Rhetorica
1293 articlesJune 2000
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Abstract
346 RHETORICA Kennedy's standards. Still, Schiappa's book will help us continue this important conversation about rhetorical history, epistemology, and disciplinarity—a conversation that his work has been instrumental in fostering. Janet M. Atwill The University ofTennessee Anne W. Astell, Political Allegory in Late Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), xii + 218 pp. New historicism has encouraged a generation of scholars to abandon the older critical tradition which believed that literary merit gave texts a value to which historical context was irrelevant. Believing that context illuminates aspects of writers' choices and presentations of their subjects, Anne W.Astell seeks to show that some of the best known vernacular writers, principally in Richard IPs reign—Chaucer and Gower, the anonymous author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—composed specific commentaries on contemporary events which an informed audience would recognise as critical analysis of political behaviour. Perhaps the best way to appreciate her purpose is to start with her conclusions where she summarised what she has attempted to argue. Earlier attempts to read vernacular medieval texts as verbally encoded in accordance with known contemporary rules of encryption, such as acrostics, were rejected by literary critics. Astell seeks to make a flexible interpretation of code words and allusions more acceptable by providing a framework of classical rhetorical rules from Cicero, Augustine and Boethius that were sufficiently well known and clearly used to serve as the scaffolding of their allegorical explanations. Some of the allusions on which she depends are individually weak, for the likeness of the king to the sun and the intercessory role of a queen consort were commonplaces—relevant not only to Richard and Anne's behaviour but to the expected behaviour of kings and queens throughout Europe—appropriated by the writers Reviews 347 only in the sense that they represented received ideas. She strengthens her case by the use of additional references. The counsel offered is traditional but as relevant to Richard as it would be to other monarchs in a society where men who were to him overmighty subjects saw him as little more than Primus inter pares. The extent to which the usual topoi of poems providing a "mirror for princes" is focused on the particular problems of Richard's reign would be assisted by a brief indication of the basic ideological divisions between the disputants and the precision with which the writers reflect these, which seems to vary from writer to writer. The evidence that Gower was already writing from a Lancastrian standpoint in the Confessio Amantis is comparatively straightforward. Ignoring the case for Richard's right to use his prerogative and presenting his supporters as scoundrels and treasonous by drawing a dubious comparison with a classical parallel is a familiar device used by skilled lawyers presenting a partisan case. Astell's interpretation of Chaucer's Monk's and Nun's Priest's tales starts with an argument that Richard sought consciously to emulate Edward the Confessor, and Edward II, whom he sought to have canonised as a martyr, one or both of whom were referred to "in passing" before the Monk goes on to a cautionary tale of the fall of princes, some of whom died as result of their tyranny and some because of their enemies' ambitions. The Confessor's position vis a vis the coronation ceremonies, however, is hardly peculiar to Richard's coronation and its precise relevance to the Pales is not made clear. The tale of Chauntecleer the cock, a fable included in most fabular compilations, can serve various didactic ends. It is here presented as a comedy of Richard's early years in which a man susceptible to flattery and bad advice (Richard) is able to learn from mistakes. The establishment of it as an identifiable account of the peasants' revolt is a difficult trail through other literary uses of animal embodiment. Such comparatively simple allegorical instructions are easier to accept than the complex allegory by which the beheading of the Green Knight is presented as a symbol of the execution of the earl of Arundel and the whole tale as an invitation to Richard to express penitence. To start with, it requires a date after 1397, while...
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Abstract
Short Reviews Edward Schiappa, The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), x + 230 pp. In The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece, Edward Schiappa continues his questioning of the disciplinary status of rhetoric in the Classical period. The book is divided into three sections: Reconstructing the Origins of Rhetorical Theory, Gorgias and the Disciplining of Discourse, and Fourth-Century Disciplinary Efforts. In Part I, Schiappa challenges what he characterizes as a 17point , "standard account" of the history of rhetoric—with points ranging from the status of the Corax and Tisias story to the origins and uses of ρητορική. For the most part, George Kennedy is the author of the account Schiappa challenges, and these first chapters interrogate Kennedy's timeline as well as his categories of "traditional," "technical," and "philosophical" rhetorics. This section recapitulates Schiappa's well-known argument that Plato was responsible for coining the term ρητορική —most likely in the early fourth century BCE. By Schiappa's account, this "coining" was "a watershed event in the history of conceptualized Rhetoric in ancient Greece" (p. 23). Specifically, Schiappa maintains that before ρητορική was coined the "verbal arts" were "understood as less differentiated and more holistic in scope", and they did "not draw a sharp line between the goals of seeking success and seeking truth" (p. 23). Part I includes Schiappa's direct response to critics of his ρητορική argument. In Chapter Two, he draws on theorists from Kenneth Burke and Ferdinand de Saussure to Benjamin Lee Whorf and Michel Foucault to defend the significance of the act of naming that Schiappa maintains is embodied in the coining of ρητορική (pp. 23-28). Chapter Four includes a sharp critique of the ideological uses of the term "Sophistic rhetoric", in which Schiappa challenges the "wishful thinking" of those who "over-romanticize the relationship between 'the Sophists' and Athenian democracy" .343 344 RHETORICA (p. 55). He is particularly hard on those whom he accuses of sacrificing historiographical method to ideological theory construction—a practice that he argues leads to the problem of anachronism (p. 61). Part II consists of "three studies". The first study, large portions of which were previously published in Pre/Text, examines Gorgias's style. The second study, "Rereading Gorgias's Helen", picks up more explicitly the disciplinary concerns of Part I, as Schiappa argues that "certain persistent questions about Gorgias's Helen obtain different answers once the speech is repositioned as a predisciplinary text" (p. 115). More specifically, Schiappa maintains that "Gorgias significantly influenced the early theoretical articulation of the discipline of Rhetoric by theorizing about the workings of persuasive discourse" (p. 131). In the last study, Schiappa focuses on Gorgias's "On Not Being", examining the ways in which disciplinary senses of philosophy and rhetoric have influenced interpretations and evaluations of this muchdebated text. Like Part II, Part III consists of "three studies". The first chapter of this section examines early uses of the terms ρητορεία ("oratory") and ρητορεύειν ("to orate"). Schiappa's general argument is that the terms "were not used often or consistently enough" to justify the sense of disciplinarity stability conveyed when they are translated as "rhetoric" (p. 160). The next chapter, "Isocrates's Philosophia", attempts to define Isocrates's sense of the art of discourse, particularly as it contrasts with Plato's concept of "philosophy". This chapter has—somewhat surprisingly—a second function: "to provide a reading of Isocrates that attempts to locate him as one of the first philosophers in Western history to address the concerns that we now identify with Pragmatism" (p. 162). Part III concludes with a chapter co-authored with David Timmerman that addresses the motivations for and implications of the diverse forms of discourse Aristotle classified as "epideictic". Schiappa's arguments have yielded invaluable insights into some of the most recalcitrant debates in the history of rhetoric—in particular, the ancient contest between rhetoric and philosophy. I found that the structure of The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece sometimes obscured rather than foregrounded the significance of these insights. As Schiappa acknowledges in the Reviews 345 Preface, portions of the book have appeared in books and journal articles. The result is sometimes redundant as opposed to...
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Abstract
This short paper will sketch the twilight years of Greek rhetorics, roughly from 1500 until just after the Greek War of Independence. This is an area that, like much else in neo-Greek intellectual history, has been sadly ignored in “Western” scholarship. Greek scholars played an important part in the reception of the works of Hermogenes, Longinus, and pseudo-Demetrius in the mid- and late-sixteenth century. But other Greek teachers and scholars at the College of St. Athanasius in Rome, at the University of Padua, at the Flanginian Academy in Venice, and at schools in Bucharest, Jannina, and Constantinople itself continued to add to those traditions with numerous school texts, homiletic handbooks, and some interesting philosophical treatments of rhetoric. Their names (Korydaleus, Skoufos, Mavrokordates, Damodos, and many others) are unknown to most students of the history of rhetoric—a situation this paper will try in its small way to change.
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352 RHETORICA Jeanne Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), xiv + 234 pp. The title of this work well represents the focus of the book, but it fails to convey the breadth of content it contains. Jeanne Fahnestock's book displays a range of erudition not only in the history of science but in the history of rhetoric as well. Unlike other studies that have treated the use of metaphors and analogy in scientific literature, this one reveals the work of some little marked but ubiquitous figures of speech in many classic and modem texts in science. Fahnestock's aim, however, is not just to show the way in which these figures have influenced the turn of scientific thought, or have structured its expression, but she seeks to illuminate the nature of rhetorical figures themselves. The book claims that certain figures are actually condensed lines of argument and that they appear in all kinds of discourse. She selects for close study five figures of particular importance to scientific reasoning: antithesis, gradatio, incrementum, antimetabole, ploche, and poliptoton. These are looked at systematically, with historical accounts and illustrations of each, followed by well-developed examples of their use in a coherent topical, not chronological, order. Throughout the work Fahnestock has also included visual representations that bear witness to the structural figuration behind them. The first chapter of the book alone, "The Figures as Epitomes", should prove invaluable to historians and teachers of rhetoric and literature. Fahnestock first clarifies the confusing categories of tropes, schemes, figures of diction and thought. Next she examines leading theories of figuration: figures are departures from "normal" or "typical" word use; figures ornament or embellish, adding emotion, force, charm. Figures may do all of these things, she says, but essentially they are composites a "formal embodiment of certain ideational or persuasive functions" (p. 23). She defines them as "an identifiable convergence, felicity, or synergy of form and content" (p. 38). As such the most useful approach to the figures is to look at their function. Accordingly, she examines the function of the figures mentioned above to condense or epitomize lines of argument. The key to the figural epitome lies in the topics, Reviews 353 lines of argument best described in Aristotle's Topics and Rhetoric, which he identified as common ways of reasoning. In the second chapter on antithesis, a figure based on the topic of opposites, the author explores a variety of scientific examples, including Bacon's tables of absence and presence and Darwin's examination of emotion in man and animals. The figures of series incrementum and gradatio, described in the third chapter, she explains as products of the dialectical topic of property when considered from the standpoint of the more and the less and similarities. In the scientific illustrations for the chapter, the figures are shown to be constitutive of both thought and expression. The author suggests a continuity between the rhetorical series and mathematical series, illustrating this with Newton's discussion of motion and later theories in astronomy. The subject of chapter four, antimetabole, another figure which epitomizes arguments from property, displays repeated terms in two cola, the second of which reverses the grammatical and syntactic order of the first ("Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country"). Although this figure has not been consistently stressed in stylistic discussions over the years, Fahnestock sees it as having given scientists an especially fertile tactic of conceptual reversal. Newton in mechanics, Farraday and Joseph Henry in electromagnetism, Lamarck and Lewontin in theories of evolution, all furnish examples of the figure's usefulness. The final chapter on ploche and poliptoton introduces figures of repetition, probably unfamiliar to most readers. Pioche, described as "perfect repetition", is a word woven into a discourse in the same, or at times, in a different, sense. The second figure, polyptoton, appearing in highly inflected languages more frequently than in English, repeats a word but does so in a different grammatical case. In a dazzling account of the history of writings on electricity, the author documents the grammatical shifts that occur as experimenters begin to understand its nature. First a...
March 2000
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The Epideictic Dimension of Galatians as Formative Rhetoric: The Inscription of Early Christian Community ↗
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Modern rhetorical theory suggests that epideictic creates and sustains values by addressing issues of legitimacy, inclusion, exclusion, and virtue. By focusing on the epideictic dimension in Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, this paper explores Paul’s efforts to form an emerging Christian community that at once identified with its Judaic roots and yet dissociated itself from a conservative sect of Jewish Christians, who were attempting to colonize the young Galatian churches.
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This article examines the way in which the classical rhetorical tradition inspired John Quincy Adams’s public life. While rhetorical scholars have probed Adams’s role as Harvard’s first Boylston Professor of Rhetoric, they have not appreciated how the classical tradition in general, and Ciceronian rhetoric in particular, influenced his political career. Social scientists, on the other hand, have studied Adams’s impact on Antebellum America but have not appreciated how his life-long devotion to classical rhetoric shaped his response to public issues. John Quincy Adams remained inspired by classical rhetorical ideals long after the neo-classicalism and deferential politics of the founding generation had been eclipsed by the commercial ethos and mass democracy of the Jacksonian Era. Many of the idiosyncratic positions that Adams adopted over the course of his long career are explicated by considering his abiding devotion to the Ciceronian ideal of the citizen-orator “speaking well” to promote the welfare of the polis.
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Reviews David Gribble, Alcibiades and Athens: A Study in Literary Presentation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999) ix + 304pp. Yet another biography of Alcibiades? Well, no. This is a study of Alcibiades' bios, the way he lived his life and how the ancient sources portray it, set against the background of Greek attitudes towards the relationship between the individual and the city. Building on the work of scholars such as Christopher Gill and his own supervisor, Christopher Pelling, Gribble begins in the introduction with a discussion of what we should understand by the term "individual" in the Greek context and the type of individuality into which Alcibiades falls ("the empowered, confident, assertive individual, possessing the power to make moral choice, and endowed with status: the citizen. Contrast the repressed and powerless person, the subject", p. 7). But Alcibiades, like the heroes of the Iliad and Themistocles, is a "great individual", superlative rather than unique and with superlative status, and this puts him in some ways outside his society and a danger to it. The great individual's love of honour (philotimia) leads him into conflict with his community, and the key qualities of his phusis (nature) are excellently examined by Gribble with reference to the philosophical discussions of Plato and Aristotle. In the first part of chapter 1 Gribble discusses the Alcibiades tradition, which he divides into three stages. In the fifth and early fourth centuries attitudes towards Alcibiades were polarised—to his supporters he was the supreme citizen, to his opponents he was a dangerous threat to the polis. By the later fourth century, when he was no longer a live issue, an ambivalent portrayal of Alcibiades was developing, as writers like Demosther es looked back to the great days of the Athenian empire and noted both Alcibiades' hybris and his public achievements. Socratic writings emphasised his moral development or degeneration, and as the 217 218 RHETORICA tradition entered its third stage in the Hellenistic period moral anecdotes came to predominate, while the political (and "factual") side of Alcibiades' life became less important. It will have been in this period that Alcibiades' later role as a favourite topic of declamation had its origins, though the rhetorical texts, with one possible exception (see on [Andocides] 4 below), are lost. In the second part of this chapter Gribble examines the relationship between the élite individual and the democratic city in terms of conspicuous public expenditure (on liturgies and the pan-Hellenic games), contacts with the élite of other cities (through guestfriendship and marriage) and private luxury spending; and this leads to a discussion of Alcibiades' relationship with Athens in four key areas: his betrayal of the city as a result of tension between personal and civic values, his participation at the Olympics of 416, his uncontrolled behaviour concerning bodily pleasures and his foreign contacts. Gribble's analysis here is perceptive and persuasive, bringing out out well the kinds of behaviour which enabled élite individuals to gain power, but at the same time put them outside the norms of the democratic city and so undermined them. After this excellent general discussion of the portrayal of Alcibiades' relationship with the city, Gribble moves on to more detailed study of the sources. Separate chapters on the rhetorical works, Thucydides, and Plato and the Socratics are followed by a concluding chapter on Plutarch's Life ofAlcibiades. Gribble analysis of the trials of Alcibiades' son in the 390s and the speeches connected with them (Isocrates 16, Lysias 14 and 15) is invaluable, especially the discussion of the intertextual relationship between Isocrates 16 and Lysias 14. Gribble argues convincingly that Lysias 14 represents closely the speech delivered at the trial, whereas the encomium of Alcibiades in Isocrates 16 raises suspicions of later editing. In Part B of this chapter Gribble brings [Andocides] 4 and the speeches of Alcibiades in Thucydides into a full discussion of the competing rhetorical presentations of Alcibiades' position with regard to Athens, his patriotism and treachery. He is surely correct to argue that [Andocides] 4 is a later composition, and makes a strong case for a Hellenistic dating (he might have considered the stylistic argument against Andocidean authorship; see, for example, my summary of S...
