handbook of Quintilian, in his home and in mine, and online when the coronavirus struck, with Jerry always eager to contribute by email. While working closely with him, I came to realise at first hand what a tremendous scholar Marc was, as well as his ability to make tough decisions. He saw this major project through to completion in time for Jerry to hold a copy of the volume, and it was a proud moment for both of us on 21 December 2021 when we were able to launch the Handbook at Radboud University, online because of the virus but the two of us together in spite of it. It is a serious loss to scholarship that Marc did not live to finish his edition, with commentary and translation, of Agricola's important work De inventione dialectica. He also recognised, throughout his career, the high importance of accurate bibliographies and was working on one of Agricola for the Oxford Bibliographies Online series. Totally at ease with all six languages of the Society, as well as Greek, Marc was fluent in French and English, which I used to tease him he spoke with an American accent and vocabulary. But he was so much more...
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Rhetoric and Scripture in Augustine's Homiletic Strategy. Tracing the Narrative of Christian Maturation by Michael Glowasky (review) ↗
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Reviewed by: Rhetoric and Scripture in Augustine's Homiletic Strategy. Tracing the Narrative of Christian Maturation by Michael Glowasky Rafał Toczko Michael Glowasky, Rhetoric and Scripture in Augustine's Homiletic Strategy. Tracing the Narrative of Christian Maturation, Supplements to Vigilae Christianae: Texts and Studies of Early Christian Life and Language 166. Leiden, NL: Brill, 2021. 195 pp. ISBN 978-90-04-44668-7. Augustine's rhetoric is experiencing a new wave of scholarly interest. Michael Glowasky's PhD monographic thesis is among the growing number of explorations of Augustine's rhetorical practice, unique in focusing solely on Augustine the preacher. The introduction (1-29) first presents the reasons for selecting this subject and reflects on the problems of studying Augustine's sermons as a coherent corpus. Next, he proposes classifying them into three categories based on the audience's "stages of spiritual maturation" (15): catechumens, neophytes and the faithful. This is novel, as scholars usually discern between catechumens and others, because the rules of participation in liturgy differed between them. Glowasky corroborates his decision with passages from two sermons (353 and 392) in which Augustine makes a parallel between the age of innocence of the newly baptised and infants. Glowasky's division of audiences into three categories is crucial for the whole study, constituting the basis for the selection of material and the method of communicating findings. The grouping is simple and elegant. Closing the introduction, Glowasky outlines his method for approaching Augustine's use of rhetoric and scripture in these three groups. First, he redefines the classical concept of narratio, to apply it more broadly as a way of communication that may replace logical argument to "communicate deeper meaning with more persuasive and emotive force" (23). Glowasky assumes that Augustine drew here on a long Latin rhetorical tradition and made use of narratio in two senses. Firstly, narratio is the story God tells the faithful through creation, history and Scripture. Secondly, the Scripture was understood as the narratio of the sermons. Furthermore, he assumes Augustine used a different type of narratio addressing different groups, applying a forensic narratio addressing neophytes, a deliberative type addressing catechumens, and, preaching to the faithful, "draws out more fully the dialectical quality of narratio." Chapter 2 (30-56) explores the notion of narratio more deeply, building on John O'Banion's controversial claim that, for Quintilian, narratio was [End Page 207] "the orator's fundamental art" (341) and was understood as a thought process and way of communicating rather than a part of speech.1 Glowasky believes that Augustine shared this tradition and hence saw narratio as "a ready-made tool to be used to refer to the strategic ordering of temporal events in order to convey an author's particular meaning" (36). Narratio could substitute logical argument and be more persuasive if ordered properly. Glowasky again turns to O'Banion and Kenneth Burke to explain that Augustine treated "narratio primarily as a tool for interpreting Scripture" (41) but, contrary to these two scholars, links this thinking with the prior rhetorical tradition. This tradition seemingly emphasised that narratio proved to be the best tool for conveying meaning. Augustine presented Scripture as a coherent and reliable narratio in De doctrina Christiana and employed it as the narratio of his sermons. Glowasky bases his thesis on O'Banion article on Quintilian. However, Quintilian says various things about narratio throughout his vast work—some contradictory. But the main difficulty is that nothing suggests that Augustine knew the Institutiones well. They were not used as manuals of rhetoric at that time, when teaching was dominated by De inventione and Rhetorica ad Herennium and many books drawing on them, authored by Marius Victorinus, Grillius and other rhetores latini minores. Chapter 3 (57-88) is dedicated to proving the thesis that Augustine's sermons for catechumens seek to persuade them to enter the Catholic Church as the only place where salvation is attainable (57). Glowasky observes how Augustine's technical advice concerning preaching to the catechumens from De catechizandis rudibus shares much with Cicero's view of narratio in judicial oratory. Augustine's two sample speeches from the same book focus on describing the character of the Church through narratio...
January 2023
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In early Greek theoretical descriptions of rhetoric peithō and logos both emerge as crucial elements. However, historical scholarship on rhetoric has generally focused on logos at the cost of any sufficient understanding of peithō. This essay examines peithō within a text that predates the descriptions of rhetoric formulated by Gorgias, Plato, and Aristotle—Aeschylus's Oresteia. I argue that, throughout the speeches of Athena at Eumenides 778-891, Aeschylus displays highly sophisticated argumentative techniques (forms of logos) that anticipate principles outlined in Aristotle's Rhetoric. At the same time, Aeschylus highlights peithō as an essential characteristic of Athena's rhetorical effectiveness. In so doing, Aeschylus prepares the way (in practice) for what Greek sophists and philosophers will later articulate (in theory): that logos and peithō are inseparable and equally important components of effective rhetoric.
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Reviewed by: Metanoia: Rhetoric, Authenticity, and the Transformation of the Self by Adam Ellwanger Ryan McDermott (bio) Adam Ellwanger, Metanoia: Rhetoric, Authenticity, and the Transformation of the Self, University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. 2020. 202 pp. ISBN: 978-0-271-08593-7. This book moves metanoia and related concepts of transformation and conversion to the center of our theoretical understanding of ethos. Whereas for Aristotle ethos had depended on the audience—did they consider the speaker trustworthy?—now the speaking subject determines how ethos ought to be recognized, and the audience must defer to the subject's self-understanding. As a rhetorical device, Ellwanger shows, metanoia is one of the most important means by which subjects can establish ethos in either of these models. This book's consistent concern is to analyze how, precisely, metanoia is employed in the service of ethos in various contexts and rhetorical and ethical models. At its best, Ellwanger's study adopts a comparative method—what he calls "paratactical rhetorical analysis"—that allows different understandings of metanoia to clarify each other by contrast. Ellwanger also approaches his topic diachronically, telling a story of development or transformation in the practices of metanoia. This narrative gives the book its structure, moving from classical and ancient Jewish sources to early Christianity, then the Protestant Reformation, post-Enlightenment modernity, and what Ellwanger characterizes as the postmodernity of today. Each chapter's narrative section culminates with a theoretical elaboration, which is then worked out in a section of comparative examples. This reviewer found the heuristic, second section of each chapter the more effective. For example, Chapter One compares five different Christian conversion stories (all post-1850), including the Sioux Indian Ohiyesa's memoirs of his transition From the Deep Woods to Civilization, two accounts of conversions in China, and two testimonies from members of the rock band Korn. Ellwanger is able to compare these diverse experiences with impressive conceptual clarity. The major conceptual contrast that runs throughout the book is that between metanoia and epistrophe. When speaking of the contrast, Ellwanger characterizes epistrophe as a 360-degree conversion, a return home. He reserves metanoia for 180-degree conversions, which renounce the past self and result in a rebirth, a replacement of the original subject by a "completely" new subject. In Ellwanger's account, all Christian metanoia "is a substitutive transplanting of identity," and it "locates the substitution at the core of one's being" (95). Modern, secular conversions can also involve renunciation of a previous self, but they lean more heavily on epistrophic unveiling of and return to the original, authentic self. Epistrophic conversion never renounces the real self, but rather the former illusion of self. Theoretically, this contrast harbors considerable explanatory power. It helps make sense of why ethos can reside alternately in audience or speaker. When a speaker seeks to establish ethos by claiming that her previous self is dead and she is now a new (and better) self, she might appeal to the audience to authenticate whether she is indeed new and better. But when a speaker [End Page 93] claims to have discovered and returned to her original, authentic self, she expects the audience to acknowledge her authority to authenticate herself. The contrast between ethoi established by metanoic or epistrophic conversion narratives plays out in fascinating ways in the contrast between Bruce Jenner's coming out as gender-transitioned Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezol's racial transition from identifying as a White woman to identifying as a Black woman. In public responses to each narrative (which unfolded roughly contemporaneously), Ellwanger identifies both metanoic and epistrophic discourses. Each kind was employed by both critics and defenders of the respective claims to identity. The conflict between metanoic and epistrophic understandings of identity transition help account for the intense scrutiny and controversy each story attracted. The weakest part of the book is its narrative of secularization, which frames Christian and modern models of conversion as mutually exclusive. Ellwanger asserts that "in Judeo-Christian thinking metanoia and epistrophe were two fundamentally opposed models of conversion" (100). By contrast, "the definitive feature of modern transformation is a reconciliation of" the two models (p. 143). Likewise, "Christianity is especially...