February 2000
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The Intended Public of Demetrius's On Style: The Place of the Treatise in the Hellenistic Educational System ↗
Abstract
Abstract: On Style, written by a certain Demetrius probably in the first century B.C., is an important witness to the rhetorical education of the third/second centuries B.C. It is a matter of long scholarly debate whether Demetrius intended his treatise to be a handbook of rhetoric or a work of literary criticism. Here it is argued that the public Demetrius writes his book for are pupils who have done the preliminary courses in rhetoric and have leamt to write progymnasmata. They now enter the final course on rhetoric and will compose the more difficult exercises, commonly termed declamationes.
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Abstract: George Campbell's rhetorical theory is based upon a philosophical tradition that has ancient roots—common sense philosophy. Campbell's interest in common sense emerged through his association with Scottish Enlightenment philosophers such as Thomas Reid. However, Campbell's beliefs about the relationship between individual perception and social knowledge at the same time reveal a philosophical affinity with Aristotie and the Stoics. For Campbell, as for the ancients, common sense represents both the intuitive ability that individuals use in apprehending the reality of the external world and the shared human capacity to make necessary collective judgments. Although Campbell believes that there is objective truth that is apprehended through coinmon sense, he at the same time perceives common sense as providing a foundation for making decisions about the contingent circumstances that people face from day to day. Campbell's rhetoric has frequentiy been described as managerial, but his interest in common sense creates an epistemic function for rhetoric, as it provides the means for negotiating the principles of moral evidence in order to resolve the specific questions that arise in the life of the community.
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Abstract: Recent scholarship argues that Anglo-Saxon rhetorical strategies derive from an extended grammatical curriculum such as the praeexercitamina, an argument which complements the trend to rehabilitate our understanding of the Anglo-Saxons, from the romantic notion that they were bound to native conventions to one which recognizes their acquisition and application of Latin learning. This paper extends these arguments by seeking to show that elements of the progymnasmata, on which the praeexercitamina are based, seem to inform the invention and arrangement of material in the “Hunfer]) Episode” of Beowulf.
January 2000
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Abstract
RHETORICA 106 J. Stephen Russell, Chaucer and the Trivium: The Mindsong of the Canterbury Tales (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), x + 266 pp. Although he acknowledges the veil of time hiding the exact nature and extent of Chaucer's education from us, J. Stephen Russell argues that the curriculum of late medieval grammar schools, the trivium (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric), thoroughly influenced and shaped die Canterbury Tales. Establishing his key assumptions early on, Russell claims that Chaucer usually relied on accessus, florilegia, and other scribally-mediated collections of classical and medieval authors rather than full texts, and consequently that Chaucer's citations of specific auctores, texts, and terms does not prove that he knew them well. Russell assumes the grammar school curriculum was Chaucer's only formal education and objects to some current, grander claims about Chaucer's knowledge of philosophy or theology. Chaucer, for example, "may have known Ralph Strode, but Strode did not teach Chaucer the Summa Logicae over dessert" (p. 8). Such claims raise questions about what limits we might want or need to place on Chaucer's capabilities, and they raise questions about how extensively we can argue for a culture's ability to write itself into individual texts. Russell does not, however, explore these issues; instead, he focuses on the trivium specifically and explores ways it shapes the Canterbury Tales. The primary value of his study is to reassert the crucial importance of medieval rhetoric and literacy studies for any reading of Chaucer. Russell provides an overview of the trivium in his first chapter, "A Medieval Education and Its Implications". Grounded in Latin grammar and readings, the curriculum taught children a "subliminal lesson that Latin was purity and precision, the vernacular chaos and compromise" (p. 11). Elements of the school curriculum that addressed dialectic or logic posited a basic model of human cognition: the agens intellectus "recognizes" objects perceived through the senses; the intellectus passivus "cogitates" on those objects. Students learned that a universal, "mental" language exists that is capable of perceiving truth but that our Reviews 107 language of actual communication in the world, "natural" language, is always inadequate and inferior to ideas. (Here some might object to Russell's simplifications of the models or to his use of more obscure semanticists like the Modistae.) In this chapter, Russell stresses the importance of the Tree of Porphyry, Aristotle's Categories, and supposition theory; together, these created taxonomies and produced particular kinds of thought patterns in students. Russell subsequently traces the influence of this curriculum on Chaucer's work, preferring to locate ré inscriptions rather than refusals of these models. In the General Prologue, Chaucer the pilgrim-narrator uses the Aristotle's ten categories as the groundwork for his observations. Beginning with a careful study of Chaucer's grammar, Russell develops a brilliant explication of the conceptual structure of the General Prologue: "each successive verbal act, each step in the dance of predication, involves the ubiquitous decision Quid est? and the answer to that question, Chaucer knew, is always a pas de deux between the object and the predicator, the other and the self" (p. 96). As the Chaucer the observant pilgrim "falls" into language, negotiating tensions between ideal human types and the rather motley crew before him, he cannot sustain Aristotelian formality. His own passions begin to show, and a "slippage" occurs "from natural and accidental supposition to confused determinate supposition, reflecting the narrator's fall from objectivity and reportorial responsibility" (p. 95). For Russell the Knight's Tale focuses on issues of definition, the Man of Law's Tale on "words as commerce, apostrophe (or right coinage) and...God's jurisdiction" (p. 137). The Clerk's Tale offers Russell the opportunity to explore metaphors (i.e., Walter as "the fallen creator", Griselda as a Christ-figure), rhetorical features of narrative, and the epilogue (where the Clerk explicates his own tale). For Russell, the tale is, finally, "an abstraction, a meditation on linguistic, logical, and theological arts that is almost", but not quite "abducted from complications of authorship" (p. 173). Russell does much to establish that the Canterbury Tales "explodes into life thanks to the lessons of grammar, rhetoric, and logic" (p. 202), although...
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Abstract
George Campbell’s rhetorical theory is based upon a philosophical tradition that has ancient roots—common sense philosophy. Campbell’s interest in common sense emerged through his association with Scottish Enlightenment philosophers such as Thomas Reid. However, Campbell’s beliefs about the relationship between individual perception and social knowledge at the same time reveal a philosophical affinity with Aristotle and the Stoics. For Campbell, as for the ancients, common sense represents both the intuitive ability that individuals use in apprehending the reality of the external world and the shared human capacity to make necessary collective judgments. Although Campbell believes that there is objective truth that is apprehended through common sense, he at the same time perceives common sense as providing a foundation for making decisions about the contingent circumstances that people face from day to day. Campbell’s rhetoric has frequently been described as managerial, but his interest in common sense creates an epistemic function for rhetoric, as it provides the means for negotiating the principles of moral evidence in order to resolve the specific questions that arise in the life of the community.
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Abstract
Recent scholarship argues that Anglo-Saxon rhetorical strategies derive from an extended grammatical curriculum such as the praeexercitamina, an argument which complements the trend to rehabilitate our understanding of the Anglo-Saxons, from the romantic notion that they were bound to native conventions to one which recognizes their acquisition and application of Latin learning. This paper extends these arguments by seeking to show that elements of the progymnasmata, on which the praeexercitamina are based, seem to inform the invention and arrangement of material in the “Hunferþ Episode” of Beowulf.
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The Intended Public of Demetrius’s On Style: The Place of the Treatise in the Hellenistic Educational System ↗
Abstract
On Style, written by a certain Demetrius probably in the first century B.C., is an important witness to the rhetorical education of the third/second centuries B.C. It is a matter of long scholarly debate whether Demetrius intended his treatise to be a handbook of rhetoric or a work of literary criticism. Here it is argued that the public Demetrius writes his book for are pupils who have done the preliminary courses in rhetoric and have learnt to write progymnasmata. They now enter the final course on rhetoric and will compose the more difficult exercises, commonly termed declamationes.
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“We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women by Shirley Wilson Logan ↗
Abstract
Reviews 111 Shirley Wilson Logan, "We Are Coming": The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 255 pp. Shirley Wilson Logan introduces "We Are Coming": The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women by stating, "This book examines the public persuasive discourse of nineteenth-century black women intellectuals" (p. xi). She continues in the Preface to talk more specifically about the nature of the historical era of the analysis, constraints on the availability of texts, the nature of both public discourse and persuasive discourse, and the rhetorical theories and strategies that shape her analysis. Near the end of the Preface she says, "My hope is that these discussions might also add to a clearer understanding of nineteenth-century culture and of the ways in which the persuasive discourse of nineteenth-century black women adapted itself to its multiple audiences and multilayered exigences" (p. xvi). By this process, Logan makes the reader immediately aware of the extent to which the participation of African American women in public discourse during the nineteenth century signals complexity, rather than simplicity, and a need for contemporary researchers to account for patterns in rhetorical practices at the same time that we resist reducing those patterns to simplistic and monolithic notions of a "Black women's rhetoric". First of all, in focusing attention on specific rhetors, Logan re inscribes the historical record with the names of women who actively charted new pathways for rhetorical engagement during an era of remarkable social, political, and economic change. She brings texture to what we have come to know about the rhetorical performances of Maria Miller Stewart, Frances Watkins Harper, Ida Wells Barnett, Fannie Barrier Williams, Anna Julia Cooper, Victoria Earle Matthews, Mary Shadd Cary, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and others who in recent years have been brought to the attention particularly of teachers and scholars in women's studies, ethnic studies, and literary studies. To this list, however, she adds the names of women whose accomplishments are much less familiar: Rosetta Douglass-Sprague, Alice Woodby McKane, Lucy 112 RHETORICA Wilmot Smith, Mary Cook, Edmonia Highgate, Georgia Swift King and others. She reminds us that to date we have only scratched the surface of the history of African American women's intellectual work as she places the subjects of her study more visibly onto the rhetorical landscape. Using five themes that are symbolized by quotations from the texts of die rhetors, Logan explains in systematic ways how the rhetorical actions of this group were shaped and performed amid various systems and forces of the social environment. She raises for critical viewing points of inquiry that help us to envision these women both individually and collectively, interrogating, for example: the importance of allusions to an African past in the gamering of rhetorical power; their commitment to forging alliances across various communities of interest; the directing of their energies toward critical issues within the African American community; the use of specific strategies in the art of persuasion; their creation of their own arenas for rhetorical engagement; and the ways and means of rhetorical action in the particular arena of the Black Clubwomen's Movement, that is, their shaping of the discourse of racial uplift. Logan suggests that individually these women illustrate a breadth of rhetorical responses to a continuity of exigencies and that collectively they were quite astute at finding ways to invoke lively connections between themselves and their audiences; to invent themselves anew within their performative arenas; and to respond provocatively to the exigencies of multiply constrained rhetorical situations. The effect of Logan's approach is to underscore a critical point that she makes in her statement of purpose, that is, her assertion that these women are intellectuals. In attending to individual practices, common exigencies, and thematic points of inquiry, Logan makes visible that the case to be made ultimately with this analysis is not simply that African American women engaged persuasively in rhetorical practices in public arenas during this era, but that their doing so demonstrates the liveliness of their intellectual engagement and their ethical commitments. Logan's choice in making this case is to lead us analytically through a textual display, making conditions...
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RHETORICA 108 General Prologue and three serious tales. Much of the comedic and fantastic is left unexplored; indeed, he writes, "I hope others will extend the discussion...I have only initiated" (p. 212). Although Russell, at times, claims rather brashly to know what Chaucer thought or didn't think, what he read or didn't read without much qualification, the edginess of his prose provokes response. His work confidently negotiates contemporary Chaucerian scholarship, solidly convincing readers that the trivium can serve as an important lens through which we can read medieval literary texts. ANNE LASKAYA University of Oregon Lynne Magnusson, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), x + 221 pp. In Shakespeare and Social Dialogue, Lynne Magnusson accepts poststructural questioning of the unity and autonomy of the literary text and the independence of its "author" and characters but argues that this critique of formalism has unnecessarily dismissed close reading of language. She seeks to restore it by applying concepts from discourse analysis to a comparison of Renaissance correspondence and Shakespeare's dialogue. Her assumption that letters and plays come close to recording actual conversation seems a little naive, and I am not always sure whether her goal is to recover Elizabethan speech or to illuminate Shakespeare, but she largely achieves both. In place of the Aristotelian categories applied to Elizabethan letters by Frank Whigham, she builds on theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and Pierre Bourdieu, and especially the empirical research of cultural anthropologists Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson. Their model describes attempts to manage risk and save face in conversation through strategies of positive politeness (identifying participants) and negative politeness (dissociating them) that take into account their social Reviews 109 distance, their relative power, and the culture-specific ranking of impositions. As an historian of rhetoric skeptical of imposing our own theories on Renaissance texts, I am startled by how well this approach explains Elizabethan language. Magnusson's study has three parts. Part One demonstrates that gender as well as class influences social dialogue. In Henry VIII, Norfolk employs positive strategies to advise Buckingham; Katherine and Wolsey address King Henry with negative strategies of deference and indirection. The correspondence of Edmund Molyneux, Sidney family secretary, reveals the complexities of Elizabethan relationships. Philip and Robert Sidney command him, while he responds to Philip's criticisms primarily with negative strategies. Lady Mary Sidney tempers her authority over Edmund with positive strategies. Shakespeare's Sonnet 58 and others deferring to his patron are best understood in the context of these conventions. Part Two focuses on letter-writing manuals and administrative correspondence, applying its examples to Shakespeare's plays. Magnusson contrasts Desiderius Erasmus' reform of the horizontal, homosocial relations of scholars in De conscribendis epistolis with Angel Day's reproduction of Elizabethan social hierarchies in The English Secretary, which nevertheless facilitates upward mobility. William Fulwood's The Enimie of Idlenesse, a translation of a French treatise, could have unwittingly supplied hints for the linguistic pretensions of Love's Labour's Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream. In the former play, the lords' linguistic excesses respond to imitation of their style by upstarts, while in the latter, Theseus appreciates his subjects' incompetence because bumbling shows deference. Elizabethan business depends on personal relationship: thus recommendations ignore job qualifications and requests for favors cement friendship. The Marchants Avizo of Bristol merchant John Browne advises the apprentice to seek aid from fellow merchants, adapting the courtly "pleasuring style" to the commerce. The Merchant of Venice shows the same patterns in the Christian community, but Shylock's speech challenges them, and in Timon of Athens they break down. In the personal letters by which Sir Henry Sidney, Sir William Cecil, and other courtiers administer 110 RHETORICA the Elizabethan regime, negative politeness to equals hints that the intended audience is the Queen, while expressions of "trouble taking" and regrets for "trouble-making" to superiors may excuse independent decisions. Positive strategies of identification present weighty requests as trivial. 1 Henry IV contrasts Hal's mastery of this social language and Hotspur's impatience with it. Part Three explores language as theme in three plays. Greenblatt's concept of self-fashioning cannot adequately explain...
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Short Reviews1 Martin Heidegger, Plato's Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), xxvii + 476 pp. Reflecting on her early years as a student of philosophy at the University of Marburg, Hannah Arendt recalls how the name of a young assistant professor, Martin Heidegger, travelled across Germany like "rumours" of a "secret king". Now, with the publication of Plato's Sophist, readers of English may judge for themselves whether these lectures confirm or dispel the rumours of Heidegger as a "subterranean" king of the realms of thinking and teaching. Plato's Sophist is a faithful and readable translation of Platons Sophist, Ingeborg Schiisslers's superb reconstruction of a lecture course on the Sophist conducted by Heidegger at Marburg in the Winter semester of 1924/25 under the deceptively simple title, Interpretation Platonischer Dialog (Sophistes). Although Heidegger claims in his preliminary remarks that the phenomenological "way of seeing" follows the "pure" and "simple" way of thinking of the early Greeks, there is nothing simple about Heidegger's magisterial interpretation of the Sophist as the first radical inquiry into the question of the "meaning of Being", the guiding thread of Heidegger's own Being and Time (1927). In order to prepare the way for an understanding of the Sophist as a "scientific" dialogue, Heidegger devotes the introduction (pp. 15-155) to a detailed exposition of the doctrine of intellectual virtues set forth by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics (VI, 2-6) and the Metaphysics (I, 1-2). Taking its point of departure in the Greek concept of truth (aletheia) as "unconcealedness" and "uncoveredness", chapter one argues that 1 The Editor and the Book Review Editor would like to apologize to Janet Atwill for the error in naming in the review of her book Rhetoric Reclaimed in Rhetorica, 17 (1999) p. 334. 103 RHETORICA 104 the intellectual virtues (episteme, techne, phronesis, sophia, and nous) represent different ways of "unconcealing" and uncovering the truth of Being. While chapter one exposes the "deficiency" of know-how (techne) and fabrication (poiesis) as ways of unveiling Being, the second and third chapters seek to establish the preeminence of sophia ("genuine insight") over phronesis ("circumspective insight") as the highest mode of "disclosive seeing". Here Heidegger argues that while phronesis concerns the "gravest" matters, the "shared world" (Mitwelt) of words and deeds in the city, sophia concerns the "highest" matters, the "ultimate principles" (archai) of Being, which reveal themselves only in the "silent speaking" of the solitary thinker. One of the most striking features of this remarkable "double preparation" for the Sophist—apart from the rigour, clarity, and sobriety of its argumentation—is the subtle process by which Heidegger purifies the concepts of practical and theoretical wisdom of any trace of sophistry. The translation of deliberation (bouleuesthai) as "circumspective self-debate", for example, seems to eliminate the plural dimension of deliberation for the Greeks: the deliberative assembly (boule), the forum of deliberative rhetoric (rhetorike symbouleutikos), becomes the "inner forum" of the call of conscience and the "silent dialogue" of the soul. Having surveyed the "thematic field" of the Sophist through an exposition of the modes of truth in the Nicomachean Ethics, Heidegger devotes the "main part" (pp. 157-422) of Plato's Sophist to a patient, almost line by line exegesis of the dialogue. Following the argument of the Eleatic Stranger "step by step", the first four chapters bring to light the inner coherence of the various apparitions of the sophist, arguing that all seven definitions converge on the art of disputation as the "unitary basic structure" of the techne sophistike. The excursus on Plato's "ambiguous" (zwiespaltige) attitude toward rhetoric in chapter three will doubtless hold the most interest for the historian of rhetoric. Here Heidegger argues that dialectics emerges from an "inner need" of Socratic philosophy to transcend the "idle chatter" of sophistry and its modes of "pretheoretical speech" (the rhetoric of the law courts, deliberative assemblies, and public festivals). Although Plato failed to achieve a "positive understanding" of rhetoric, Reviews 105 concludes Heidegger, his vision of a redeemed rhetoric as the leading of souls in the Phaedrus lays the foundation for the "concrete work" of Aristotle in the Rhetoric, the "first...
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Reviews 113 are able to do so with a useful vocabulary, specific examples, and an assessment of the landscape of rhetorical practice that sets a new pace. Her title, then, "We Are Coming", gains increasing significance. Indeed, African American women are coming onto the rhetorical scene, and this analysis contributes greatly to our ability to take into account in interesting ways what their presence means. JACQUELINE JONES ROYSTER The Ohio State University Lynette Hunter, Critiques of Knowing: Situated Textualities in Science, Computing, and the Arts (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), vi + 239 pp. Critiques of Knowing is a disarmingly accurate title for Lynette Hunter's most recent book, a study of the relevance of rhetoric to critical theories of language in several fields. Standpoint theory, Hunter proposes, integrated with rhetorical understandings of ethos, topos, and audience, can both illuminate, and exemplify the need for a rhetorical critique of "critical and aesthetic discourses for talking about communication, textuality, and the arts" (p. 7). The discussion moves patiently and informatively through discourses about ideology and the nation state, agency, the subject, recent studies of artificial intelligence and computing, hypertext models of literary texts, "scientific" discourse studies and linguistic poetics, feminist critiques of science, and feminist aesthetics. Hunter weaves rhetoric into the methods and languages of these disciplines with subtlety and common sense; readers will find in each chapter an up to date review of current critical theory in the fields reviewed. Another major accomplishment of the study as a whole is a collateral appraisal of the languages and epistemologies, stated and unstated, that each field employs. The comparison is no easy task, particularly since the fields under scrutiny have been prominent advocates of critiquing knowledge, understood as comprehension of the "real" 114 RHETORICA by subjects capable of knowing, and of representing their knowledge in representational, informative texts. This relentless critique of knowledge and language in recent theory, Hunter asserts, has resulted in a barrage of pluralisms and relativisms, each with its own canonical ideology. Hunter teases out different versions of an "essentialist-relativist" standoff that has emerged again and again among recent ideological constructions of plurality (pp. 6-7). In characterizing many of these problems Hunter is not alone; she will find readers welcoming her positions. What makes her discussion original and especially valuable is the way in which she brings to this impasse several richly drawn definitions of rhetoric. Because of its historical and conceptual self awareness as "inexorably different to the real world" in any literal or scientific sense, rhetoric can help construct an analysis of stance which will position the discourses of the disciplines historically, politically, and socially (p. 6). The prospect that rhetoric may be able to integrate and amplify a number of critical discourses about language that are currently bogged down in confessing their own impossibility and meaninglessness is a welcome vision. Hunter's exposition of the ethical and epistemological adjustments rhetoric could provide to contemporary critical discourses is also an anatomy of the past and present wealth that resides in rhetorical studies that continue to be marginalized by so many fields. The chapters are arranged by discipline: contemporary studies of the ideologies of nation-states, studies of artificial intelligence and computing applications within the humanities, hypertext methodologies, feminist critiques of science, and feminist critiques of aesthetics. Hunter's analysis establishes an important parallelism: a lack of rhetorical self awareness has hampered the discussion of the subject and of agency, of intelligence and knowledge, of the ethics of critical discourses visa -vis their contexts and audiences. Hunter defines her overall goal as "a critique of critical and aesthetic discourses for talking about communication, textuality, and the arts" (p. 7). The essentialistrelativist standoff that Hunter seeks to redress has locked many branches of discourse studies, including linguistics, artificial intelligence, computing, rhetoric and poetics, into methodologies that, somewhat oddly, base social and political tolerance for all Reviews 115 discursive practices upon scientific models of neutral description and quantitative analysis. Somehow, according to many of these models, discourses are produced by "the culture" or by "language". Alternatively, we find accusations of "essentialism" or "enlightenment humanism" hurled at any and all references to the subject, to agency, to an ethnic...
November 1999
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Research Article| November 01 1999 Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period, 330 B.C. - A.D. 400 Stanley E. Porter ed. Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period, 330 B.C. - A.D. 400 (Leiden: Brill, 1997) xv + 901 pp. Laurent Pernot Laurent Pernot CARRA, Université des Scinces Humaines de Strasbourg, 14, rue René Descartes, 67804 Strasbourg Cedex, France. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1999) 17 (4): 433–437. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1999.17.4.433 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Laurent Pernot; Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period, 330 B.C. - A.D. 400. Rhetorica 1 November 1999; 17 (4): 433–437. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1999.17.4.433 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. Copyright 1999, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1999 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
September 1999
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Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period, 330 B.C.-A.D. 400 ed. by Stanley E. Porter ↗
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Reviews Stanley E. Porter ed., Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period, 330 B.C. - A.D. 400 (Leiden: Brill, 1997) xv + 901 pp. Ce fort volume, d'une présentation typographique impeccable, se veut un ouvrage de référence sur la rhétorique antique, destiné principalement aux lecteurs anglophones. Il réunit 29 contributions, réparties en trois groupes, et toutes munies de bibliographies détaillées. La première partie (Rhetoric Defined) commence par un survol de l'histoire de la rhétorique antique confié à G. A. Kennedy: à tout seigneur tout honneur. Puis sont étudiés les grands secteurs de la doctrine: "The Genres of Rhetoric" (G. A. Kennedy), "Arrangement" (W. Wuellner), "Invention" (M. Heath), "Style" (G. O. Rowe), "Delivery and Memory" (T. O. Olbricht). Sur chacun de ces sujets, les auteurs s'efforcent de résumer les principales indications données par les théoriciens grecs et latins. On trouvera donc ici de solides aide-mémoires consacrées aux grandes divisions et classifications de la rhétorique antique. Le chapitre sur l'invention m'a paru spécialement original et éclairant, dans la mesure où il décrit le processus de Vinventio à partir d'un exemple précis et avec un grand recul méthodologique. La deuxième partie (Rhetoric in Practice) est plus curieuse. On était en droit d'attendre une étude de la pratique oratoire, parallèle à l'étude de la théorie qui fait l'objet de la première partie. Mais en réalité on a affaire à une succession de chapitres centrés sur les principaux genres littéraires et consacrés aux rapports de ces genres avec la rhétorique: "The Epistle" (J. T. Reed), "Philosophical Prose" (D. M. Schenkeveld), "Historical Prose" (S. Rebenich), "Poetry and Rhetoric" (R. Webb), "Biography" (R. A. Burridge), "Oratory and Declamation" (D. H. Berry - M. Heath), "Homily and Panegyrical Sermon" (F. Siegert), "The Rhetoric of Romance" (R. F. Hock), "Apocalyptic and 433 434 RHETORICA Prophétie Literature" (J. M. Knight), "Drama and Rhetoric" (R. Scodel). Ceci pose un problème de fond, qui mérite qu'on s'y arrête. Il suffit de lire cette liste de chapitres pour être frappé par une anomalie: "Oratory and Déclamation" est présenté comme un secteur parmi d'autres, enfoui au milieu du livre, dont les rapports avec la rhétorique ne seraient pas plus étroits que ceux de la philosophie ou du roman. En d'autres termes, le mot "rhétorique" est pris dans ce volume au sens de: théorie rhétorique, corps de doctrine, ensemble de cadres d'invention et de procédés d'écriture dont l'influence peut s'exercer sur n'importe quel texte, et par conséquent la pratique oratoire ne se voit reconnaître aucun statut particulier. L'inconvénient de cette conception est de rompre le lien très fort qui unit, dans l'Antiquité, la théorie et la pratique du discours. Pour les Grecs et les Romains, la pratique oratoire (sous ses multiples formes d'exercice scolaire et de discours public) faisait elle-même partie de la rhétorique. Il n'est donc pas surprenant que les auteurs du chapitre sur "Oratory and Déclamation" s'avouent embarrassés. Ils reconnaissent que "rhetoric" and "oratory" ont entretenu une relation essentielle, "symbiotic", tout au long de l'Antiquité (p. 393), mais se voient forcés, faute de place, de renoncer à ce qui serait le véritable sujet (une étude de l'éloquence antique), pour se contenter de brèves illustrations. Et voilà pourquoi les historiens sont plus longuement traités que les orateurs, ou la collection des Panegyrici Latini passée sous silence alors qu'on lit des pages entières sur Bion de Borysthène et Chariton, auteurs intéressants en eux-mêmes, certes, mais dont l'importance est bien moindre pour l'histoire de la rhétorique. On remarque également que la déclamation fait l'objet d'un traitement contradictoire à deux moments du livre: dans le chapitre sur "Oratory and Déclamation" (pp. 406 sqq.), il est question des rapports de la déclamation avec la rhétorique, tandis que...
August 1999
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Abstract: The later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries in Italy saw a marked new interest in the study of Ciceronian rhetorical theory, in both Latin and vernacular contexts. This reflects the increasing prominence within the civic culture of the Italian communes of practices of oral and adversarial rhetoric which the dominant instrument of rhetorical instruction in this period, the ars dictaminis, was ill-equipped to teach. While the utility of the strategies of argument taught by Roman rhetorical theory was widely recognised in this period, the ethical attitudes implicit in that theory represented a challenge to prevailing Christian constructions of the moral decorum of speech. Classical rhetorical theory may thus be seen to have constituted a destabilising presence within late medieval ethical discourse: a situation which presisted, to some extent, even after the political and cultural changes of the later Trecento had displaced rhetoric in Italy from a primary to a secondary, literary and educational, role.