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Reviewed by: The Ethics of Persuasion: Derrida's Rhetorical Legacies by Brooke Rollins Mario Telò (bio) Brooke Rollins, The Ethics of Persuasion: Derrida's Rhetorical Legacies, Classical Memories/Modern Identities. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2020. 230 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8142-1424-4. There aren't many bold books on ancient Greek rhetoric. When I say "rhetoric," I mean specifically the corpus of speeches of the orators of the fifth and fourth centuries bce, and by "bold" I mean scholarship that does not treat these texts simply as historical documents or stylistic paradigms but as complex literary constructions that invite theoretically engaged approaches. I can think, for example, of Victoria Wohl's Law's Cosmos: Juridical Discourse in Athenian Forensic Oratory (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2010), which focuses on how the very idea of the law—conceptualized as a self-styled notion of authority—affects the arguments of judicial oratory. We should be grateful to Brooke Rollins for having produced another big, bold book on a body of work that most often receives the empiricist and historicist treatment prevalent in the field of classical studies. This book has left me with the uplifting impression that, inspired by Rollins, more work in a similar vein will soon follow and that the world of fourth-century bce orators can finally gain the attention of those outside of classics. Rollins stages a compelling encounter between Gorgias, Lysias, Isocrates, and Plato, on the one hand, and Derrida on the other, engaging with the philosopher's late period, in the 1990s, when he produced a rich set of ethically and politically oriented writings. This orientation has always been central to the project of deconstruction. Rollins relays Derrida's formulation: "the thinking of the political has always been a thinking of différance and the thinking of différance always a thinking of the political" (9). Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the Derrida we see here is more Levinasian than Heideggerian; it is a Derrida deeply attentive to the implications of alterity for hospitality, friendship, and democracy. [End Page 95] Rollins is interested precisely in how the interruptive force of alterity is thematized by oratory's constitutive reliance on the address—to judges in a courtroom, to an assembly, and to listeners gathered for a specific occasion or implied, abstract, "ghostly" readers. Her main goal is to show that "when the trace of the other interrupts identity, persuasive instrumentalism implodes" (5). This implosion is not simply the failure of the speech's argumentation, its surrender to the inevitable powers of indeterminacy. The emphasis is, rather, on the ethical affirmation that derives from the unsettling of identity brought about by the projection toward an other that is the address. As Rollins put it, "We encounter no controlling, autonomous speaking subjects here, but beings constituted (and so interrupted) in an encounter with difference" (6). The claim to authority, to a kind of indivisible, closed-off truth, is contradicted by the very opening to the outside (the speaking to) that is intrinsic to the conception of a speech. In this perspective, the speech becomes "a nontotalizable encounter, in which responsibility, negotiation and decision are owed to the other" (6). Persuasion, the alleged primary function of speech-writing, is thus complicated by an ex-cess, an ethical responsibility, emerging from "the unsettling moment of rapprochement with the unassimilable other" (37). In this way, persuasion can be regarded "not as a traditional communicative transaction, but as a possibility given only by way of our ongoing responsibility to and for the nonpresent other" (41). It becomes the staging of an aporetic moment, the opportunity for "a response in which both self and other are transformed" (45). In the chapter on Gorgias, Rollins focuses on the much-discussed Encomium of Helen, pushing against the apparent takeaway of the speech, an affirmation of logocentrism, of the affective power of logos. As Rollins observes, "Helen is marked, engraved, written by what is radically other to her" (61). The upshot is that "the subject is nothing but the effect of affirming the other's unwilled address" (63) and so is the all-encompassing, fetishized logos, another, albeit depersonalized, Über-subject, at...
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Discours. Livres XXXIV, XXXV & XXXVI by Libanios, and: Libanius: Ten Mythological and Historical Declamations by Libanius ↗
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Reviewed by: Discours. Livres XXXIV, XXXV & XXXVI by Libanios, and: Libanius: Ten Mythological and Historical Declamations by Libanius Fabrizio Petorella (bio) Libanios, Discours. Livres XXXIV, XXXV & XXXVI, texte établi et traduit par Catherine Bry, Collection des universités de France Série grecque—Collection Budé 550. Paris, FR: Les Belles Lettres, 2020. 278 pp. EAN: 978-2-251-00637-6. Libanius, Libanius: Ten Mythological and Historical Declamations, ed., intro., trans. and notes, Robert J. Penella. Cambridge, GB: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 420 pp. ISBN: 978-1-108-48137-3. Our knowledge of Late Antique rhetorical school practice has been recently enriched by several studies focused on Libanius' works: in the last decades, the Antiochean rhetor has been the subject of key monographs and academic articles on upper-class education in the Later Empire and [End Page 104] many of his writings have been edited and translated into modern languages.1 The two volumes discussed here are part of this upsurge of interest in Libanius's teaching activity. Furthermore, they are meant to lay the foundations for future studies aimed at contributing to the debate on Late Antique paideia. Antiochean school life is at the core of the orations edited and translated by Catherine Bry. Her volume, which is the result of her doctoral research at the École Pratique des Hautes Études of Paris, opens with a brief introduction clarifying why the three Libanian speeches she takes up deserve to be analyzed together: composed in the second half of the 380s, they all stem from problems related to Libanius's role as a teacher. Thus, Orations 34, 35, and 36 provide a vivid testimony about the teaching of Greek rhetoric in the Eastern Empire and the issues that even a renowned sophist might face. These initial remarks are followed by an extremely accurate section devoted to philological aspects. Even though Bry acknowledges the importance of the last edition of the three speeches (published by Richard Foerster in 1906), she considers that work too distant from modern philological conventions.2 As a result of a rigorous re-examination of the whole manuscript tradition, she integrates the descriptions of the sources given by Foerster, Jean Martin, and Pierre-Louis Malosse with her personal observations, thus offering a detailed presentation of all witnesses and a stemma codicum for each of the three orations.3 In this well-ordered preliminary phase, Bry demonstrates a scrupulously honest approach, enabling the reader to access and—if (s)he wishes—to question her philological work. After a list of abbreviations and a bibliography (significantly divided into a section specifically devoted to the edition of the three speeches and a general bibliography), comes the core of the volume. Every oration is preceded by a brief and clear introduction, where the reader finds information on the date and circumstances in which Libanius originally delivered his speech and on the audience he intended to address, as well as a rhetorical analysis of the following text and a list of its previous editions and translations. [End Page 105] In contrast to Foerster, Bry opts for positive apparatuses and avoids mentioning orthographical variants, unless they have some morphological (and, consequently, semantic) value. This approach (which does not prevent her from quoting the conjectures of previous editors when necessary) has the merit of making her edition a very practical tool for the study of the three orations and their textual history. The translation heads in the same direction. It is clear and original and allows the reader to easily grasp the main aspects of Libanius' oratorical performances, accurately transposed into a modern language. In these respects, the volume shows clearly how scholarly accuracy and readability can be combined, thus producing an edition that can be appreciated on several levels. To complete this picture, Bry's commentary is agile, but exhaustive. Her explanatory notes reveal once more a strong interest in the context in which the orations were originally performed and in their rhetorical features. Libanius' words are analyzed in relation to Late Antique rhetorical theories and to their application at school (see, for example, the entry concerning the role of memorization in the learning process at pp. 43–44, n. 55). Particular attention is...
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Abstract
Reviewed by: The Ideology of Democratic Athens: Institutions, Orators and the Mythical Past by Matteo Barbato Christine Plastow (bio) Matteo Barbato, The Ideology of Democratic Athens: Institutions, Orators and the Mythical Past. Edinburgh, GB: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. 252 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4744-6642-4. Barbato's book offers a new analysis of Athenian ideology through the application of a New Institutionalist approach to the city's democratic institutions as demonstrated by their use of stories from the mythical past. He argues for a middle ground between Marxist and culturalist understandings, characterising Athenian ideology as value-neutral, flexible, normative, constructive, and bidirectional. This is illustrated through an analysis of the varied presentations of four myths across several institutional contexts: particularly the epitaphioi logoi, but also tragedy, Assembly and forensic speeches, and private genres. An introduction lays out the structure of the book and summarises previous approaches to Athenian ideology; there is a particular focus on the Marxist approach of Nicole Loraux and others, and the culturalist approach illustrated by the work of Josiah Ober. The second chapter explores Athenian knowledge of mythology, identifying the theatre as its main source but also noting the importance of religious festivals such as the Panathenaia, public institutional contexts, and private learning. The third chapter establishes Barbato's theoretical approach, drawing on New Institutionalism to argue that the different democratic institutions of Athens had their own discursive frameworks and that discourse within them was necessarily structured by these: the need to create an imagined community in the funeral speeches; the requirement to argue in favour of justice in the law courts; the principle of advantage for the Athenians in the Assembly, and both justice and advantage in the Council; and the ability to play with the ideological frameworks of other institutions and the need to appeal to a diverse audience at the dramatic festivals. The subsequent four chapters examine the use of four stories from the Athenian mythic past in these institutional contexts and in private genres: the concept of Athenian autochthony, the sheltering of the Heraclidae, the Amazonomachy, and the assistance provided to Adrastus against Thebes. A short conclusion summarises the book's arguments and contextualises its contributions to the study of Athenian ideology, democracy more broadly, and interactions between Classics and political science. [End Page 88] There is much to commend Barbato's book. His analysis of Athenian ideology highlights two important points that are not prominent in the work on the subject to date. First, he emphasises that Athenian ideology was not fixed but fluid and dynamic, and that the presentation of ideological material necessarily differed based on the context in which it was delivered. This is an important point to grasp to understand the Athenians' apparent tendency to contradict themselves from source to source. Barbato successfully illustrates the appropriateness of different perspectives in different institutional contexts. For example, his nuanced analysis of the various versions of the myth of Adrastus presented in Lysias' funeral oration, Euripides' Suppliant Women, and Assembly speeches convincingly shows how the emphasis on or exclusion of certain narrative features—such as the hybris of the Thebans—can be manipulated to evoke aspects of the democratic ideology suitable to the setting. Second, he is right to draw attention to the fact that ideological material not only describes the audience's viewpoint but also moulds it by demonstrating a norm to which they are expected to conform, touching implicitly on an important point regarding the cognitive effects of rhetoric. Indeed, this methodology in combination with a cognitive approach could produce a particularly strong reading: for instance, how was the ideological result affected by the movement of audience members between the institutions and their memory of the different versions they had heard in other arenas? Barbato is working within a particular school of thought in the study of Athenian oratory that proposes that strict expectations of acceptability were in place in the various contexts of public speaking. Indeed, in his conclusion he summarises that the institutionalist reading of fixed discursive parameters in the institutions "corroborates the view that Aristotle's subdivision of the discipline into three genres was based on the observation of actual oratorical practice" (219). While the...
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Empire of Eloquence: The Classical Rhetorical Tradition in Colonial Latin America and the Iberian World by Stuart M. McManus ↗
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Reviewed by: Empire of Eloquence: The Classical Rhetorical Tradition in Colonial Latin America and the Iberian World by Stuart M. McManus Don Paul Abbott (bio) Stuart M. McManus, Empire of Eloquence: The Classical Rhetorical Tradition in Colonial Latin America and the Iberian World. Cambridge, GB: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 300 pp. ISBN: 978-1-108-83016-4. The title of Stuart McManus's book might lead readers to expect a history of rhetoric in the Americas. That expectation would be perhaps misleading, for the "empire of eloquence" extends far beyond the New World and encompasses all the territories that were under the direct control or indirect influence of the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies. It was a realm that included portions of Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Asia. It was, like a later empire, a vast domain upon which the sun never set. It was also a polity of remarkable duration, beginning in the sixteenth century and continuing well into the nineteenth. Most importantly for readers of Rhetorica this empire was also a place where "neo-Roman public speaking was the archetypal ordering mode in Iberian urban settings, and a powerful tool for spreading ideas, building political consensus, bolstering religion and articulating standards of public behavior that could take place in Latin, European vernaculars and indigenous languages" (5). [End Page 97] The immense geographical and chronological scope this empire requires a correspondingly comprehensive research endeavor. And so, the author helpfully includes a map of some of his extensive research travels. The inclusion of this map leads to the inevitable question: where in the world is Stuart McManus? The answer, it seems, is that while preparing this book he might have been found in any number of far-flung archives and libraries. The result of McManus' scholarly travels is a study that is, in his words, both "meta-geographical" and "polycentic." He contends that "the early modern Hispanic monarchy, and arguably the Iberian world as a whole, cannot usefully described only in terms of a series of bilateral relationships between the crown and subject territories" (197). Accordingly, McManus traces the interconnections between the practice of rhetoric in the various colonies, enclaves, dependencies, allies, and outposts that made up the Iberian world. And despite the great diversity of that world, its rhetorical culture exhibited remarkable consistency and continuity. Most notably, "the early modern Iberian world saw an unprecedented flowering of epideictic oratory" (40). The Empire of Eloquence is, therefore, a cultural and intellectual history constructed around the oration and, in particular, the epideictic oration—sermons, academic discourses, civic celebrations, and funeral orations. This work is, therefore, a history of oratory rather than a history of rhetoric (in the sense of the rhetorical theory and precepts found in the handbooks and treatises of the early modern period). This is not to say these handbooks and treatises are neglected—they are not—but simply that they are ancillary to the story of the oration. Indeed, one of the strengths of McManus' book is that it analyses an impressive variety of neglected, and mostly unpublished, speeches. These are important artifacts that have been often overlooked by scholars in favor published, and thus more accessible, rhetorical treatises and textbooks. This intellectual history is comprised of a series of case studies which typically examine either individual orators or a particular variety of epideictic oratory. An example of the latter is the study of the epideictic oratory following the death of Philip IV in 1665. The Spanish King's death prompted commemorations (exequias) which included funeral oratory as well as poetry, ephemeral architecture, and other memorial forms. McManus studies 42 exequias between 1665 and 1667 which were celebrated from "the Philippines to Flanders and from Mexico to Milan" (51). The content of funeral orations reveals a remarkable similarity despite their wide geographical distribution. These encomia were, of course, speeches praising Philip's virtues, most notably justice and religious devotion. But they also emphasize that Philip's virtues should be embraced and emulated by the citizens and authorities who inhabited the empire, thereby strengthening its political and social structures. Thus, these funeral orations were, according to McManus, a form of "virtue politics" that served both to honor the...
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Abstract
Although long considered an unrhetorical philosopher, Spinoza takes pains to appear to be in agreement with his intended audience. Recent scholarship draws attention to this strategy of linguistic accommodation. The Roman comic playwright Terence, whom Spinoza frequently paraphrases, inspires his rhetorical strategy. This essay argues that Spinoza models his accommodating style upon that of Micio, an indulgent pedagogue from Terence's comedy Adelphoe, in order to avoid attracting admiration and envy. The principles of Spinoza's Micionic writing, and his reasons for using this rhetorical strategy, offer specific contours to the emerging scholarly appreciation of a highly rhetorical philosopher.
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Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age by Nathan R. Johnson, and: Excavating the Memory Palace: Arts of Visualization from the Agora to the Computer by Seth Long ↗
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Reviewed by: Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age by Nathan R. Johnson, and: Excavating the Memory Palace: Arts of Visualization from the Agora to the Computer by Seth Long David Marshall (bio) Nathan R. Johnson, Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age. Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2020. 205 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8173-2060-7. Seth Long, Excavating the Memory Palace: Arts of Visualization from the Agora to the Computer. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2020. 243 pp. ISBN: 978-0-226-69514-3. Is memory the sleeping giant of the five parts of classical rhetoric? Some rhetoricians have been skeptical of the entire art of memory enterprise, denying essentially that there are any artificial means of training natural capacities for memory. But many have been believers, and there are vivid arguments asserting how memory as the fourth of those classical parts underwrites and illuminates each of the others. Memory is invention by another name, because the treasure house of previous performances is also a store of potential recombinations. In the most famous of the ancient mnemonic exercises, practitioners were asked to use a familiar architectural form—a sequence of rooms in a home they knew well, for instance—as a background and storage facility for items they wished to remember, and in the emphasis on sequencing there is a logic and practice of arrangement. (Cicero relayed an origin story for this topos about the Greek poet Simonides: during a performance at a dinner, he was called away; while he was away, the roof collapsed killing those within, mangling their bodies beyond recognition; but Simonides was able to identify the dead because he recalled where each guest had been sitting—and the inference was that visualizing figures against a ground is the secret of memorization.) When it comes to the work of symbolizing items to be set against this imagined background, moreover, we are certainly in the domain of style and trope. In the example that Pseudo-Cicero made famous (Rhet. Her., 3.20.33–34), we are asked to picture a scene in which a ram's testicles hang from the fourth finger of a man's hand. The goal of such imagining is to more securely recall facts that are relevant to a legal case we are memorizing—namely, the facts of an inheritance (Romans made purses from scrotums) and the availability of witnesses (testicle and testimony share an etymology). And, as for delivery, the deep paradox of memory is that organizing and practicing the passage of things from the present into the past is in fact one of the keys to performing in the moment: it is as if the artisan of a well-constructed and vividly-appointed memory palace is like an acrobat with every potential move memorized and at-hand equidistant as it were from the here and now of performance. There is thus a lot to say about the rhetorical dimensions of memory, and taken together the two books reviewed here, Nathan Johnson's Architects of Memory and Seth Long's Excavating the Memory Palace, make wide-ranging use of memory's rhetorical histories to make claims about contemporary mnemonic practices and possibilities. Nathan Johnson makes a pitch for the significance of the material infrastructures of memory work, and he anchors this pitch in histories of [End Page 100] the different cultures of Library Science and Information Studies after World War II in the United States. Johnson organizes his attention around two significant figures and their respective institutional contexts: Dorothy Crosland, a librarian at Georgia Tech from 1925 (and head librarian from 1953–1971), and Robert S. Taylor, who wrote the influential work The Making of a Library (1970) and who, within a year of his appointment as Dean in 1973, changed the name of the School of Library Science at Syracuse University to the School of Information Studies. Johnson does note the different trajectories that each of these individuals represents. In his narrative, Crosland represents a library sciences profession that women dominated and that was often coded as a "feminine" form of labor, and Taylor represents the rise of...