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Short Reviews: Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Democratic Athens, by Harvey Yunis, Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition, by Janet M. Atwill, Two Greek Rhetorical Treatises from the Roman Empire: Introduction, Text, and Translation of the Arts of Rhetoric Attributed to Anonymous Seguerianus and to Apsines of Gadara, by Mervin R. Dilts and George A. Kennedy, Language and Society in Early Modern England, by Vivian Salmon, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, by Quentin Skinner and Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, by Alan G Gross and William M. Keith ↗
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Research Article| August 01 1999 Short Reviews: Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Democratic Athens, by Harvey Yunis, Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition, by Janet M. Atwill, Two Greek Rhetorical Treatises from the Roman Empire: Introduction, Text, and Translation of the Arts of Rhetoric Attributed to Anonymous Seguerianus and to Apsines of Gadara, by Mervin R. Dilts and George A. Kennedy, Language and Society in Early Modern England, by Vivian Salmon, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, by Quentin Skinner and Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, by Alan G Gross and William M. Keith Harvey Yunis,Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Democratic Athens (Ithaca, NY: Comell University Press, 1996) xv + 316pp.Janet M. Atwill,Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998) 265pp.Mervin R. Dilts and George A. Kennedy eds. Two Greek Rhetorical Treatises from the Roman Empire: Introduction, Text, and Translation of the Arts of Rhetoric Attributed to Anonymous Seguerianus and to Apsines of Gadara, Mnemosyne Supplement 168 (Leiden: E. J. Brill 1997) xxvii + 249 pp.Vivian Salmon,Language and Society in Early Modern England (The Netherlands: John Benjamfris, 1996) 276 pp.Quentin Skinner,Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) xvi + 477 pp.Alan G Gross and William M. Keith eds. Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997) 371 pp. Michael Svoboda, Michael Svoboda C/O The Joanne Rockwell Memorial House, 1910 E. Jefferson Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21205, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar James Fredal, James Fredal Department of English, 164 W. 17th Avenue, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar John T. Kirby, John T. Kirby Program in Comparative Literature, Purdue University, SC 1354, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Linda C. Mitchell, Linda C. Mitchell Department of English, One Washington Square, San Jose State University, San Jose, California 95192-0090, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Wade Williams, Wade Williams Department of English, The University of Puget Sound, 1500 North Warner, Tacoma, Washington 98416, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Judy Z Segal Judy Z Segal Department of English, University of British Columbia, #397-1873 East Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia, V6T1Z1, Canada Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1999) 17 (3): 331–346. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1999.17.3.331 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Michael Svoboda, James Fredal, John T. Kirby, Linda C. Mitchell, Wade Williams, Judy Z Segal; Short Reviews: Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Democratic Athens, by Harvey Yunis, Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition, by Janet M. Atwill, Two Greek Rhetorical Treatises from the Roman Empire: Introduction, Text, and Translation of the Arts of Rhetoric Attributed to Anonymous Seguerianus and to Apsines of Gadara, by Mervin R. Dilts and George A. Kennedy, Language and Society in Early Modern England, by Vivian Salmon, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, by Quentin Skinner and Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, by Alan G Gross and William M. Keith. Rhetorica 1 August 1999; 17 (3): 331–346. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1999.17.3.331 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 Copyright 1999, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1999 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
June 1999
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Short Reviews Harvey Yunis, Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Democratic Athens (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996) xv + 316pp. In methodological reflections written near the end of his career (and published in English translation as On Interpretation), the German classicist August Boeckh articulated a number of hermeneutic principles, including two very simple dicta. First, a good interpretation will explain as much of the text as possible. And, second, a good interpretation will make the text compelling on the terms of its own time. Judged on these two criteria, Taming Democracy by Harvey Yunis offers a very good interpretation of Plato on political rhetoric. Though Plato is not the only subject of Taming Democracy, he is at the center of this study of models of political rhetoric in democratic Athens: a study that runs from the theatrical responses to the Peloponnesian War of Aristophanes and Euripides, to Thucydides' self-conscious history, to Plato's evolving views, to Demosthenes' oratorical resistance to Philip of Macedon's imperial encroachments. As an interpreter of Plato on rhetoric, Yunis immediately stands out for his willingness to move beyond the two-piece puzzle posed by the Gorgias and the Phaedrus. To his interpretations of these essential dialogues Yunis adds some reflections on the Apology and the Republic and, in a nearly unprecedented move, a detailed assessment of the rhetorical theory implied by the "persuasive preambles" Plato introduces in his Laws. Looking at this larger set enables Yunis to conclude, "The philosophical distance that Plato has traveled from the bitter rejection of rhetoric in the Gorgias to the creation of a new rhetorical genre of legal-political discourse in the Laws is immense" (p. 235). Yunis then makes this philosophical journey historically compelling by setting it against the rise and fall and rise of the 331 332 RHETORICA Athenian empire. Yunis suggests that Athens' democracy depended in subtle ways on its imperial ambitions. The navy that gave the masses, the poorer classes, an important civic role to play also built for Athens an empire. And that empire brought revenues to Athens, revenues that provided the livelihoods for many of these poorer citizens. Thus, domestic harmony in Athens depended on foreign hegemony, even tyranny. Taming Democracy is an analysis of late fifth and early-mid fourth century thinkers who, like Plato, felt compelled to address the political questions raised by Athens' imperial history. "Athens' miserable defeat in the Peloponnesian War invited a réévaluation of its democracy in general and democratic rhetoric in particular" (p. 32). Their answers, according to Yunis, hinged on whether they believed that rhetoric could be instructive, whether they thought the rhetores—the most accomplished speakers in the assembly—could tame the demos, the public, by teaching it to deliberate wisely through mass political discourse. In Thucydides' work Pericles is presented as the exemplary rhetor because he had the ability and the moral will to teach the Athenians as he led them. The rhetores who arose after Pericles lacked his abilities and his character. They pandered to the Athenians' worst impulses and thus, Thucydides implies, led Athens to its ruin. The Gorgias, Yunis argues, is Plato's response to Thucydides' portrayal of Pericles. Unlike Thucydides who gloried in Athens' power, Plato regarded Athens' imperial ambitions as inherently corrupting. The Gorgias is set in Athens at its zenith; but the characters and historical references of this dialogue about rhetoric and power serve to remind the alert reader that the city will soon be led, by a speech, into the disastrous folly of the Sicilian expedition and, thereby, to the collapse of its empire. This is an extraordinarily provocative book. It is not without its weaknesses, however. First, though other scholars have acknowledged the echoes and parallels between the two authors, they have stopped short of the suggestion that Plato "read" Thucydides. Yunis needs to provide additional warrants for his more assertive position. Second, Yunis actually overlooks one supporting line of evidence in this regard: the paradoxical place of shame in Thucydides and its prominence in the Gorgias. Third, Reviews 333 Yunis distorts the Phaedrus by bending it too harshly to his thesis. The setting of the dialogue and the focal relationship of the...
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Intertextuality is not only a literary but also a rhetorical phenomenon. Though largely neglected by modern scholarship, rhetorical intertextuality nevertheless looks back on a long tradition in print and communicative practice. Its manifestations are above all the commonplaces (koinoi topoi, loci communes) which represent not only abstract sedes argumentorum but also concrete formulae taken from pre-texts, literary and non-literary ones, that offer themselves for reemployment in texts of a derivative kind, in “littérature au second degré” (Genette) or, metaphorically speaking, in second-hand literature. The following aspects of the commonplaces deserve closer attention: their place (of publication), their re-cognition, their disposition, their genres, their multi- and intermediality, and their normativity. These facets constitute a complex spectrum of an intertextual rhetoric leading up to an “interrhetoric” which makes possible the recognition and analysis of such rhetorical phenomena as transcend the limits of a single text and of a single (e.g. verbal) sign-system.
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Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science ed. by Alan G Gross and William M. Keith ↗
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Reviews 343 within this conventional context. "What this means in practice", Skinner explains, "is that I treat Hobbes's claims about scientia civilis not simply as propositions but as moves in an argument. I try to indicate what traditions he reacts against, what lines of argument he takes up, what changes he introduces into existing debates" (p. 8). While Skinner's method has occasioned much debate, culminating in a collection of essays entitled Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (1988), historians of rhetoric, who themselves attempt to understand texts within larger contexts, should welcome the attention paid to questions of intention, meaning, and language. Meticulously researched, Skinner's study of Hobbes and the rhetorical culture of Tudor England is a welcome contribution to histories such as Victoria Kahn's Machiavellian Rhetoric and Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment. Together, these studies clarify the complex interplay between rhetorical and political traditions in early modem Europe. WADE WILLIAMS The University ofPuget Sound Alan G Gross and William M. Keith eds, Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997) 371 pp. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar writes "The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science", the lead essay in this volume—its "Provocations"—and the rest of Rhetorical Hermeneutics is a collection of "Dissensions", "Extensions" and "reflections", the last including a response to respondents by Gaonkar. So the book is the perfect rhetorical study. It is utterly dialogic; Gaonkar's claims are all tested on an audience of distinguished rhetorical theorists and rhetoricians of science: John Angus Campbell, Thomas Farrell, Steve Fuller, Alan Gross, James Jasinski, David Kaufer, William Keith, Andrew King, Michael Leff, Deirdre McCloskey, Carolyn Miller and Charles Willard. The book has an 344 RHETORICA excellent cast—and a sometimes argumentative one (McCloskey writes that the philosophical warrants for Gaonkar's case against a ubiquitous rhetoric themselves warrant the question, "So what?", p. 107); it also has a very worthy project. The central question of Rhetorical Hermeneutics is this: can a theory of production be usefully, and without distortion, transformed into a theory of interpretation? This question sponsors others—for example, does the "thinness" of rhetorical theory (the paucity of constraints on its terms of use) make it so easy to spread, as it were (rhetoric is the universal hermeneutic) as to weaken the plausibility of rhetoric altogether (what distinguishes rhetoric as an interpretive program?)? Gaonkar answers his own questions in part by evoking the work in rhetoric of science of John Angus Campbell, Alan Gross, and Lawrence Prelli. Campbell and Gross respond. Campbell, Gaonkar finds, is mired in a problem of agency ("refuses to let go of an image of Darwin as the rhetorical superstar", p. 49); Gross is only successful as a rhetorical critic to the extent that he does not practice the neoAristotelianism he proposes; Prelli, among other questionable practices, seems to be "probing into the 'rhetorical unconscious'" of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (p. 73). So Gaonkar describes problems in the house of rhetoric of science; he also draws attention not only to the problematic relation of rhetorical criticism to other criticisms, but also to the "embattled" relation of Rhetoric of Science—as a discipline—to both rhetorical studies and science studies. Gross and Keith's design and authoritative editing shape a volume which deserves consideration at a number of levels: What are possible answers to questions raised? What can be said about the questions qua questions? Why does rhetoric ask so many questions about itself anyway? The book not only deserves consideration at these levels; it also enables it. Fuller writes, for example, "The more that rhetoric of science looks like classical rhetoric, the less exciting its interpretations seem...[T]he more that rhetoric of science strays from classical sources, and the more provocative its readings become, the more interchangeable its methods seem with those used by sociologists and critical theorists" (p. 279). Gross writes, "The current attitude of Reviews 345 historians and philosophers oscillates between increased need to take a rhetorical point of view into consideration and an occasional hostility to the possibility of rhetorical analysis" (p. 146). With such comment, the authors invite readers to participate...
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Reviews 341 Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) xvi + 477 pp. More than one historian has criticized the "history of ideas" approach: too many ideas and not enough history. Over the past twenty years, Quentin Skinner, along with fellow historians John Dunn and J. G. A. Pocock, has attempted to correct this methodological bias by developing a contextualist approach to history. The result has been a new approach to the history of ideas and a growing body of scholarship that foregrounds rhetoric as both an intellectual tradition and as a method by which to study ideas in history. In his first major work, the two volume The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, (1978), Skinner began his analysis with an account of how the study of rhetoric in the Italian universities gave rise to the Republican civic ideology that would be so important in the political and religious revolutions in Europe (and America) between 1500 and 1800. In his latest book, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, Skinner continues these inquiries and proposes a revisionist reading of Hobbes's civic and moral philosophy; one that positions it squarely within the humanist tradition of education in Renaissance England. Historians have previously understood Hobbes's intellectual development as paralleling the larger shift from humanism to science in seventeenth century European intellectual culture. Hobbes's earlier works, including his translations of Thucydides's Histories (1629) and his abridgment of Aristotle's Art of Rhetoric (1637), evidence his humanist phase. However, like Descartes and other philosophers looking for epistemological certainty in the seventeenth century, Hobbes loses faith in the humanistic rhetorical training of his youth and applies geometrical models to moral reasoning in his Elements ofLaw and De Give, both published in the early 1640s. Skinner argues that beginning about 1650, however, Hobbes began to doubt the possibility of constructing a science of virtue and vice. Contemplating the Leviathan, Hobbes began to ask himself, "If the findings of civil science possess no inherent power to convince, how can we hope to empower them?" (p. 351). This was, of course, the same question that 342 RHETORICA classical and Renaissance rhetoricians had addressed. Hobbes found the answer to this question, Skinner contends, in rhetoricians such as Cicero and Quintilian who had argued that the dictates of ratio, or demonstrative moral reasoning, needed to be empowered by the "moving force of eloquentia" (p. 351). Thus, in the Leviathan (1651) Hobbes returned to the humanist training of his youth, arguing that eloquence is an indispensable partner to reason in the maintenance of the commonwealth. Skinner divides his book into two parts: "Classical Eloquence in Renaissance England" and "Hobbes and the Idea of a Civil Science." The first part, which can stand on its own, exhaustively reconstructs the place of classical rhetoric in the Tudor education of Hobbes's youth. The second part situates the development of Hobbes's philosophical thought in the educational context of English humanism delineated in the first part, examining Hobbes's initial enthusiasm for, later rejection of, and ultimate return to both the values and strategies of humanist rhetoric. Even if historians are not as interested in the second half of the book, Skinner has provided a great service to those interested in both classical and Renaissance rhetoric by surveying "the teaching of rhetoric in the grammar schools...and more broadly the place of the ars rhetorica in Tudor political argument" (p. 211). Historians of rhetoric in all periods will also be interested in Skinner's historiographical approach. Along with Pocock and Dunn, Skinner's work defines a specific approach to the history of ideas, known as "Cambridge contextualism," which he summarizes as "trying to place [historical] texts within [historical] contexts...to identify what their authors were doing in writing them" (p. 7). Following the lead of Ludwig Wittengenstein and later speech act theorists like John Austin, Skinner and other Cambridge contextualists separate the locutionary (propositional) and illocutionary (rhetorical) dimensions of language. They argue that to situate a text in context and understand its historical meaning, historians need to examine not only the sense and reference of words—what the author is saying—but...