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Abstract
Reviewed by: The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk by Samuel McCormick Daniel M. Gross (bio) Samuel McCormick, The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020. 326 pp. ISBN: 978-0-226-67763-7. Implicitly McCormick's book addresses a question that is urgent in the US academic context, where current rhetoric and communication practices are in fact much studied: Why study history at all? At best, so the skeptic might offer, historical work provides some interesting background to the pressing problems of today. At worst, historical work exacerbates some of those same problems around rhetorical power by simply by spending too much time on received traditions. (I've long admired Malea Powell's sly and self-consuming conference paper title "Aristotle Is Not My Father.") At the same time a set of distinct answers to this history question has been brewing at The University of Chicago Press, thanks in large part to the late editor extraordinaire Douglas Mitchell, who had himself learned about rhetoric from the late century Chicago scene, and Richard McKeon in particular. The series Mitchell started at Chicago "Rhetoric and Communication" has published different types of concept-oriented histories by scholars including Nancy Struever, John Durham Peters, Debra Hawhee, David Marshall, and now Samuel McCormick. Taken together, this group of scholars shows how rhetoric and communication can't be studied adequately without some strong historical version of conceptual work, because that is how the very [End Page 90] things we wish to study appear as such in the first place. In what follows I discuss how McCormick's book makes the case elegantly. First of all, why for McCormick "conceptual history," especially as it would apply to "everyday talk" counterintuitively? Shouldn't we study everyday talk by recording and coding ordinary speakers in face-to-face settings? No doubt, replies McCormick, such grounded study of the first type gets at something sociological (2). But how can we study the very concept of everyday talk as it has shifted significantly online for instance, showing up as "chat," which can't be the same thing? For that sort of study, historical work on the concept is essential, because that is the only way we know what our object of study is in the first place. It is not "conversation," which McCormick calls an interpersonal modality, that achieved its highest art and greatest conceptual clarity in the Enlightenment. At the same time, it is not public sphere discourse legitimated by (again Enlightenment) institutions of oratory and journalism (291). Instead, McCormick argues with a nod to paradox, "everyday talk" is a distinct concept that rises with modernity and its industrializing momentum (4), what Kierkegaard first identifies as snak. This is where McCormick must demonstrate—and he does so beautifully—why we turn to Kierkegaard at this point of inquiry, and not only to his rich archive of wagging tongues, noise and nonsense, cliché and bombast, wordplay and witticism, tangent, reprise, gossip, gimcrack, diversion, duplicity, tedious anecdote, absurd abstraction, abrupt interjection, and endless logorrhea (44). Methodologically, McCormick's powerful point is that snak is the concept that names this verbal efflorescence, and Kierkegaard's work is where the concept appears in its sharpest and critical form. If we studied for instance only Gert Westephaler's fictional talk, or the philosophical talk of Hegel's Danish parrots (44), we would lose track of the concept snak altogether, and thus we would not really understand what we were talking about ourselves: an irony that McCormick has to dance with throughout this substantial section steeped in Kierkegaard's first language Danish, and in his vast corpus that we no longer know how to handle academically. One outstanding virtue of McCormick's book is that it will teach a new generation of scholars what Kierkegaard did besides anticipate existentialism. The next section of the book, a book that runs 326 pages in total, picks up the work of Martin Heidegger, who was himself a keen reader of Kierkegaard. Now focusing on the 1920s, which were for Heidegger both a period of tremendous intellectual ferment that includes his 1924 lecture course on Aristotle's Rhetoric and...
November 2022
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Review: <i>A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856–1886</i>, by Amy J. Lueck ↗
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Book Review| November 01 2022 Review: A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856–1886, by Amy J. Lueck Amy J. Lueck. A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856–1886. Writing Research, Pedagogy, and Policy. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. 272 pp. ISBN 978-0-8093-3742-2 Jason Maxwell Jason Maxwell University at Buffalo, SUNY Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (4): 415–417. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.4.415 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jason Maxwell; Review: A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856–1886, by Amy J. Lueck. Rhetorica 1 November 2022; 40 (4): 415–417. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.4.415 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. © 2022 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Review: <i>De la “agudeza” al “gusto.” Cicerón, entre el Barroco y la cultura ilustrada</i>, by Javier Espino Martín ↗
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Book Review| November 01 2022 Review: De la “agudeza” al “gusto.” Cicerón, entre el Barroco y la cultura ilustrada, by Javier Espino Martín Javier Espino Martín. De la “agudeza” al “gusto.” Cicerón, entre el Barroco y la cultura ilustrada. Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios Clásicos 62. Ciudad de México, MX: UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, 2019. 305 pp. ISBN 978-607-30-2747-2 Genaro Valencia Constantino Genaro Valencia Constantino Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (4): 412–415. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.4.412 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Genaro Valencia Constantino; Review: De la “agudeza” al “gusto.” Cicerón, entre el Barroco y la cultura ilustrada, by Javier Espino Martín. Rhetorica 1 November 2022; 40 (4): 412–415. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.4.412 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. © 2022 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
September 2022
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Abstract
Reviewed by: A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856–1886 by Amy J. Lueck Jason Maxwell Amy J. Lueck. A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856–1886. Writing Research, Pedagogy, and Policy. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. 272 pp. ISBN 978-0-8093-3742-2 Historians of composition have long understood their work as a necessary corrective to reductive accounts of English Studies that focus solely on literary studies and critical theory. In their efforts to provide a more capacious understanding of the discipline, however, compositionists have themselves produced significant exclusions, offering a rather limited understanding of the history of college writing. As Amy J. Lueck explains, the field of Rhetoric and Composition, perhaps in an effort to fortify its standing within the research university, has tended to overlook the role that high schools have played in shaping college writing pedagogy. In A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856–1886, Lueck does not merely seek to document points of overlap and contestation between high school and college writing curriculum. Instead, her work aims to call into question the very boundaries between designations like “high school” and “college.” These boundaries, Lueck maintains, are responsible for producing a standardized academic hierarchy that limits the range of pedagogical possibilities within any given level of the system. For instance, high school becomes conceived as little more than a preparatory vehicle for college, and its curriculum becomes defined negatively—that is, high school is understood as not providing college-level instruction. History has shown that this reification and subordination proves detrimental for both high schools and colleges. While we take these distinctions for granted today, Lueck turns to the nineteenth century, a point when the current academic system had not yet solidified (in this regard, her work shares much with Laurence Veysey’s [End Page 415] landmark The Emergence of the American University [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1965], which similarly documents a period of intense fluidity and contestation). Prior to the establishment of research universities, which precipitated the creation of our broader contemporary hierarchy, the middle of the century boasted a landscape populated by a wide array of educational institutions whose relations to one another were anything but clear. Consider the name “high school.” While the term might suggest an institution that serves as a capstone to the “lower” primary schools, it just as easily might be read as belonging under the banner of “higher learning” that we usually reserve for colleges and universities. Much of the ambiguity surrounding various schools’ status and function can be attributed to the larger conversation about the role of education in American life during this time. For example, many were calling into question the hegemony of the traditional college’s “classical curriculum,” which privileged learning languages like Greek and Latin in order to produce distinguished gentlemen. Critics of this curriculum suggested replacing it with a “modem curriculum” that would better prepare students for the practical concerns of work and citizenship. Because the transition to this modern curriculum was uneven at best, many high schools adopted it long before their college counterparts, making them an attractive option for many in the community. Indeed, practically-oriented high schools were not merely viable alternatives to classically-minded colleges. They also constituted sites of pedagogical innovation that colleges and universities would later draw upon in their own reform efforts. Lueck grounds her analysis in A Shared History by studying the developments of a number of schools in Louisville, Kentucky during the second half of the 1800s. She dives into the archival record and finds a range of institutions, instructors, and students that challenge long-held assumptions about the educational system and the kinds of work students are expected to produce at any given site within that system. Admitting that it would be impossible to produce a comprehensive account of the changes unfolding during this time, Lueck argues that the city nevertheless engaged meaningfully with almost every larger educational trend of the era, and several educators who worked in Louisville went on to have an impact shaping educational policy at the national level. Moreover, her...
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This article argues that the catachrestic usage of “affection to mean “affectation” in Shakespearean drama may be best understood with reference to Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, which employs catachresis in using the existing Latin word adfectatio to render the Greek word ϰαϰόζηλον [cacozēlon]. Quintilian’s influential picture of the all-encompassing rhetorical vice of adfectatio, his catachrestic practice, and his descriptions of catachresis as both a necessary extension of the meaning of an existing word and a poetic device, appear to have influenced Shakespeare’s portrayal of some of his most complex and articulate characters, among them Hamlet and Leontes (of The Winter’s Tale). Through these characters and their catachrestic speeches, we are forced to contend with the possibility that their “affections” may be nothing more (or less) than “affectations.”
August 2022
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Abstract
In Phaedrus, Plato invokes a mythic exemplum concerning the Egyptian deity Thoth. Though often interpreted as an overt critique of writing, this argument posits Thoth is offered analogically to contrast Plato's rhetorical epistemology with that of the ancient Egyptians. To do so, this argument addresses why a mythic Egyptian figure might be so significant to Plato in the 4th Century B.C. Greece, whose culture already had multiple gods and cultural heroes to whom the invention of writing is attributed, when the episode in Phaedrus is axiomatically described as a critique of writing. Because Plato may have had some degree of firsthand knowledge of Egyptian traditions it explores those traditions personified in the figure of Thoth, which should be examined as an analogical device advised by Egyptian rhetorical epistemology. A closer examination of the comparative rhetorical epistemological perspective not only illuminates Thoth's appearance in Phaedrus but also the Egyptian rhetorical-epistemic tradition. Thoth's role as epistemic mediator between humans and truth, in the broadest terms, was to act as psychopomp who moves both between humanity and the arrival at knowledge that prefigures rhetorical action.
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Review: <i>Robert Burton's Rhetoric: An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge</i> by Susan Wells; <i>Reading by Design: The Visual Interfaces of the English Renaissance Book</i> by Pauline Reid; <i>The Players' Advice to Hamlet: The Rhetorical Acting Method from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment</i> by David Wiles ↗
Abstract
Book Review| August 01 2022 Review: Robert Burton's Rhetoric: An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge by Susan Wells; Reading by Design: The Visual Interfaces of the English Renaissance Book by Pauline Reid; The Players' Advice to Hamlet: The Rhetorical Acting Method from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment by David Wiles Susan Wells. Robert Burton's Rhetoric: An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge. RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. 211 pp. ISBN: 978-0-271-08467-1.Pauline Reid. Reading by Design: The Visual Interfaces of the English Renaissance Book. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. 283 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4875-0069-6.David Wiles. The Players' Advice to Hamlet: The Rhetorical Acting Method from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 370 pp. ISBN: 978-1-108-49887-6. Timothy Barr Timothy Barr Northeastern University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (3): 325–330. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.3.325 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 Timothy Barr; Review: Robert Burton's Rhetoric: An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge by Susan Wells; Reading by Design: The Visual Interfaces of the English Renaissance Book by Pauline Reid; The Players' Advice to Hamlet: The Rhetorical Acting Method from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment by David Wiles. Rhetorica 1 August 2022; 40 (3): 325–330. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.3.325 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. © 2022 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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“A Confidence as Bold”: The Rhetorical Construction of Evangelical Authority in Hugh Latimer's “Sermon of the Plough” ↗
Abstract
Hugh Latimer's 1548 “Sermon of the Plough” is well-known as an example of early English evangelical rhetoric. However, the sermon has often been considered as an effect of, rather than a participant in, evangelical theology. This article reads Latimer's rhetoric, especially his creation of a persona, as fully theological, using Melanchthon's valorization of rhetoric over logic as a model. Latimer's sermon produces an authority that is not limited to Latimer himself, but serves as a reformation of Catholic notions of the authoritative role of the Church, a role based upon the rhetorically effective presentation of the Bible.
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Review: <i>Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Approaches to Text, Tradition and Social Construction in Biblical and Second Temple Literature</i>, by Carol A. Newsom ↗
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Book Review| August 01 2022 Review: Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Approaches to Text, Tradition and Social Construction in Biblical and Second Temple Literature, by Carol A. Newsom Carol A. Newsom. Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Approaches to Text, Tradition and Social Construction in Biblical and Second Temple Literature. Forschungen zum Alten Testament 130. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019. 382 pp. ISBN 978-3-16-157723-9. Davida Charney Davida Charney University of Texas at Austin Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (3): 322–324. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.3.322 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 Davida Charney; Review: Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Approaches to Text, Tradition and Social Construction in Biblical and Second Temple Literature, by Carol A. Newsom. Rhetorica 1 August 2022; 40 (3): 322–324. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.3.322 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. © 2022 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
June 2022
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Abstract
Reviewed by: Robert Burton’s Rhetoric: An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge by Susan Wells Timothy Barr Susan Wells. Robert Burton’s Rhetoric: An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge. RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. 211 pp. ISBN-978-0-271-08467-1. Pauline Reid. Reading by Design: The Visual Interfaces of the English Renaissance Book. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. 283 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4875-0069-6. David Wiles. The Players’ Advice to Hamlet: The Rhetorical Acting Method from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 370 pp. ISBN: 978-1-108-49887-6. The works reviewed here celebrate the openness and indefiniteness of rhetoric’s domain by arguing against its assimilation of a disciplinary mode of scholarship. They work from three distinct positions while drawing from the early modem and (mostly) English archive. Susan Wells’s argument for a “transdisciplinary rhetoric” (it is part of the RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric) is sustained throughout each chapter of her reading of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, refiguring what Nancy Struever has called rhetoric’s “theoretical insouciance” as its value for playing tavern-keeper at a crossroads of other disciplines’ inquiries. Pauline Reid’s work explicitly targets the boundaries between new media and bibliographic studies by showing how early modem print involved visual modalities beyond the oft-rehearsed oral-print divide. David Wiles offers a fresh perspective by taking counsel for the discipline from a position without one: the professional actor of the early modern English and French stage. Each has a distinct refrain: transdisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and a kind of “undisciplining”—unlearning the trained incapacity of academic theorization. Wells opens her book with an autobiographical note. She first read The Anatomy of Melancholy for her comprehensive exams in the mid-1970s. Although her scholarship did not initially take her into uncovering the allusive world of Burton’s massive work, she describes being impressed by the voice of his prose. It was one “utterly at ease with its learning ... thin, rhythmic, quizzical, the voice of an eccentric and intimate friend” (1). Although such notes are often left in the prefatory material, here it is germane to the work. Reading Wells is to hear her performance of just such a voice witty, opinionated, with an erudition that feels like an inviting gesture at a cherished library rather than the intimidating cage of fingers pressed against the don’s lips in office hours. Wells’s style is part of her argument: like Burton, she is a scholar writing for other scholars, but—also like Burton—she refuses any idée fixe, a symptom of melancholy and today of too academic a discipline. Her second chapter, published in an earlier form in Philosophy & Rhetoric, is a contribution to genre studies. Is a genre like a genus, a category [End Page 325] for an assembling of species? Or, as she argues, is it a kind of space for exchange rather than classification? The Anatomy is a sui generis work. Rather than merely dismissing all the previous scholarship devoted to locating it in a taxonomy—an admittedly “old-fashioned project” (40)—Wells reflects on the underlying metaphors of the field. Even the idea of a “hybrid genre” relies upon the species metaphor (49). Burton identifies his work variously as “satire, as a treatise, as a cento, as a consolatio, or as a drama, satire, and comedy, but not as a satiricocento or a dramatic treatise” (40). His use of genre is often skew, bent to his peculiar and often-changing purposes. He delves into the medical genre of observationes less for clinical knowledge and more for the narrative color and moral insight that these cases might provide. Sometimes he interpolates speech into these stories for dramatic effect, as when in a case of love-melancholy he has the stricken Lady Elizabeth say, “O that I were worthy of that comely Prince ...” (66). Elsewhere he neglects the more florid detail of the original observation in order to make a point. One case tells of “two Germans who drank a lot of wine and within a month became melancholy.” Their symptoms were diverse: one “sang hymns...
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Abstract
This article explores the history of the English-language style guide, a genre of writing with beginnings in the eighteenth century. Gaining popularity in the Victorian period, the style guide began to solidify as a genre dedicated to preserving certain linguistic usages. I argue that, from the nineteenth century on, the best style guides have used rhetoric as the cornerstone of their linguistic philosophy. Guides which ignore rhetorical scholarship tend to be reactionary and of limited use to the reader. To emphasize these two types of guides, I look specifically at The Queen’s English and The Dean’s English, two extremely popular, polemical style guides written in the mid-nineteenth century.
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“A Confidence as Bold”: The Rhetorical Construction of Evangelical Authority in Hugh Latimer’s “Sermon of the Plough” ↗
Abstract
Hugh Latimer’s 1548 “Sermon of the Plough” is well-known as an example of early English evangelical rhetoric. However, the sermon has often been considered as an effect of, rather than a participant in, evangelical theology. This article reads Latimer’s rhetoric, especially his creation of a persona, as fully theological, using Melanchthon’s valorization of rhetoric over logic as a model. Latimer’s sermon produces an authority that is not limited to Latimer himself, but serves as a reformation of Catholic notions of the authoritative role of the Church, a role based upon the rhetorically effective presentation of the Bible.
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Abstract
Anaxagoras is a missing author in the history of Greek rhetoric. His style has often seemed archaic and naive, unworthy of in-depth study. Nevertheless, the main so-called Gorgian figures are present in his fragments. They are not used with simply ornamental purposes but with a strongly expressive and even speculative intent. By examining in detail some texts (Lanza frr. B12; B6; B4), such systematicity and speculative depth of the use of the main rhetorical figures can be detected. Thus some conclusions about the contemporary Athenian culture can be inferred.