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RHETORICA 338 for most individual readers. I am happy to report that the International Sales Manager of Brill subsequently wrote to me to say that, as a result of my review, the cost of those books was being reduced to 90.00 dollars each. DK is still expensive, but much less so than these others were; and where a bilingual edition is involved, it is understandable that overhead costs would be higher. And, once the purchase is made, the reader may luxuriate in the sumptuous quality of a Brill edition. JOHN T. KIRBY Purdue University Vivian Salmon, Language and Society in Early Modern England (The Netherlands: John Benjamins, 1996) 276 pp. The twelve essays reprinted in this collection demonstrate a variety of approaches to, and treatments of, the topics of language and society in Early Modern England. The subjects range from language concerns of the sixteenth-century England, to the development of female rhetoric by figures such as Bathsua Makin, to the discussion of the actual use of language in a specific socio political context, such as the early Anglican church. Although Salmon writes from a linguist's perspective, her well-researched material allows the reader to place rhetoric within a broader context. Her descriptions of historical figures and their contributions are well defined, especially in relation to their connections to logic, rhetoric, and grammar. She includes social, historical, religious, and political details that influenced linguistics and rhetoric. Her theory is balanced nicely with concrete examples, such as enhancing foreign language instruction by the rhetorical considerations of gesture and tone. Salmon looks at the connection between pronunciation and rhetoric, claiming that "sounds changed in accordance with certain figures of rhetoric, for example, prosthesis, apharaesis, epenthesis, and syncope" (p. 8). Other figures, she notes, cautiously retain the classification of sound changes by reference Reviews 339 to rhetorical figures" (p. 8). She also examines challenging issues in translating the Bible, teaching the native tongue to foreigners, and finding the Adamic language. In chapter one Salmon emphasizes the rhetorical elements of syntax. She discusses the seventeenth-century belief that meaning is a nonverbal concept in the mind. Some elements of that concept might remain unexpressed in speech, or even actively "suppressed". Priscian used the term "subaudiri" to refer to sentence elements that are "understood" but not spoken; Salmon notes that traditional rhetoric came to terms with this view by distinguishing between simple and rhetorical syntax, a distinction that was familiar to seventeenth-century scholarship (p. 17). Salmon traces this rhetorical concern with syntax through Gill, Wilkins, Linacre, Sanctius, Lancelot, Cooper, Lane, and Harris. Salmon spends several chapters focusing on the power of words. Chapter three is constructed on three main points: the natural or conventional origin of words (Platonic/Aristolian debate, Socrates, and Hermogenes); the status and power of words; and the meaning of translation, especially when translating the Holy Scriptures. Chapter four talks about language properly to be employed in the liturgy and sacred books of the church. More specifically, Salmon mentions the developments of two kinds of sermons: the "typical Protestant type of Hugh Latimer and Laurence Chaderton that was plain and colloquial" (. 94); the other type was "typical of High Church divines influenced by the rhetorical style of much of sixteenth-century poetry and prose, and in the seventeenth century in the witty and metaphysical style of John Donne, directed at more sophisticated hearers" (pp. 94-95). In chapter five Salmon notes that some seventeenth-century authors like Wilkins argued for a plain writing style because congregations had difficulty understanding the highly rhetorical style adopted by Anglican preachers in the later sixteenth century (p. 103). Bedell was also convinced that his Protestant congregation got lost in the incomprehensible vernacular and the use of rhetorical and ambiguous language (p. 101). Of significance to rhetoricians is chapter six, "Wh- and Yes/No Questions: Charles Butler's Grammar (1633)". Butler's work influenced eighteenth-century rhetorical grammarians like 340 RHETORICA John Walker (1785) who in turn influenced the training of elocutionists. Salmon observes that previous grammarians placed "question" in a section on syntax, but that Butler was the first scholar to place "question" in a chapter on punctuation where he looked at "tone...
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Two Greek Rhetorical Treatises from the Roman Empire: Introduction, Text, and Translation of the Arts of Rhetoric Attributed to Anonymous Seguerianus and to Apsines of Gadara ed. by Mervin R. Dilts and George A. Kennedy ↗
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Reviews 335 begins. And she never fully answers the question posed by the structure of the book. How does a revised understanding of rhetoric as an "art of intervention" help us to rethink current humanities institutions, canons, or curricula? The title and structure of the work invite us to expect some lines of inquiry that don't appear. Anyone looking for specific applications of rhetoric as techne to an emancipatory or interventionist pedagogy might be disappointed. But those looking for careful readings, particularly of Aristotle—in the Rhetoric and other works like the Analytics and the Nicomachean Ethics—that bear upon the relations between theoretical, practical and productive arts will be well repaid. Atwill shows the incommensurability in Aristotle between theory, whose end is static contemplation, and rhetoric (like all techne) whose end is realized only in the exchange between rhetor and audience. She is careful not to overstate the emancipatory goals of Protagoras or Isocrates, who were no more interested in redistributing political power or cultural capital than was Plato. And her focus on this ancient debate between theoria and techne helps us to see current debates within the humanities, as well as well-known ancient texts, in a new light. JAMES FREDAL The Ohio State University Mervin R. Dilts and George A. Kennedy eds, Two Greek Rhetorical Treatises from the Roman Empire: Introduction, Text, and Translation of the Arts of Rhetoric Attributed to Anonymous Seguerianus and to Apsines of Gadara, Mnemosyne Supplement 168 (Leiden: E. J. Brill 1997) xxvii + 249 pp. Prior to this new book by Dilts & Kennedy (hereafter DK), the most satisfactory scholarly edition of either the Anonymous Seguerianus (AS) or Apsines was to be found in the Rhetores Graeci of Spengel/Hammer (Leipzig: Teubner 1894). What we have now is a superb presentation of both treatises, in a carefully edited 336 RHETORICA Greek text furnished with critical apparatus, an accurate en face translation, and a running commentary. DK also provide historical and textual introductions and a bibliography. There is something for everyone here: the philologist will spend many happy hours burrowing into the extensive apparatus criticus; the Greekless reader may read the treatises in modern English translations; and the rhetorical theorist will find much to ponder, in both text and comments. Readers of Kennedy's earlier work will already know about these ancient treatises. Kennedy had signaled the importance of both, as early as The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World (1972), and again in Greek Rhetoric under Christian Emperors (1983) and A New History of Classical Rhetoric (1994). These late-antique Greek treatises form part of the didactic tradition of declamation cultivated in the Second Sophistic. Both begin by demonstrating allegiance to what Solmsen labeled the moria logou tradition; that is, their disposition of the material is based on the parts of the oration: proem, narration, pisteis or proofs, and epilogue.1 This in fact is a fair skeletal outline of the AS, which does, however, show some Aristotelian and Stoic influence as well. The treatise is especially valuable as a compendium of the work of various theorists of the period, including Alexander son of Numenius, [?Aelius] Harpocration, the followers of Apollodorus of Pergamum, and one Neocles. The AS is of course anonymous, but we know2 something more about the author of the second treatise in DK. Valerius Apsines of Gadara is praised by Philostratus (2.628), and may be dated to the late second/early third century CE. His treatise, more than the AS, is intended specifically for the instruction of declamation. His list of the moria logou is more elaborate than that in the AS, as it includes proem, prokatastasis (preparation for the proof), narration, enthymemes, kephalaia ("headings"), and epilogue. The Greek texts in DK are superbly careful and accurate. It is an apt adjudication of their quality, in fact, to say that they are a Friedrich Solmsen, The Aristotelian Tradition in Ancient Rhetoric", American Journal ofPhilology 62 (1941) pp. 35-50,169-190. Or thought we knew: for a dissenting voice see Malcolm Heath, "Apsines and Pseudo-Apsines", American Journal ofPhilology 119 (1998) pp. 89-111. Reviews 337 significant improvement over the already good texts of Spengel/Hammer. Fresh manuscript...
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The later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries in Italy saw a marked new interest in the study of Ciceronian rhetorical theory, in both Latin and vernacular contexts. This reflects the increasing prominence within the civic culture of the Italian communes of practices of oral and adversarial rhetoric which the dominant instrument of rhetorical instruction in this period, the ars dictaminis, was ill-equipped to teach. While the utility of the strategies of argument taught by Roman rhetorical theory was widely recognised in this period, the ethical attitudes implicit in that theory represented a challenge to prevailing Christian constructions of the moral decorum of speech. Classical rhetorical theory may thus be seen to have constituted a destabilising presence within late medieval ethical discourse: a situation which presisted, to some extent, even after the political and cultural changes of the later Trecento had displaced rhetoric in Italy from a primary to a secondary, literary and educational, role.
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Reviews 333 Yunis distorts the Phaedrus by bending it too harshly to his thesis. The setting of the dialogue and the focal relationship of the lovers both argue, in my view, against an endorsement of political discourse. Yunis' suggestion that the demos can be treated as having a single soul and, thus, as subject to the dialogue's rhetorical psychology strikes me as akin to pious efforts to allegorize The Song of Solomon. Nevertheless, by interpreting Plato in the dramatic political context of his time, Yunis succeeds in making Plato's dialogues on rhetoric more compelling objects of study for our time. I recommend the book highly. MICHAEL SVOBODA The Pennsylvania State University Janet M. Atwill, Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998) 265pp. Following Achilles' death near the end of the Trojan War, the chieftains held a debate to determine whether Odysseus or Ajax should win his armor. Ajax claimed the armor based not only on his legendary strength, but on his strength of character, his steadfast loyalty, bravery and self-control in battle. He was governed by a proper sense of shame and honor, corresponding to a code of behavior that guaranteed the propriety of his actions. Odysseus, by contrast, used shameless tricks and deceptions to defeat his enemies, even allowing his slaves to beat him so that, dressed in rags, he could sneak behind the walls of Troy, accomplishing in one night what the entire Achaean army couldn't accomplish in ten years. He makes the weaker appear to be the stronger. Odysseus wins the armor, for good or ill, but the contest represented by constant Ajax and wily Odysseus would continue to saturate ancient Greek public discourse. Are skills at trickery, deception and craft to be valued for their effectiveness, or despised for their dangers? Ought rhetoric to reproduce stable, normative subjects governed by traditional conventions of 334 RHETORICA conduct (like Ajax)? Or does it rather teach crafty arts of social intervention through cunning self-reformation answerable only to the specific exigencies of context and advantage (like Odysseus)? In Rhetoric Reclaimed, Margaret Atwill challenges us to rethink the question of techne, not only in terms of Greek rhetoric, but in terms of contemporary liberal arts education. For Atwill, the liberal arts tradition has long been committed to reproducing normative subjects defined in terms of a universal human "nature", in terms of a foundationalist faith in objective knowledge, and of a reductive scale of value whose end is the acquisition of knowledge. These models of subjectivity, knowledge and value, argues Atwill, coalesce to form what is now termed "the humanities", whose business "is not so much the dissemination of knowledge or competencies as it is the production of a particular 'kind' of subject" (p. 18). This educational paradigm naturalizes the contingent, universalizes the particular, and privatizes the public: claims by now familiar to students of various current postmoderisms. But despite its deformation into a theoretical discipline by scholars like Plato and, later, Grimaldi and Cope, rhetoric was always more than just a tool for normative subject formation. It was in the hands of Protagoras, Isocrates and Aristotle a productive art (a techne) of "seizing the advantage", of social and political intervention, of creating possibilities and transforming existing social structures (a la Odysseus). Atwill's goal is to rethink current classroom goals and methods within the humanities by "reclaiming" rhetoric; to ask "What forums are available and what must be invented to enable the kind of political agency that was once the primary aim of rhetorical instruction?" (p. 210). In her approach to this question, Atwill discusses a wide variety of texts, from Hesiod to Aristotle, unpacking the meaning of techne and rhetoric's place as productive art within that tradition. Atwill develops terms like techne in important ways, but avoids connecting the discussion to related terms (like metis—cunning intelligence, hexis, or habitus all terms used by Bourdieu, upon whom she relies). She does not pursue the important subjectivity/knowledge/value equation with which she Reviews 335 begins. And she never fully answers the question posed by the structure of the book. How does a revised understanding of rhetoric as an...
May 1999
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Abstract: The understanding of free speech was, from fifth century Athens onwards, rhetorically coloured, and Greek uses of parrhesia and the definitions of licentia later set out in Roman handbooks are highly influential to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English works on rhetoric and political advice. Consequently, discussions of liberty of speech in Elizabethan and Jacobean England can often be understood best if read with an eye to the conditions of deliberative rhetoric. Authors of rhetorical works in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were engaged in a complicated relationship of negotiation with sometimes apparentiy contradictory traditions when they defined parrhesia. Both traditions were used by speakers and writers concerned find ways of offering frank counsel to their superiors in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
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Research Article| May 01 1999 Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric Stephen D. O'Leary,Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, ix + 314 pp. David S. Cunningham David S. Cunningham Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, Evanston, Illinois 60201, USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1999) 17 (2): 233–238. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1999.17.2.233 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 David S. Cunningham; Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric. Rhetorica 1 May 1999; 17 (2): 233–238. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1999.17.2.233 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. Copyright 1999, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1999 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
March 1999
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Reviews 227 political pessimism of Cicero's late letters is rhetorically defined, I would argue, as a failure in the discourse of the courts and the senate; thus it is not simply the melancholy of the collapse of the Roman republic, but Cicero's description, rhetorically sensitive, that Vico has appropriated. Finally, Goetsch's book should, perhaps, not be judged as a contribution to the history of rhetoric, but as an idiosyncratic use of the history of rhetoric to give an account of a major Early Modem figure who has fared badly in the standard histories of philosophy, dominated by the philosophical dévotion to methods of logical rigor. It is to Goetsch's credit as a historian of philosophy that he regards a sympathetic reading of the rhetorical tradition as essential to his task. And, to his great credit, Goetsch did not take the "rhetorical turn" of much contemporary inquiry, which tends, using the mantra "form is content", to ignore the "content" of the rhetorical tradition in favor if identifying piecemeal formal figurative tactics, a reading of the text reduced to a list of tropes. Nancy S. Struever Johns Hopkins University Pascal Quignard, Rhétorique spéculative (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1995) 218pp. Ce livre fort savant n'est pas un "ouvrage à caractère scientifique": au lieu de bibliographie, notes et index, on n'y trouvera qu'allusions, sous-entendus et masques. Cela ne veut pas direqu'il n'intéresse pas l'historien de la rhétorique. Au Contraire, cet ouvrage à caractère littéraire—mais pour Pascal Quignard le littéraire n'est autre que la rhétorique écrite—intéresse à la fois l'histoire, la philosophie et la modernité de la rhétorique. Car c'est à la fois l'inventaire, la Défense et l'Illustration de cette "tradition lettrée anti-philosophique qui court sur toute l'histoire occidentale dès l'invention de la philosophie", "tradition ancienne, marginale, récalcitrante, persécutée, pour laquelle la lettre du langage doit 228 RHETORICA être prise à la littera" et que l'auteur nomme "rhétorique spéculative". Philosophe de formation, Pascal Quignard (né en 1948) n'est pas un universitaire, mais un musicien, un romancier et un essayiste, d'une grande originalité dans les trois domaines, surtout les deux derniers, en sorte qu'il est le plus difficile à classer des auteurs français contemporains; la meilleure approximation serait de l'inclure dans la mouvance post moderne, comme le fait une thèse récente.3 Certainement, il préférerait être considéré comme ante-moderne: n'a-t-il pas un jour, inversant le mot de Stendhal, souhaité être lu au XVIIe siècle? Violoncelliste et spécialiste de musique baroque, il est aussi l'auteur de plusieurs romans—dont Tous les Matins du Monde, que le cinéma a rendu particulièrement célèbre. Ayant "toujours aimé les choses désavouées", il a traduit YAlexandra de Lycophron et écrit une étude sur la Délie de Maurice Scève,4 deux œuvres réputées particulièrement hermétiques. C'est peut-être ce goût pour les temps et les œuvres restés en marge de l'Histoire qui l'a conduit d'abord à évoquer l'atmosphère de l'Antiquité tardive dans une œuvre de fiction, Les Tablettes de buis d'Apronenia Avitia, puis à traduire et à étudier l'étonnant rhéteur du Ier siècle Albusius Silus,5 enfin à inventer le courant qui donne son titre à l'ouvrage dont nous rendons compte ici. Rhétorique spéculative forme avec La haine de la musique, paru ultétieurement, un nouvel ensemble de Petits Traités, genre de prédilection imaginé par Pascal Quignard: il en avait précédemment publié cinquante-six,6 beaucoup (par exemple Un lipogramme d'Appius Claudius ou Longin) sinon tous relevant déjà de la rhétorique spéculative. L'ouvrage dont nous rendons compte comprend, outre un Minuscule traité sur les Petits traités d'un intérêt anecdotique, cinq Traités: Fronton, La langue latine, De deo abscondito, Sur Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Gradus. Les trois premiers seront les plus intéressants pour...