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Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Approaches to Text, Tradition and Social Construction in Biblical and Second Temple Literature by Carol A. Newsom ↗
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Reviewed by: Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Approaches to Text, Tradition and Social Construction in Biblical and Second Temple Literature by Carol A. Newsom Davida Charney Carol A. Newsom. Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Approaches to Text, Tradition and Social Construction in Biblical and Second Temple Literature. Forschungen zum Alten Testament 130. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019. 382 pp. ISBN 978-3-16-157723-9. In Rhetoric and Hermeneutics, Carol A. Newsom has collected eighteen of her essays that appeared between 1989 and 2016 and one previously unpublished essay. Unlike many volumes of this sort, the whole greatly exceeds the sum of its parts. Apart from its usefulness as a survey to scholars and students, the book advances Newsom’s scholarly agenda. Newsom works with texts circulating in and around Jerusalem during the late Second Temple period. This was a time of intellectual ferment: proto-gnostic sects proliferated; established religious practices were being challenged, defended, and modified. Newsom argues persuasively that these groups were led by sophisticated readers and rhetors. The leaders grasped that the Hebrew Bible, still undergoing canonization, is polyphonic and intertextual. Further, the texts that they created deployed polyphony, enargeia, and other rhetorical techniques to shape communal identity, attract adherents, and help individuals cope with the precarity of their status. These arguments are advanced in each of the book’s four topical sections. First are six essays that explain and apply Newsom’s methods of rhetorical criticism. Second are four essays illustrating how the Qumran community—responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls—shaped communal and individual identity. Third are three essays that lay out an ethno-psychological model for mapping conceptions of self and agency across cultures. The essays apply the model to the Hebrew Bible and a variety of Second Temple texts. Last are six reception studies that examine how narratives of the period are taken up and transformed both in antiquity and in modern times. Newsom, a chaired emerita professor of theology at Emory University, has published on so many aspects of Second Temple literature over her career that she has plenty of essays on method, theory, and application to choose from. As a result, even without additional commentary, the sections build coherent arguments. Each section opens with introductory issues of [End Page 322] theory, method, and scope and develops with close textual analysis and suggestive implications. The first section on methods reveals what Newsom means by rhetorical criticism and what theorists she relies on most. Like many biblical scholars, her immediate rhetorical touchstone is George Kennedy. But he does not inspire her to read widely in the Greco-Roman tradition. She is not concerned to trace possible cross-influences during the Hellenistic period. Instead Newsom turns to Bakhtin and Burke and the more literary strand of twentieth-century rhetorical criticism. For Newsom, rhetorical strategies in scripture reflect the identities and ontologies of their compositors and shape those of readers and writers to come. Accordingly, this section accomplishes two tasks for Newsom. First, the section launches Newsom’s larger claims that Second Temple communities deployed rhetorical strategies to shape individual and communal identities with case studies of Job (chapter 2), Proverbs 1—9 (chapter 3), Jewish apocalyptic texts (chapter 5), and texts from Qumran (chapter 6). Second, for biblicists new to rhetorical approaches, it introduces concepts and methods of rhetorical criticism, including Bakhtinian polyphony and dialogism (chapters 1 and 3), genre studies (chapters 2 and 4), and a variety of basic rhetorical concepts (chapters 5 and 6) such as epideictics, arrangement, enargeia, and kairos, though she doesn’t always employ these terms. While displaying nuanced rhetorical sensibilities, Newsom would clearly benefit from additional reading in rhetorical scholarship, particularly Carolyn Miller’s classic “Genre as Social Action”1 and William FitzGerald’s Spiritual Modalities for its use of Burke’s religious terministic screen to draw Burkean implications for prayer and religious practice.2 In Section Two, Newsom argues that the Qumran community—a break-away Jewish sect that deliberately positioned itself against the practices in the Second Temple—was “intentional and explicit in the formation of the subjectivity of its members” (159). First, she argues that the Dead Sea Scrolls served as a library for the community (chapter 7), based...
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Abstract
In Phaedrus, Plato invokes a mythic exemplum concerning the Egyptian deity Thoth. Though often interpreted as an overt critique of writing, this argument posits Thoth is offered analogically to contrast Plato’s rhetorical epistemology with that of the ancient Egyptians. To do so, this argument addresses why a mythic Egyptian figure might be so significant to Plato in the 4th Century B.C. Greece, whose culture already had multiple gods and cultural heroes to whom the invention of writing is attributed, when the episode in Phaedrus is axiomatically described as a critique of writing. Because Plato may have had some degree of firsthand knowledge of Egyptian traditions it explores those traditions personified in the figure of Thoth, which should be examined as an analogical device advised by Egyptian rhetorical epistemology. A closer examination of the comparative rhetorical epistemological perspective not only illuminates Thoth’s appearance in Phaedrus but also the Egyptian rhetorical-epistemic tradition. Thoth’s role as epistemic mediator between humans and truth, in the broadest terms, was to act as psychopomp who moves both between humanity and the arrival at knowledge that prefigures rhetorical action.
May 2022
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Abstract
Obituary| May 01 2022 Jerry Murphy (1923–2021) Don Paul Abbott Don Paul Abbott University of California, Davis Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (2): 109–110. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.2.109 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 Don Paul Abbott; Jerry Murphy (1923–2021). Rhetorica 1 May 2022; 40 (2): 109–110. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.2.109 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. © 2022 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Abstract
In the prologue to the Rhetorica ad Herennium book 4, Cornificius boldly departs from tradition: he will create his own examples to illustrate styles and figures of rhetoric, rather than drawing from poets and orators, as Greek manuals typically did. This methodological discussion, which resembles a declamation, portrays itself as an exemplum in that it embodies the precepts exposed in books 1, 2, and 3. Moreover, this exemplary discussion partakes in a larger debate between philosophy and rhetoric and must be considered in its historical and cultural context.
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Review: <i>Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement</i>, by Bjørn F. Stillion Southard ↗
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Book Review| May 01 2022 Review: Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement, by Bjørn F. Stillion Southard Bjørn F. Stillion Southard. Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement. Race, Rhetoric, and Media Series. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2019. 176 pp. ISBN 978-1-4968-2383-0 Sara C. VanderHaagen Sara C. VanderHaagen University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (2): 213–215. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.2.213 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 Sara C. VanderHaagen; Review: Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement, by Bjørn F. Stillion Southard. Rhetorica 1 May 2022; 40 (2): 213–215. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.2.213 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. © 2022 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Abstract
Book Review| May 01 2022 Review: Persuasion, Rhetoric and Roman Poetry, by Irene Peirano Garrison Irene Peirano Garrison. Persuasion, Rhetoric and Roman Poetry. New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 295 pp. ISBN 978-1-316-21935-5 Michele Kennerly Michele Kennerly Penn State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (2): 211–213. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.2.211 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 Michele Kennerly; Review: Persuasion, Rhetoric and Roman Poetry, by Irene Peirano Garrison. Rhetorica 1 May 2022; 40 (2): 211–213. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.2.211 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. © 2022 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Abstract
This essay explores a nexus of related concepts—authorship, authenticity, and authority—as they impinge upon one another and on the experience of reading, particularly in the case of “canonical” authors such as Aristotle. Aristotle’s own Rhetoric and Poetics are considered together in light of these concepts, as well as in terms of seven constraints that operated upon Aristotle as a thinker and writer. Twentieth-century theories of reading are adduced in an examination of the rhetorical dimensions of Aristotle’s own notion of authorship. The essay also examines the rhetorical forces entailed in the editing and publication of authors known only from ancient manuscripts, and in the reading of legal and sacred texts.
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Review: <i>Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance</i>, by Vanessa Kraemer Sohan ↗
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Book Review| May 01 2022 Review: Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance, by Vanessa Kraemer Sohan Vanessa Kraemer Sohan. Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019. 232 pp. ISBN 978-0-8173-2038-6 Sarah Walden Sarah Walden Baylor University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (2): 209–211. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.2.209 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 Sarah Walden; Review: Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance, by Vanessa Kraemer Sohan. Rhetorica 1 May 2022; 40 (2): 209–211. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.2.209 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. © 2022 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
March 2022
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Abstract
In the prologue to the Rhetorica ad Herennium book 4, Comificius boldly departs from tradition: he will create his own examples to illustrate styles and figures of rhetoric, rather than drawing from poets and orators, as Greek manuals typically did. This methodological discussion, which resembles a declamation, portrays itself as an exemplum in that it embodies the precepts exposed in books 1, 2, and 3. Moreover, this exemplary discussion partakes in a larger debate between philosophy and rhetoric and must be considered in its historical and cultural context.
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Abstract
Reviewed by: Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance by Vanessa Kraemer Sohan Sarah Walden Vanessa Kraemer Sohan. Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019 232 pp. ISBN 978-0-8173-2038-6 In Lives, Letters, and Qailts, Vanessa Kraemer Sohan argues for the value of “everyday rhetorics of resistance” or “the conscious, purposeful recontextualization of the seemingly ordinary means and materials available in order to mediate thought and action, and to persuade others” (3). She examines three women or groups of women who demonstrate the power of persistent, everyday acts that recontextualize the means available to them in a particular time, place, and space. Throughout the book Sohan emphasizes two key arguments. First, she argues for the importance of a translingual and transmodal framework in order to avoid oversimplifying language, to understand difference as the norm, to “recover and reclaim the ways individual composers recontextualize within and across languages, genres, modes, and media,” and to adopt “more democratic and descriptive approaches to language” (9). Sohan’s second key argument involves the need to expand what counts as rhetoric, to redefine resistance, and to reframe how scholars situate rhetors who do not necessarily fit within the typical heroic narratives. For example, when Sohan discusses the ministry of Eliza P. Gurney, she describes the legend that one of Gurney’s letters was in President Abraham Lincoln’s breast pocket the night he was assassinated. She writes, in one of the most powerful lines of the book, that this myth serves as “a reminder of how a powerful, feminist rhetorical figure can be pigeonholed and, as a result, remain hidden in plain sight, because her rhetorical practice is evaluated solely in relation to the men with whom she came in contact, rather than on its own merit” (70-71). Sohan’s commitment to feminist rhetorical scholarship is clear throughout the book as she works to articulate and examine the everyday rhetoric available to women and to argue for its value as a site of study. In chapter one, Sohan explores the letter-writing campaigns of the Townsend Movement, a populist movement that advocated pension reform for the elderly by establishing local clubs that could organize and promote the plan through letter-writing campaigns, voter-registration drives, and petitions. These clubs promoted literacy through workshopping letter-writing, which allowed members to “collaboratively imagine” their future without financial worries (41). Pearl Buckhalter, president of the Oregon [End Page 209] City, Oregon, Townsend Club No. 1, is an example of a leader who recontextualized the means available to position herself as an expert, using her own experience as her ethos, rather than simply repeating the words prescribed by Townsend headquarters (52). Sohan argues convincingly that the translingual and transmodal literacy practices of the Townsend Movement allowed individuals like Buckhalter to transform their lives through the literacy training they receive as part of their activism, even if the movement they promote ultimately fails, as the Townsend Movement did. Nevertheless, she argues, this is exactly why rhetorical scholars must fight against the impulse to examine only heroic narratives of activism and must include the everyday in their analyses. In chapter two, Sohan examines the life and work of Quaker minister and activist Eliza P. Gurney. Gurney, Sohan argues, skillfully blends the epideictic form of classical rhetoric with the “nondirective, nonconfrontational, conversational rhetorical approach” of the Quaker community (71-72). Sohan examines several key parts of her ministry: her development as a minister, her traveling ministry in Europe, and her relationship with President Lincoln. Sohan argues that Gurney harnessed silence and kairos to establish an ethos with potentially hostile audiences, at a time when ethos was assumed to be more fixed than fluid. In her discussion of Gurney’s meeting and correspondence with Lincoln, Sohan demonstrates how Gurney recontextualized the epideictic to develop a relationship with the president and to plead with him to imagine a more peaceful and just world. In this chapter, Sohan significantly builds on prior scholarship on Gurney to establish her as a skillful activist and rhetorician through a detailed exploration of Gurney’s speeches, letters, and meetings. Chapter three is perhaps...
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Abstract
Reviewed by: Persuasion, Rhetoric and Roman Poetry by Irene Peirano Garrison Michele Kennerly Irene Peirano Garrison. Persuasion, Rhetoric and Roman Poetry. New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 295 pp. ISBN 978-1-316-21935-5 In our free-verse universe, poetry only seems unbound; every so often, it is invoked precisely because it cannot shake common knowledge of its traditional formal and affective structures. For instance, in the 1980s, New York governor Mario Cuomo distinguished courtship from leadership with his quip “you campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose.” In the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, Hillary Clinton used the line against Barack Obama, attempting to call into question his ability to pivot from charming to commanding. In 2020, then California senator Kamala Harris, interviewed while seeking her party’s nomination for the presidency, explained that policy proposals have “to be relevant,” not “a beautiful sonnet,” suggesting form can come at the expense of function. These examples show how orators operating in a tricky rhetorical culture use poetry and prose to differentiate modes of influence. They are part of a lengthy lineage. In Persuasion, Rhetoric and Roman Poetry, classicist Irene Peirano Garrison makes what is not the first case but what may be the fullest that distinctions posited between ancient poetry and oratory, verse and talk, poetics and rhetoric, are not fixed and absolute but strategic and contested. What is at stake in the making of those distinctions? That is an important question to ask of any time period, but Peirano Garrison s focus on Rome’s early imperial period sets her up to oppose what for a long time was prevailing scholarly opinion: that, during that period, the purity of poetry was adulterated by rhetoric, with Ovid being the first faulty filter. Peirano Garrison challenges the logic (and imagery) of that opinion, arguing that the very assumption that poetry and rhetoric were ever self-evidently [End Page 211] discrete and separate is not supported by the ancient evidence. To make her case, Peirano Garrison partitions that evidence into three sections: 1) Poetry in Rhetoric; 2) Oratory in Epic; 3) “Rhetoricizing” Poetry. A short introduction offers operative definitions of a few key terms. The first part begins with the chapter “Poetry and Rhetoric and Poetry in Rhetoric,” in which Peirano Garrison stretches from Gorgias to Derrida to take the long view of purported disassociations, connections, and interrelations between the two verbal arts. Pinpointing imperial Rome, she identifies eloquentia and facundia as terms for capacities of powerful and fluent speech that accommodate both orators and poets. It is precisely because they share in those capacities that orators and poets pursue and argue about who does what better under their respective constraints. The remainder of the chapter spotlights pleasure (voluptas), showiness (ostentatio), and enhancement (ornatus), since debates about the closeness of poetry and oratory tend to bunch around those concepts. The second chapter, “Poetry and the Poetic in Seneca the Elder’s Controuersiae and Suasoriaeseeks to understand and then correct the misguided view—in Seneca’s time and now, to the degree that anyone still clings to it—that the popularity of declamation in the early imperial period indexes its broken (that is, poeticized) rhetorical culture. Garrison focuses on how Seneca, himself from Spain, vaunts a Spanish orator (Porcius Latro) over an ostensibly eastern orator (Arellius Fuscus), because Latro instructs in what an uncorrupt, properly Roman oratorical style should sound like. Whereas Fuscus’s concoctions are bad imitations of good poets, Latro’s controlled persuasions render him so exemplary a speaker that Ovid and Vergil emulate him in their verse (74). “The Orator and the Poet in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria,” the final chapter in this section, ranges across the Institutio but dwells on book-rolls 8, 9, 10, and 12, since it is there that Quintilian most explicitly erects boundaries between poetry and oratory, even while he quotes and borrows extensively from Vergil to specify an orator’s unique training and trajectory. In this first part of the book, readers may notice Peirano Garrison’s unflagged (and frequent) use of the word “prose” in her discussions and translations. It seems important, even helpful, to her...
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Abstract
Can religious texts be read rhetorically? Or are these texts immutable archetypes that prevent rhetorical interpretations? I would like to argue that like other living texts, rhetorical readings of religious texts facilitate not only uninhibited dialogues but also foster new knowledge through disagreements and adaptations. Following this, I read the Bhagavad Gita as an instance of a religious text that has been exposed to both conservative and pluralistic interpretations. Most readers of the Gita contend with its philosophical content but rarely with its argumentative form. My interests lie in accentuating the contradictions within this form and revealing how the symbolic order of the text is activated through a series of antinomies. They will, I believe, unveil multiple rhetorical transformations the text has encountered and sustained, and enable similar persuasive transgressions hereafter.