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Abstract
The understanding of free speech was, from fifth century Athens onwards, rhetorically coloured, and Greek uses of parrhesia and the definitions of licentia later set out in Roman handbooks are highly influential to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English works on rhetoric and political advice. Consequently, discussions of liberty of speech in Elizabethan and Jacobean England can often be understood best if read with an eye to the conditions of deliberative rhetoric. Authors of rhetorical works in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were engaged in a complicated relationship of negotiation with sometimes apparently contradictory traditions when they defined parrhesia. Both traditions were used by speakers and writers concerned find ways of offering frank counsel to their superiors in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
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Eloges grecs de Rome: Discours traduits et commentés éd. par Laurent Pernot, and: Dire l’évidence: Philosophie et rhétorique antiques éd. par Carlos Lévy et Laurent Pernot ↗
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Reviews Laurent Pemot ed., Eloges grecs de Rome: Discours traduits et commentés (Paris: Les Belles Lettres 1997) pp. 198. Carlos Lévy et Laurent Pemot eds, Dire l'évidence: Philosophie et rhétorique antiques (Paris: Ed. L'Harmattan, 1997) pp. 448. The first book contains in translation two epideictic orations: the famous speech To Rome, (Eis ‘Ρώμην, en l'honneur de Rome, Or. xxvi) delivered in 144 by the then still young and unknown sophist Aelius Aristides when sojourning in Rome, and an oration written by an unknown sophist about 247 in honour of Philippus Arabs and transmitted under Aristides' name, Praise of the Emperor, (Eis Βασιλέα, En l'honneur de l'empereur, Or.xxxv). Both speeches belong to the genre of encomium, concern the Roman empire, especially its centre, the city of Rome and its emperor. Hence the part éloges...de Rome in the title, whereas the word grecs refers to the source language but also, at the same time, to the fact that these praise-speeches are written from a Greek point of view. The two speeches are published here for the first time in a French translation. It is a pleasure to read this version but I must leave a verdict on its Frenchness to others. The strongest point of this book, I think, is its introduction. It shows Pemot as an accomplished critic of the scholarly discussions on these speeches as well as—and this is more important—as a master in analyzing and discussing them. Of course, much of what Pemot says here, is already known from his Rhétorique de l'éloge dans le monde grécoromain (Paris 1993), where one may also find detailed comparisons with other speeches by Aristides, something which would be out of place in an introduction meant for a larger public. But it is very pleasing to have a thorough discussion of these speeches by themselves. It was also a good idea for Pemot to take two orations both concerning Roman power which at the same time are different© The International Society for the History of Rhetoric, Rhetorica, Volume XVII, Number 2 (Spring 1999) 213 RHETORICA 214 from a rhetorical point of view: Aristides is, although (probably) about 26 years old, a talented speaker, who knows how to play with the rules of the genre, whereas the author of the second speech closely follows these rules. It has been suggested, therefore, that this oration is just a school exercise but Pemot finds many reasons not to accept this suggestion. So the author must have been a mediocre orator who was not able to transcend the rules of his art. Thus one can apply the scheme of the basilikos logos from the handbook of Menander Rhetor to explain almost every feature of this oration. Aristides, however, also knows the rules of the genre and Pemot duly annotates many occasions on which what Aristides says and the topoi he uses can be compared with the theory known from rhetorical handbooks and the practice of older orations. But, to take one example, whereas when praising a city it is almost obligatory to deal with its history, Aristides ignores this aspect. The second publication under discussion concerns 21 contributions to a 1995 colloquium organised by the French branch of our Society under the theme of Dire l'évidence. Already its subtitle, Philosophie et rhétorique antiques, shows that a part of this collection is of an immediate interest to readers of this journal but other articles also offer important insights. The volume contains four sections, évidence et argumentation, l'évidence, obstacle ou accès à la connaissance?, images, imagination^ and l'ineffable. The connotations of the word évidence are manifold and those of its Latin source, evidentia, also, or even more, because it is a Ciceronian translation of the Greek enargeia. In the very first paper Barbara Cassin discusses the differences between the philosophical use of enargeia as an notion "liée à la vision, critère de soi, index sui, liée au vrai et au nécessairement vrai", whereas "l'évidence des orateurs est ï'energeia comme...un effet de logos,..liée au 'comme si' de la vision, à la vision comme fiction". It will...
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222 RHETORICA substitute aux mots orator ou poeta celui de pictor et applique à la peinture des analyses rhétorico-poétiques" (pp. 19-20). The result amounts to a digest of everything in classical rhetoric relevant to the visual arts. The full extent of Junius's re-elaboration of rhetorical theory can be partly gauged by the subjects treated in the editor's invaluable commentary section, reduced to key terms: imitatio, ars, phantasia, ratio imitandi ("une problématique cicéronienne"), ut pictura poesis (including the roles of inspiration, enthusiasm, imitation, illusion, emotion), and contemplatio (the function of the spectator, aesthetic and moral). Every self-respecting historian of rhetoric should make sure his departmental library buys this remarkable edition. And we keenly look forward to its completion. Brian Vickers ETH Zurich James Robert Goetsch Jr, Vico's Axioms: The Geometry of the Human World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) xiv + 173pp. Goetsch undertakes a defense of Vico against his "friends", such as Isaiah Berlin, who are mainstream historians of philosophy; he is concerned to give Vico credit for a solid, systemic mode of inquiry, rather than the wildly eclectic mass of detail, chaotically presented, attributed to Vico by Berlin, (p. xi). His defense of Vico becomes a defense of rhetoric, for Goetsch insists on the significance of fundamental rhetorical assumptions and strategies of analysis of language structure and process as they frame an investigation. Vico's hermeneutics are, for Goetsch, a rhetorical hermeneutics. The defense of rhetoric is also an abandonment of the hegemonous strategies of definition and the standard issues of history of philosophy. To give a perspicuous, inclusive account of Vico's project, it is necessary to focus on the axioms, the key structuring principles, Vico lists in his New Science (p. 106); Axioms 1-22, 106 are common (koinoi), Axioms 33-144 particular Reviews 223 topics (p. 128). But, in Goetsch's rhetorical reading, the Vichian axioms, or elementi, or degnita (things worth thinking), are peculiarly rhetorical uses of the topoi,of the topical connections of the general and the particular (p. 108). The commonplace tradition illumines Vichian method (p. 104), because "topical storehouses" provide the arguments, enthymemes, motivating the most basic civil operations. The topoi, as both bins, spaces, organising argument and the contents of the bins represent a mode of connection in which both source and goal are in the domain of the communis. "Common sense", as a body of beliefs and dispositions held by a historical community, is a primary interest for Vico (p. 96), as the origin of the principles which illumine human history; Vico reads the axioms as "causes of customs" (p. 108). The description of common sense, as the summary of the common practices and values of the communities, is the goal of all historical initiatives and arguments. Moreover, when Vico claims that Providence, "like the queen she is", works only through civil institutions and practices, he selects irony as primary trope; history is not simply the product of self-conscious personal impulses; rather, particular institutional effects and strategies are often the unintended consequences of radically different, earlier dispositions and practices. Goetsch claims Vico's strategy represents a "recovery of an authentic Aristotelian rhetoric" (p. 106), a more "dynamic" Aristotle (pp. 54, 114). Goetsch reads the opening statement in the Rhetoric, that rhetoric is the antistrophe of dialectic, as pointing to the peculiarly heavy engagement with civic consciousness and civil effect of rhetoric (p. 108). Goetsch thus claims to recontextualise Vico in an Aristotelian tradition which is not that of a purely abstract, logical systematicity, the dominant reading of Aristotle in history of philosophy, but of a rhetorical, topical systematicity; a "rhetorical" reading of Aristotle, he claims, "corrects" the "scholastic" tendencies of Aristotle's logical interests (p. 77). Thus Goetsch asserts he may place Vico in a history of ideas aligned with the peculiar interests in philosophy of language and the philosophy of psychology represented in such twentieth-century figures as Ernst Cassirer, Ernesto Grassi, and Owen Barfield, to name three of the mentors frequently invoked by Goetsch.. At all times, Goetsch privileges, and claims Vico 224 RHETORICA privileges, "organic" wholeness (p. 116), valuing the image, imagination, ingenium, temporicity, historicity—a...
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De Pictura Veterum Libri Tres (Roterodami 1694): Edition, traduction et commentaire du livre I per Franciscus Junius ↗
Abstract
220 RHETORICA la religión. El estudio ofrece un minucioso análisis de las obras más importantes de la época, en el que queda de manifiesto la notable influencia del ramismo en Inglaterra. Por último, se realiza una reflexión sobre el supuesto carácter ramista de la Methodica adumbratio Ethicae, de William Temple (1555—1627), mostrando que el autor inglés, influido por la intransigencia metodológica del ramismo, desarrolla un esquema sobre la ética que responde a las instancias de claridad y concisión típicas de la metodología ramista, por lo que se separa en mayor medida que sus contemporáneos del modelo aristotélico, pero no llega a desarrollar plenamente su intento de realizar una ética ramista alejada del pensamiento tradicional. Estamos ante un trabajo interesante, en definitiva, que explica con claridad el papel que tuvo el ramismo en el desarrollo de la cultura de la sociedad burguesa moderna. En este sentido, y pesar de su fugacidad, las teorías de Ramus representan el reflejo de una época de transición entre el antiguo feudalismo y el naciente sistema capitalista. A mi modo de ver, el mérito del trabajo no sólo reside en ayudar a esclarecer las particularidades del método ramista, sino también en relacionar la aparición y evolución del ramismo con las circunstancias históricas y sociales que lo determinan, así como en ofrecer un detallado panorama del pensamiento ramista en Inglaterra. ALFONSO MARTÍN JIMÉNEZ Universidad de Valladolid Franciscus Junius, De Pictura Veterum Libri Très (Roterodami 1694): Edition, traduction et commentaire du livre I, par Colette Nativel (Genève: Librairie Droz, 1996) pp. 725; ill. Franciscus Junius (1571-1677), son of the distinguished Protestant theologian Franciscus Junius (1545-1602), has been fortunate in recent years. His De Pictura veterum, first published in 1637, was given a sumptuous and expensive edition ($240.00) in 1991 for the University of California Press by Keith Aldrich, Reviews 221 Philipp Fehl, and Raina Fehl. Their two handsomely produced volumes (418 and 611 pages, respectively) included Junius's slightly revised text of The Painting of the Ancients in his own English translation (1638), together with the Catalogus Architectorum and other artificers from the second, expanded Latin edition (1694) in Aldrich's translation. With ample notes and extensive indices, this editorial trio set standards which one imagined could hardly be excelled. But now Colette Nativel has started to produce an even more elaborate edition. Her first volume, running to over 700 pages, is devoted to Book One, which constitutes about a quarter of Junius's text. She gives a brief introduction (8 pages), situating De pictura veterum in the tradition of classical rhetoric: then follows a detailed and lavishly illustrated biography of Junius (61 pages), and an illuminating account the book's evolution and reception (24 pages). The text itself is presented on facing pages, French and Latin (292 pages), with an extraordinary amount of annotation. For the Latin text notes indicate the hundreds of additional passages (many of them quotations from classical treatises) added in the 1694 edition. The translation pages add notes identifying all of Junius's quotations, with extensive quotations in Greek and Latin. One can only admire both the editor's diligence and the publisher's devotion to scholarly standards in producing such a meticulous and costly-to-print apparatus. As if this were not enough, Dr. Nativel then adds a commentary section, running to 183 closely-printed pages, an extensive bibliography (96 pages), and Index locorum and an Index nominum. All students of rhetoric and art theory are deeply indebted to the editor for this magnificent edition, the introduction concisely shows just how "cet ars pingendi puise sa pensée dans Pars dicendi" (p.15), drawing on the richness of ancient treatises on rhetoric just at those points where analogies were made between discourse and image: "C'est un detour de comparaisons où les arts visuels servent de référents aux arts de la parole que Junius trouve ses théories picturales. Il élabore sa réflexion suivant un double procès: tantôt, il se contente d'utiliser la comparaison qu il rencontre...
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Abstract
Reviews 233 plutôt: parce que rhéteur) en musicien: les idées sont des thèmes, les sujets sont des instruments. Pierre-Louis Malosse Stephen D. O'Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, ix + 314 pp. Endings, like beginnings, have always fascinated us; thus, speculative accounts of the world's beginning (etiologies) and its ending (eschatologies) have engendered controversial philosophies and gripping narratives. As we approach the end of a millenium, eschatological speculation can only be expected to increase; and thus, Arguing the Apocalypse is a timely contribution to rhetorical history and rhetorical theory. It is also broadly interdisciplinary, carefully researched, and intelligently written. The book's author, Stephen O'Leary, studied comparative religion at Harvard before going on to graduate work in Communication Studies at Northwestern; this book is a revision of his dissertation, and it is marked by the influence of both its director (argumentation theorist Tom Goodnight) and one of its readers (Bernard McGinn, a historian of medieval theology). With a few exceptions, the author has purged his book of the stylistic residues of the much despised "dissertation" genre. Nevertheless, as in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, the first ninety pages will test the readers' mettle; only if they are able to wade through the complexities of the theory will they earn their just reward: two rhetorical histories that are fascinating (and at times, even "page-turners"). Yet there are those first ninety pages. Chapter 1 begins by defining apocalypse—a subset of eschatological discourse that "makes manifest a vision of ultimate destiny, rendering immediate to human audiences the ultimate End of the cosmos in the Last Judgment" (pp. 5-6). Given the powerful appeal of such discourse through the ages, the author suspects that rhetorical theory will be useful in showing how it has shaped human 234 RHETORICA thought and action within particular cultural milieux. Chapter 2 sets out three important topoi of apocalyptic discourse: time, evil, and authority. These topoi are ripe for rhetorical analysis, since they involve not only the intellect but the whole person. O'Leary provides thumbnail sketches of the typical accounts of these three topoi, suggesting that apocalyptic discourse attempts to address certain aporiae that have been left by such accounts. In chapter 3, O'Leary develops the dramatic frames of comedy and tragedy, through which he will view various apocalyptic movements. Traditional Christian eschatology, he argues, accented the comic frame by emphasizing God's complete sovereignty in bringing about the end of time; the divine plan is inscrutible, and we can neither predict the end nor bring it about. But this view still acknowledged an identifiable end, in which evil and time would be no more; and this created the rhetorical space for a "tragic" apocalyptic eschatology, in which God brings the world to a catastrophic close (an event that will be survived only by those who know what to look for, and when to look). "Once an audience has accepted the eschatological argument that evil will be both eliminated and justified in the Last Judgment...their experience of evil will create a hope and expectation for this Judgment that still requires satisfaction" (p. 81). Thus, in apocalyptic rhetoric, "the evils of the present day are pyramided into a structure of cosmic significance" (p. 83). This arouses ever more eager anticipation of the consummation of history. Apocalyptic rhetoric thus tends to be enormously persuasive in the short term. While often blithely dismissed as the ranting of fanatics, it has mobilized thousands, indeed millions, of adherents—a claim that O'Leary will demonstrate in the historical sketches that fill most of the remainder of the book. The next four chapters examine two of the most important apocalyptic movements in the United States. Chapter 4 chronicles William Miller's rise from obscure farmer, to sought-after lecturer, to religious figurehead, to discredited prophet; the chapter also shows why Millerism should be analyzed as a rhetorical movement. In chapter 5, O'Leary examines the particular forms of Millerite argument, showing why they were found persuasive by certain auditors. Chapter 6 jumps ahead some more than a century, examining the more...