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In MemoriamJerry Murphy (1923–2021) Don Paul Abbott James Jerome “Jerry” Murphy died on Christmas Eve, 2021, at the age of 98. His death marked the end of a very long and a very productive life. As readers of this journal will know, Jerry exercised a remarkable influence over the history of rhetoric and those of us who study it. This influence was a result, in part, of an impressive record of publication extending over a remarkable 60 years. Jerry wrote about Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance rhetoric, composition and argumentation, pedagogy and bibliography, and more. Fortunately for us, his scholarly works remain readily available to us in libraries and data bases. His scholarship speaks for itself and so it is Jerry himself that I want to speak about. I first met Jerry sometime in the late 1970s. It was a meeting that would change the trajectory of my professional life. He had taken an interest in my work, encouraging me to pursue certain avenues and to forgo others. Fortunately, I had the good sense to follow his advice. I soon learned that I was by no means unique—Jerry regularly mentored young scholars in the United States and beyond. And his support often meant more than simply encouragement. Those whose work he found promising would frequently be included in his various projects: anthologies, conferences, symposia and more. For Jerry was an impresario, an organizer, and a promoter of rhetorical scholarship in ways that benefitted many individual careers and the development of the field itself. He was, after all, one of the six founders of this society and the founding editor of this journal. And, when he perceived there [End Page 109] were too few publishers of historical scholarship, Jerry simply founded his own publishing house, Hermagoras Press. My association with Jerry became closer when, because of him, I was appointed to the faculty of the University of California, Davis in 1982. I remain grateful for his confidence in me to this day. My initial appointment was in the Department of Rhetoric which, of course, Jerry had established in 1965. Having him as a colleague was rather like having my own personal consultant. I would regularly go to Jerry with questions about the project I was working on at the time and he would invariably know the answer or know how to find the answer. Thus, I was distressed when he decided to retire in 1991. But I needn’t have worried because, while he may have left the University, he didn’t really retire. Indeed, after his official retirement he continued to be remarkably productive, writing or editing six books. Happily, he remained alert and intellectually engaged until just a few days before his death. His final publication, The Oxford Handbook of Quintilian, which he co-edited, arrived exactly one week before he died. He feared he would die before he saw this, his last publication, and so he was delighted to be able to hold it in his hands. Jerry was, then, in every sense, a gentleman and a scholar. In particular, he was a profoundly kind man who was extremely reluctant to express a negative opinion about anyone. His inherent kindness was apparent in the many scholars he aided and encouraged, but it was also evident in his extensive and varied efforts as an editor. He was careful to avoid harsh criticism of others’ material even when he regarded it as deficient. Rather, he always attempted to bring out the best in the work of others by gentle prodding and careful questioning. As a result of Jerry’s fundamental humanity, the number of people around the world who regarded him as a friend and advisor is really quite extraordinary. Jerry Murphy was my friend and colleague for over 40 years. And while I still find it difficult to believe he is gone, I take solace in remembering that he led a very long—and very good—life. [End Page 110] Don Paul Abbott University of California, Davis Copyright © 2022 International Society for the History of Rhetoric
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Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement, by Bjørn F. Stillion Southard ↗
Abstract
Reviewed by: Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement, by Bjørn F. Stillion Southard Sara C. VanderHaagen Bjørn F. Stillion Southard. Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement. Race, Rhetoric, and Media Series. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2019. 176 pp. ISBN 978-1-4968-2383-0 While often dismissed as a straightforward failure, arguments advocating the removal of free Black Americans to Africa are rhetorically significant: they continued for more than fifty years, engaged white and Black Americans alike, and powerfully shaped understandings of Blackness and Black communities into the twentieth century. As I have found when [End Page 213] teaching courses on the African American rhetorical tradition, the shadow of this discourse lurks in the words of speakers from Sojourner Truth to Marcus Garvey. Its presence—much less its rationale—can be difficult to explain. Bjørn F. Stillion Southard’s excellent book helps to address that challenge by offering a rich, complex analysis of this persistent occurrence of “peculiar rhetoric.” Beginning with speeches given at the founding of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1816, the first chapter examines what Stillion Southard calls the “peculiar argumentation” of colonization’s founding advocates. These speakers’ arguments in favor of colonization were shaped (or, more accurately, misshaped) by their effort to appeal to two diametrically opposed audiences: southern slaveholders and northern abolitionists. Attempts to meet such a strange rhetorical task left key ideas in what Stillion Southard terms “jangling relation” (33) to one another and opened the ACS to critiques from all sides. Although the ACS treated free Black Americans as “objects of the scheme, not subjects to be addressed” (25), as the author astutely notes, it is not difficult to imagine that they would have had strong opinions about the proposal. Chapter two explores a response to the founding of the ACS whose authorship was attributed to the “Free People of the District of Columbia.” Because the authorship of this text cannot be clearly identified, Stillion Southard focuses instead on its “peculiar voice” in order to demonstrate that it is “hermeneutically diasporic; it both belongs to and flees from familiar interpretive frames” (42). The analysis deftly deploys familiar rhetorical concepts, such as polysemy, in unfamiliar ways in order to draw out the text’s three voices: serious, ironic, and signifying. Each of these three voices suggests a different set of authors and distinct purposes vis-à-vis colonization. While the analysis provides solid evidence for all three voices, I found the discussion of signifying most insightful and potentially productive for scholars seeking to understand and amplify Black voices from the past. The concept of signifying used by Stillion Southard, while departing slightly from Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s variation, “signifyin’,” reveals a compelling insight: “Being black and subversive was much more difficult in public discourse than being white and ironic” (57). Further evidence of that insight appears in chapters three and four, which focus on texts produced by Black colonists. Chapter three examines the “negotiation of blackness, power, and material conditions” (66) in free Black landowner Louis Sheridan’s correspondence with the ACS and his eventual emigration to Liberia. Adapting Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s concept of planning in the face of “exclusionary forces” (66), Stillion Southard demonstrates how colonization discourse created limited possibilities for free Blacks who sought to emigrate and reveals the inventive ways in which these individuals rhetorically negotiated their severely constrained subjectivity in the face of limitations. This analysis effectively engages both Afro-Pessimist and Black optimist thought, which compellingly illustrates Sheridan’s own journey from optimism to pessimism as a result of his “peculiar planning for emigration. The focus on Black subjectivity is critical here, [End Page 214] as it helps to show how one individual Black person experienced and responded to the peculiar machinations of a colonization scheme that treated him as “neither slave nor free” (71). Chapter four turns to a more empowered settler colonist, Hilary Teage. Just before the Republic of Liberia declared independence in 1847, Teage gave two speeches that constituted “settler colonist civic identity” by outlining, respectively, their “peculiar obligation to debate” and their “peculiar obligation to commemorate” (89; emphasis in original...
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Abstract
This essay explores a nexus of related concepts—authorship, authenticity, and authority—as they impinge upon one another and on the experience of reading, particularly in the case of “canonical" authors such as Aristotle. Aristotle’s own Rhetoric and Poetics are considered together in light of these concepts, as well as in terms of seven constraints that operated upon Aristotle as a thinker and writer. Twentieth-century theories of reading are adduced in an examination of the rhetorical dimensions of Aristotle’s own notion of authorship. The essay also examines the rhetorical forces entailed in the editing and publication of authors known only from ancient manuscripts, and in the reading of legal and sacred texts.
February 2022
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Review: <i>Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992–2016</i>, by Tammy R. Vigil ↗
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Book Review| February 01 2022 Review: Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992–2016, by Tammy R. Vigil Tammy R. Vigil, Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992–2016. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019. 272 pp. ISBN: 9780700627486 Sara Hillin Sara Hillin Lamar University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (1): 100–102. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.100 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 Sara Hillin; Review: Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992–2016, by Tammy R. Vigil. Rhetorica 1 February 2022; 40 (1): 100–102. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.100 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. © 2022 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Review: <i>Orality and Performance in Classical Attic Prose: A Linguistic Approach</i>, by Alessandro Vatri ↗
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Book Review| February 01 2022 Review: Orality and Performance in Classical Attic Prose: A Linguistic Approach, by Alessandro Vatri Alessandro Vatri, Orality and Performance in Classical Attic Prose: A Linguistic Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. 344 pp. ISBN: 978019879590 Vasiliki Zali-Schiel Vasiliki Zali-Schiel University of Liverpool Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (1): 96–98. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.96 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 Vasiliki Zali-Schiel; Review: Orality and Performance in Classical Attic Prose: A Linguistic Approach, by Alessandro Vatri. Rhetorica 1 February 2022; 40 (1): 96–98. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.96 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. © 2022 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Review: <i>Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics</i>, by Michele Kennerly ↗
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Book Review| February 01 2022 Review: Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics, by Michele Kennerly Michele Kennerly, Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2018. 242 pp. ISBN: 9781108426237 David L. Marshall David L. Marshall University of Pittsburgh Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (1): 91–94. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.91 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 David L. Marshall; Review: Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics, by Michele Kennerly. Rhetorica 1 February 2022; 40 (1): 91–94. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.91 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2022 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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La metarretórica cognitiva aristotélica y su relación con el tratamiento de la memoria en la <i>Rhetorica ad Herennium</i> ↗
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This article examines the influence exerted by the Aristotelian cognitive metarhetoric over the treatment of memory in Book 3 of the Rhetorica ad Herennium. Sections 3.16.28–29, 3.19.32 and 3.22.35–37 are read against the backdrop of the core principles of Aristotle’s psychological treatises on mind and memory, De Anima and De Memoria et Reminiscentia, together with the multifaceted concept of energeia, found in these treatises as well as in the Rhetoric and the Metaphysics. The results suggest that the psychology of memory of the Rhetorica ad Herennium and its rhetorical products are indebted to Aristotelian philosophy, with particular emphasis on the imagines agentes within the mnemonic system per locos et imagines.
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Abstract
Book Review| February 01 2022 Review: Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention, by Steele Nowlin Steele Nowlin, Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention. Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016. 274 pp. ISBN: 9780814213100 Denise Stodola Denise Stodola Kettering University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (1): 98–100. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.98 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 Denise Stodola; Review: Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention, by Steele Nowlin. Rhetorica 1 February 2022; 40 (1): 98–100. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.98 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. © 2022 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Review: <i>The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire: The Rhetorical Schoolroom and the Creation of a Cultural Legend</i>, by T. J. Keeline ↗
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Book Review| February 01 2022 Review: The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire: The Rhetorical Schoolroom and the Creation of a Cultural Legend, by T. J. Keeline T. J. Keeline, The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire: The Rhetorical Schoolroom and the Creation of a Cultural Legend. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 388 pp. ISBN: 9781108426237 Martin T. Dinter Martin T. Dinter King’s College London Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (1): 90–91. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.90 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 Martin T. Dinter; Review: The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire: The Rhetorical Schoolroom and the Creation of a Cultural Legend, by T. J. Keeline. Rhetorica 1 February 2022; 40 (1): 90–91. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.90 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. © 2022 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.