February 1999
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Abstract
Abstract: The Commentary on the Psalms is the least studied of Cassiodorus's sixth-century works. Close knowledge of it significantly alters our understanding of the Introduction to Divine and Human Readings, with which it should be paired. The Commentary serves to establish the Bible as the source for all the liberal arts and a model for rhetorical imitation. This essay examines the eloquence Cassiodorus discovers in the Psalter, focussing in particular on those passages which he marked with the marginal notation for Rhetoric: RT. Cassiodorus finds examples of deliberative, demonstrative, and judicial oration in the Psalter. His elucidation of them does not simply preserve classical lore,but rather presents a sophisticated alternative to pagan theory and practice. A fuller understanding of Cassiodorus's view helps us to grasp his formative influence on medieval culture, rhetoric, and poetics.
January 1999
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Abstract
In the Christian society and culture of England before the Norman Conquest literary education was centred on grammar. The extant texts reflect an educational system which by no means neglected rhetorical education—but the classical ars bene dicendi was apparently basically unknown. Anglo-Saxon England thus provides a test case for the continuation and elaboration of alternatives for classical rhetorical teaching. It is argued that, besides the influence of pedagogical considerations and Germanic poetical devices, the background of Anglo-Saxon rhetorical strategies is to be sought in an extended grammatical curriculum. Instruction in the praeexercitamina may have been included in this curriculum. The figures and tropes contained in the grammars for the purpose of text interpretation were certainly studied, and they were also employed in the production of literature. Of utmost importance was the creative use of rhetorical techniques which were deduced from model texts by way of grammatical enarratio.
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Reviews 97 mystics and celebrated preachers in Spain during the sixteenth century. This is the first rhetorical treatise intended for missionaries converting people from the East and West Indies. Studies of other rhetorical guides are found in the chapters on Fray Diego Valadés (ch.3), Bartolomé de las Casas and José de Acosta (ch.4) and José de Arriaga (ch.6). The study of Bernardino de Sahagún's General History of New Spain is one of the most important chapters of this book. Sahagún's text inserts a considerable range of reflections of the spiritual conquest of New Spain, and also reveals to the western world a survey of all aspects of Mexican religion, society and natural philosophy. The Amerindian contribution to the rhetorical tradition in Latin America is found in the huehuehlahtolli. These were the speeches delivered by the learned men, "the speeches of the elders". Abbot also studies the use and influence of the European rhetorical tradition in the readings and interpretations by this historian of the huehuehlahtolli. Abbot provides a much needed comprehensive and detailed examination of the theories and practice of rhetoric during the sixteenth and seventeenth century in Spanish America. He is successful in two important tasks: finding the points of contact and rupture between the European rhetorical tradition and the new emerging ideas about writing, oratory, and theory in the New World, and linking rhetorical theory to experiential knowledge and cultural understanding provided in colonial texts. SANTA ARIAS Florida State University Robert Crawford ed., The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 259 pp. This collection of articles presents a counter-narrative to previous histories of English Studies that have ignored the crucial role of Scotland in the institutionalization of English as a modem discipline. As the title suggests, the twelve articles in the volume use a variety of approaches to develop the thesis that "English Literature as a university subject is a Scottish invention" and to 98 RHETORICA explore the implications of this thesis in the context of issues such as national identity, cultural politics, and gender in Scotland, England, America, and Australasia. Robert Crawford introduces the volume by situating it within the context of recent accounts of the development of university English. He then addresses the establishment of courses in Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at St. Andrews, focusing in particular on the career of Robert Watson, who was appointed Professor of Logic, Rhetoric and Metaphysics in 1756. In the second article, Neil Rhodes continues Crawford's discussion of the curriculum at St. Andrew's by detailing the influence of Ramus on the teaching of Belles Lettres. Rhodes argues that it was the dissemination of Ramist pedagogy through the work of Roland Macllmaine at St. Andrews which led in the eighteenth century to the "redescription of Rhetoric as Criticism", first in the lectures of Watson and later in the work of Lord Karnes (p. 31). Joan Pittock focuses on the Scottish development of English Studies by examining the curriculum at Aberdeen. In her article, she illustrates the philosophical approach to Belles Lettres in the works of Aberdonian scholars such as David Fordyce, Alexander Gerard, and James Beattie, as well as the critical connections these scholars make between the concept of taste and the social and ethical development of students. The important social function of English Studies is also taken up by Paul Bator in his discussion of the novel in the Scottish university curriculum. Bator demonstrates the rise of the novel as a serious genre of study through careful analysis of lecture notes from Professors of Rhetoric at St. Andrews and Aberdeen Universities, acquisition and library borrowing records, and activities of the Edinburgh Belles Lettres Society. He argues that for Scottish professors of rhetoric in the eighteenth century "the novel provided a unique and unstoppable vehicle by which their students could observe and learn vicariously the manners of their English brethren" (p. 90). The new genre, then, functioned as a form of conduct literature through which the values of mainstream British culture were perpetuated in Scotland. Bator's analysis of the Edinburgh Belles Lettres Society, however, indicates that the study of the novel in the Scottish universities...
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Abstract
The Commentary on the Psalms is the least studied of Cassiodorus’s sixth-century works. Close knowledge of it significantly alters our understanding of the Introduction to Divine and Human Readings, with which it should be paired. The Commentary serves to establish the Bible as the source for all the liberal arts and a model for rhetorical imitation. This essay examines the eloquence Cassiodorus discovers in the Psalter, focussing in particular on those passages which he marked with the marginal notation for Rhetoric: RT. Cassiodorus finds examples of deliberative, demonstrative, and judicial oration in the Psalter. His elucidation of them does not simply preserve classical lore, but rather presents a sophisticated alternative to pagan theory and practice. A fuller understanding of Cassiodorus’s view helps us to grasp his formative influence on medieval culture, rhetoric, and poetics.
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Sinners, Lovers and Heroes: An Essay on Memorializing in Three American Cultures by Richard Morris ↗
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RHETORICA 102 While several of the articles in the volume do address the extended influence of the Scottish tradition in countries formerly dominated by Britain, conspicuously absent from the collection is any discussion of English Studies on the Indian subcontinent. Taken as a whole, however, the volume presents an expanded account of the historical origins of English Studies and illustrates the degree to which we owe the institutionalization of university English to Scottish culture. DANA HARRINGTON Syracuse University Richard Morris, Sinners, Lovers and Heroes: An Essay on Memorializing in Three American Cultures (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997) xxi + 237 pp. A modest but noteworthy contribution to research by rhetoric scholars on public memorials, this book focuses on symbolic responses to Abraham Lincoln's death during the nineteenth century in the United States. Morris asserts, "I know of no other event that so exactly marks the dramatic rupture of the social structure of a nation and that so clearly lays cultural transformation open to observation than the death of Abraham Lincoln" (p. 2). Written in a clear and accessible style, Sinners, Lovers and Heroes argues "the thesis that memorials are fundamentally rhetorical and cultural forms of expression, that a careful examination of American memorializing discloses the contours of at least three distinct American cultures, and that shifting visual and discursive memorial patterns across time reveal the ascendancy and subordination of these three cultures and their cultural memories" (p. xii). The organization of Sinners, Lovers and Heroes is straightforward. An introductory chapter articulates an orientation to the rhetoric and culture of public memorials. In the three following chapters, each of the "three cultures" is the central focus of one chapter, corresponding to the three key terms in the Reviews 103 title, Sinners, Lovers and Heroes. Specifically, Morris considers patterns of response to Lincoln's death, as it was represented by members of cultures that Morris names "religionists", "romanticists", and "heroists" (p. 42). The conclusion synthesizes Morris's claims that "Different people memorialize, embrace, and seek to codify through public memory their different images of the memorable not merely because of temporal or spatial or physiological divergences, but because different cultures with different worldviews and ethoi require different images of and from their members" (p. 153). One strength of Sinners, Lovers and Heroes is the extensive use of published primary materials from various nineteenth century figures who commented on Abraham Lincoln's death. Morris claims, "what we see in the transformation of Lincoln's image, then, is not a single people creating and later transforming an element of the symbolic code of collective memory, but the rise and fall of different cultures, each of which positions Lincoln within a different world view and ethos" (p. 27). Another strength of this book is the attention to accumulating details that Morris synthesizes into an encompassing perspective in his conclusion. Unfortunately, however, the book makes little explicit use of contemporary rhetoric scholars' research on public memorials, public memory, or visual rhetoric, even though the book seems to be arguing, at times, with some key figures in these areas of research. Although the introduction and the conclusion stress "differences" among the U.S. people, there is little explicit attention to either race or economic class in the body of the volume (for his comments on race, pp. x, 111; on economic class, pp. 127, 142-43, 147-49). The discussion of the "religionists" depends heavily upon a Christian conception of spirituality. As one consequence, perhaps, the speech by a Jewish leader, Max Lilienthal, is discussed under the "heroists" (pp. 125-35). In the chapter on "heroists," one abiding oxymoron is the manifestation of leveling styles reflecting an egalitarian politics, because placing some people above most others is ordinarily a requirement for having "heroes". Morris writes, "True to the mandates of the first Heroist gravescape, however, cemeterial rules and regulations in lawn cemeteries require markers to be small and, in the vast majority of instances...flush with the ground" (p. 149). 104 RHETORICA Some key concepts would perhaps have benefited from explicit, technical explanation. For example, the use of "hegemony" in Morris's book is disconnected from Antonio Gramsci's use of the same term...
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Rhetoric in the New World: Rhetorical Theory and Practice in Colonial Spanish America by Don Paul Abbot ↗
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RHETORICA 96 Don Paul Abbot, Rhetoric in the New World: Rhetorical Theory and Practice in Colonial Spanish America, (Columbia, University of South Carolina Press, 1997) xiii + 135pp. The study and practice of rhetoric were at the center of all representations, interpretations and debates in colonial Spanish America. Readings and criticisms of the cultural production of the colonial period, since just before the Quintencenary celebration in 1992 and after, have shed light on diverse aspects of history, culture and society. However, these critical assessments have only superficially confronted the use and transformation of the precepts of the European rhetorical tradition across the Atlantic. In colonial Spanish America, rhetoric offered the theories behind the evangelization project and the rules to follow in the most important political debates of the period. Don Paul Abbot's contribution to colonial studies and the history of rhetoric in America, Rhetoric in the New World, looks at how Spanish, Amerindian and Mestizo rhetoricians challenged the classical tradition and offer a new perspective on secular and religious historical writing, the theory behind it, and culture. Spanish and Mestizo scholars gave continuity and provided a new perspective in theory and practice to Renaissance humanism and the rhetorical tradition. Abbot addresses this important problem, successfully demonstrating the important role of and adjustments made to ancient concepts in the practice of writing theory, considering the different addressees, and more important, the project of representation, translation and interpretation of the Amerindian culture. The texts under review in Abbot's book provide a crosssection of some important writers and intellectuals during the early colonial period. He discusses the works of Fray Luis de Granada, Bernardino de Sahagún, Diego Valadés, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, José de Acosta, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and José de Arriaga. The context to the transmission of the precepts of rhetoric from Spain to the New World is provided in an insightful manner with a study of the lesser known Breve tratado, by Fray Luis de Granada, one of the most important ascetic writers, Reviews 97 mystics and celebrated preachers in Spain during the sixteenth century. This is the first rhetorical treatise intended for missionaries converting people from the East and West Indies. Studies of other rhetorical guides are found in the chapters on Fray Diego Valadés (ch.3), Bartolomé de las Casas and José de Acosta (ch.4) and José de Arriaga (ch.6). The study of Bernardino de Sahagún's General History of New Spain is one of the most important chapters of this book. Sahagún's text inserts a considerable range of reflections of the spiritual conquest of New Spain, and also reveals to the western world a survey of all aspects of Mexican religion, society and natural philosophy. The Amerindian contribution to the rhetorical tradition in Latin America is found in the huehuehlahtolli. These were the speeches delivered by the learned men, "the speeches of the elders". Abbot also studies the use and influence of the European rhetorical tradition in the readings and interpretations by this historian of the huehuehlahtolli. Abbot provides a much needed comprehensive and detailed examination of the theories and practice of rhetoric during the sixteenth and seventeenth century in Spanish America. He is successful in two important tasks: finding the points of contact and rupture between the European rhetorical tradition and the new emerging ideas about writing, oratory, and theory in the New World, and linking rhetorical theory to experiential knowledge and cultural understanding provided in colonial texts. SANTA ARIAS Florida State University Robert Crawford ed., The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 259 pp. This collection of articles presents a counter-narrative to previous histories of English Studies that have ignored the crucial role of Scotland in the institutionalization of English as a modem discipline. As the title suggests, the twelve articles in the volume use a variety of approaches to develop the thesis that "English Literature as a university subject is a Scottish invention" and to ...
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Abstract
104 RHETORICA Some key concepts would perhaps have benefited from explicit, technical explanation. For example, the use of "hegemony" in Morris's book is disconnected from Antonio Gramsci's use of the same term. Another instance is "culture", which resonates with Lionel Trilling's meanings for this term, but, at times, seems like a synonym for ideology. In addition to references to "collective memory", Morris distinguishes "cultural memory" from "public memory", by remarking, "whereas cultural memory reflects the particularized world view and ethos of the members of a particular culture, public memory is perhaps best conceived as an amalgam of the current hegemonic bloc's cultural memory and bits and pieces of cultural memory that members of other cultures are able to preserve and protect" (p. 26). Sinners, Lovers and Heroes will be useful to scholars interested in the rhetoric, public argument, public memory, American studies, and, especially, the legacy of Abraham Lincoln's public image. LESTER C. OLSON University of Pittsburgh Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde, eds., Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time: A Reader (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) xxiii + 406 pp. Like the recent Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition by Kathy Eden, Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time marks another attempt at a rhetorical Anschluss, annexing rhetoric . to hermeneutics in an apparent attempt to make rhetoric look more philosophical, for instance, by pointing to Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. In fact, two of Gadamer's own essays on rhetoric appear in the Jost and Hyde collection. While the writers within the collection draw many analogies between rhetoric and hermeneutics, hardly anyone obtains any definitional precision about the pairing. Reviews 105 On the other hand, the Jost and Hyde volume seeks to be what Eden's book avoids—concerned with the present, as conveyed by the prepositional phrase in the title, "in our time", and explicitly with politics: "Our very being-in-the-world is inseparably hermeneutical and rhetorical in complex ways and...a multi-faceted speaking as well as listening constitutes our situation. Our own time is an epoch of corporate capitalism and technologism, of vulgarization and breakdown. But it is also a time of deep reflection on linguistic interpretation: on persuasion, 'conversion' across paradigms or worldviews, propaganda, and more invidious forms of deception and power, as well as on forms of the electronic word and the new multimedia. It is, accordingly, a time in which we need both to listen to and to discuss what Gadamer calls the 'deep inner convergence' between rhetoric and hermeneutics" (p. xvi). First, "our" turns out to be some amorphous, underdetermined "everyone", and despite the implicit "critique" of "corporate capitalism" in the passage above, Jost and Hyde never get near the topic again, except to get away from it. The slide happens but a page later: "The task at hand now includes identifying hermeneutics (in its modern forms) as a further counterpart to rhetoric and rhetoric to hermeneutics and seeing both as features or dimensions of all thought and language, not only as the special methods or abilities of political praxis" (p. xvii). Before dealing with any concrete issues of political praxis, they widen the aperture of their project to "all thought and language", and thus sidestep the part of the "all" that might have brought them in contact with any logical definition of "politics", or with concrete historical events in North American party politics, for instance. The rhetoric that goes on in the streets, the deception—what the Greeks called the pseudos—the advertising, the propaganda, the double-talk, the exercises of political esotericism, the kind of interpretive practice that produces The Bible Code, all the "ugly" manifestations of rhetoric that are its life blood, hold almost no interest in the context of the book under review. (For the importance, even primacy, of the "ugly", see Slavo Zizek, in Slavo Zizek / F. W. J. von Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom / Ages of the World [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997] pp. 21-25). Jost and Hyde promote the lemony fresh side of rhetoric, the side most often seen in contemporary RHETORICA 106 accounts of what rhetoric accomplishes or can accomplish: "Rhetoric...helps promote civic engagement and...
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Abstract
Short Reviews Cheryl Glenn, Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997) xii + 235pp. Glenn's purpose in Rhetoric Retold is feminist and cartographic: to remap the history of rhetoric by putting female rhetoricians and rhetorical practices solidly on the map. She challenges patriarchal rhetorical history at the center by including the voices of women who practiced rhetoric from the margins. Her hope is to revitalize "rhetorical theory by shaking the conceptual foundations of rhetorical study itself" (p. 10). Glenn's method derives from historiography, feminism, and gender studies. She uses "resistant readings...of the paternal narrative" and "female-authored rhetorical works" as well as "broad definitions of rhetoric" (p. 4). Her rationale for subject selection appears in Chapter One. Thereafter, she develops each historical chapter by overviewing cultural conditions of the period, describing women's place in those worlds, sketching the nature of patriarchal rhetoric at the time, then presenting the rhetorical activities of some exceptional women who were able to speak and write from the margins. Whenever she can, she highlights significant "points of contact" across all of the subjects she considers. Chapter Two examines pretheoretical sources of rhetorical consciousness in ancient Greece. Her reading of Sappho and female Phythagorians (Theano, Phintys, Perictyone) present rhetorical avenues that mainstream tradition never explored. She details public (argumentative) rhetoric (Corax, Gorgias, and Isocrates), then treats Aspasia as a silent heartbeat at the center of Pericles's intellectual circle. Aspasia was as likely a source of inspiration to Socrates and Plato as was Diotima. Glenn examines© The International Society for the History of Rhetoric, Rhetorica, Volume XVII, Number 1 (Winter 1999) 89 RHETORICA 90 tradition (Cicero and Quintilian), challenging this tradition with voices from the margins. Here we meet Vergima, Cornelia, Hortensia, Amasia Senta, Gaia Afrania, Sempronia, Fulvia, and Octavia. In Chapter Three Glenn details Christian cultural dynamics, calling the Bible the "ur-text of history, wisdom, and doctrine" (p. 75). She discusses inheritance laws, conceptions of women's bodies, the theoretical equality of men and women in the eyes of Christ, yet the practical inequality of doctrine and of Christian institutional piety. Examining representations of women in medieval literature (imaginative, Marian, inspirational), Glenn contends that women never received "the full range of human feelings or characteristics" (p. 86). Women appear as inferior to rational men, some of whose (Augustine, Jerome) rhetorical practices (ars poetica, ars dictaminis, ars praedicandi) Glenn treats next in some detail. She shows how a small group of religious women achieved some release from the cultural hold, such as Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, whose unusual rhetorical practices Glenn tells in illuminating detail. In Chapter Four Glenn overviews the general nature of Renaissance culture, tracing the patriarchal bias of laws, the nature of women's work both outside and inside the home, the inferiority of women's bodies when compared to men's, and more. She situates classical and Christian humanism, showing the usefulness of humanistic education in society and religious life. Some special English women, according to Glenn, received humanistic training, and she traces their (modest) literary accomplishments. She contrasts these women to the fake representations of women in literature; some women appear overly assertive (Edmund Spenser's Britomart, Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth), while others appear willfully disobedient (Juliet, Desdemona, the Duchess of Malfi). Such images reinforced women's exclusion from the public world of traditional Ciceronian rhetorical practice, though the entry of educated women became more probable as rhetoric and poetics converged in early English rhetorics that focused on style and eloquence. Glenn shows how three exceptional woman each used their own versions of rhetorical eloquence to make an impact on the public Reviews 91 from the margins—Margaret More, Anne Askew, and Queen Elizabeth I. In Chapter Five Glenn stresses the performative value of her project: the "promise that rhetorical histories and theories will eventually (and naturally) include women" (p. 174). She presents "four ways...[to] work together to realize...[these] performative...goals": we must recognize our common ground, "explore various means of collaboration", reevaluate the notion of "silence", and recognize the unlimited opportunities for research in this area (p. 174-78). This was a difficult...
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Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women ed. by Molly Meijer Wertheimer ↗
Abstract
Reviews 91 from the margins—Margaret More, Anne Askew, and Queen Elizabeth I. In Chapter Five Glenn stresses the performative value of her project: the "promise that rhetorical histories and theories will eventually (and naturally) include women" (p. 174). She presents "four ways...[to] work together to realize...[these] performative...goals": we must recognize our common ground, "explore various means of collaboration", reevaluate the notion of "silence", and recognize the unlimited opportunities for research in this area (p. 174-78). This was a difficult book to write. Feminist rhetorical scholars have already identified at least three limits such revisions must observe: any feminist account of the history of rhetoric cannot stand alone, but must be continuous somehow with mainstream rhetorical histories; simply inserting "exceptional women" into an otherwise unrevised traditional account is insufficient; and only by exposing the cultural oppressions that silenced women can we hope to break their hold. Glenn succeeds brilliantly in balancing these demands as she makes the best connections she can among new kinds of (feminist) interdisciplinary research, while observing a time limit necessary for publication. Her accomplishment is significant, even though there are probably readers who will want to set the record straight about this historical person or that fact, or to join the pieces of the story more amply. Nonetheless, the space her work creates teems with opportunities for research and for insights about possible rhetorical selves for us all. MOLLY MEIJER WERTHEIMER Pennsylvania State University Molly Meijer Wertheimer, ed., Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997) 408 pp. Studies of women's contributions and challenges to the rhetorical tradition are still sparse but, thankfully, growing. Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities ofHistorical Women constitutes a welcome addition to this blossoming field. Edited by Molly Meijer Wertheimer, Listening to Their Voices comprises an RHETORICA 92 impressive array of eighteen articles on women's rhetorical activities in contexts ranging from Ancient Egypt to twentiethcentury Europe and America. Authored by American scholars (with the exception of one Canadian), these articles greatly increase the available research on women in the history of rhetoric. The range of historical periods and cultural contexts that the articles address underscores the neglected richness and diversity of women's contributions to rhetoric, as well as the extent of all that remains to be recovered and reinterpreted. Notably, the collection stretches the realm of rhetorical activity beyond its traditional focus on public, argumentative speech or writing to include, in particular, the non-traditional genres of private letter writing and conversation. The inclusionary diversity of Listening to Their Voices reveals, as Wertheimer notes in her introduction, a feminist appreciation of difference and multiplicity (p. 4). At the same time, this collection is well-unified. Its unity stems, most fundamentally, from the authors' joint assumption that the study of women's rhetorical activities is worthwhile and important to the history of rhetoric. As well, the articles demonstrate a consistently fine historical contextualization of the women rhetors and rhetoricians they discuss, uniformly avoiding the imposition of contemporary social categories on these women of the past, highlighting instead the cultural and political realities which motivated and shaped their rhetorical activities. In some cases, these activities are presented as those of an "exceptional" woman who was "able to be heard in the male public sphere" (p. ix). More intriguingly, in my view, several of the studies foreground the practices of communities of women as well as rhetorical activities addressed to contexts beyond the "male public sphere". The volume is divided thematically into four main sections, an organization that allows us to perceive non-chronological links between the articles' differing historical points of focus. I will review each section in turn, commenting only—in the interests of brevity, not of ranking—on several but not all of the articles. The first section, entitled "Making Delicate Images", includes three articles that highlight the difficulties of recovering the rhetorical roles and contributions of women within a patriarchal tradition. Cheryl Glenn, for example, relocates Aspasia "on the rhetorical Reviews 93 map" by sifting through and reading against the "powerful gendered lens" of references to her in male-authored texts (p. 24...
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Abstract
RHETORICA 108 from "the people", the tabloids, the dirty political infighting. Rhetoric awaits its Disraeli who can persuade the appropriate personages to bring rhetoric back to the life that damaged it in the first place, the life that is its life, for better or worse or otherwise. BRUCE KRAJEWSKI Laurentian University Craig Waddell, ed., Landmark Essays on Rhetoric and the Environment, Landmark Essays 12 (Mahwah, NJ: Hermagoras Press-Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998) xix + 239 pp. The eleven essays reprinted in this collection map the ecotone where rhetoric and environmental politics meet. Though individual essays resist easy classification, the collection reveals important focuses of work in this sub-field. Several essays trace and evaluate characteristic lines of argument in environmental policy debates. In the lead essay, for instance, Robert Cox glosses Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's account of the locus of the irreparable in The New Rhetoric, drawing out the strategic and ethical implications of, among other deployments of this locus, "forewarnings" of irreparable damage to the environment. Jonathan Lange analyzes five characteristics of the "logic of interaction" between the timber industry and environmentalists engaged in the debate over protecting Northern spotted owl habitat in old growth forests. Other essays study (mis)constructions of audience. Craig Waddell argues that Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb failed to "reconstitute" its audience because it did not articulate "a more comprehensive [ecocentric] framework" to replace egocentric and anthropocentric ethical frameworks (p. 68), while Tarla Rai Peterson and Cristi Choat Horton study ranchers' sense of stewardship for the land "to show how communication that responds attentively to an audience's perspective can assist in retrieving potential points of affiliation among diverse groups" (p 168). Reviews 109 Still other essays focus on the ethos of environmental advocates. M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer consider the charge of hysteria lodged against Rachel Carson and other environmentalists, arguing that the "environmentalist and the nature writer, in becoming 'voices for the earth'...represent the return of the repressed, the coming into consciousness of that which, having been avoided for far too long, has created an illness within the mind-body system of earthly existence" (p. 37). However, they note that "like any political position, environmentalism seeks to restrict access to certain subject positions just as surely as it opens access to others" (p. 50), and like Peterson and Horton, they warn against this exclusionary tendency. Finally, some essays view environmental debates through wide cultural lenses. For instance, Christine Oravec argues that the debate over damming Hetch Hetchy valley in Yosemite National Park was settled not so much by the explicit arguments of the conservationists and preservationists engaged in the debate as by the alignment of conservationists' arguments with "prevailing presumptions concerning the nature of the 'public' and its relationship to the natural environment", presumptions characteristic of early twentieth-century Progressive politics (p. 17). All of these essays conceive of environmental rhetoric in deliberative terms, focusing on conflicts over public policy (individual essay titles bristle with terms such as "controversy", "confrontation", "conflict", "dispute", and "opposition" or evoke contentious deliberative situations). Accordingly, this collection provides an excellent introduction to rhetorical studies of environmental policy debates. But readers should keep in mind that there are more discourses on earth than can be studied from any one perspective. The disciplinary rhetoric of environmental sciences and the epideictic rhetoric of much American nature writing are just two of the landscapes that lie for the most part beyond the bounds of this particular map. H. Lewis Ulman The Ohio State University ...
November 1998
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“Non solum sibi sed aliis etiam”: Neoplatonism and Rhetoric in Saint Augustine's De doctrina Christiana ↗
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Abstract: In the Confessions (397-401) and On Christian Doctrine (396; 426), St. Augustine brackets Neoplatonic philosophy with Ciceronian rhetoric, finding the acknowledged value of each to be limited by an emphasis on individual achievement that is conducive to pride. His personal struggle to overcome such pride shaped his conception of Christian eloquence, which stresses humility through subordination to the scriptural text and service to others. The Christian orator, as defined by Augustine, is above all a teacher who embodies the biblical text, whether by using the “rule of charity” to paraphrase the truths found in Scripture, by simply repeating the actual words of the Bible, or by leading a life of charity that constitutes a kind of speech without words.
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Research Article| November 01 1998 Short Reviews George Kennedy,Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Crosscultural Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).Andrea A. Lunsford ed.. Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995).Takis Poulakos,Speaking for the Polis: Isocrates' Rhetorical Education (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1997), xii +128 pp.David Roochnik,Of Art and Wisdom: Plato's Understanding of Techne (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996) xii + 300 pp.Peter Auksi,Christian Plain Style: The Evolution of a Spiritual Ideal (Monfreal:McGill-Queen's University Press, 1995).Carole Levin and Patricia R. Sullivan eds. Political Rhetoric, Power, and Renaissance Women, (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1995) xiv + 293 pp.Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle,Loyola's Acts: The Rhetoric of the Self(Berkeley: University of Califomia Press, 1997) xv+274pp.L. L. Gaillet ed., Scottish Rhetoric and Its Influences (Mahwah, N.J.: Hermagoras Press, 1998) xviii + 238pp.Thomas W. Benson,Rhetoric and Political Culture in Nineteenth- Century America (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997) 200 pp. Mary Garrett, Mary Garrett School of Communication, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Shirley Sharon-Zisser, Shirley Sharon-Zisser Dept of English, Tel Aviv Univeristy, Ramat Aviv 69 978, Israel Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar C. Jan Swearingen, C. Jan Swearingen Dept of English, Texas A & M University, College Station, Texas 77843, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Edward Schiappa, Edward Schiappa Dept of Communication, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Jameela Lares, Jameela Lares Dept of English, University of Southem Mississippi, Southem Station Box 5037, Hattiesburg, Mississippi 39406, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Victor Skretkowicz, Victor Skretkowicz Dept of English, University of Dundee, Dundee DDl 4HN, Scotland Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Don Paul Abbott, Don Paul Abbott Dept of English, University of Califomia, Davis, Califomia 95616, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Paul Bator, Paul Bator Dept of English, Stanford University, Stanford, Califomia 94305, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Thomas Miller Thomas Miller Dept of English, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1998) 16 (4): 431–454. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.4.431 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mary Garrett, Shirley Sharon-Zisser, C. Jan Swearingen, Edward Schiappa, Jameela Lares, Victor Skretkowicz, Don Paul Abbott, Paul Bator, Thomas Miller; Short Reviews. Rhetorica 1 November 1998; 16 (4): 431–454. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.4.431 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. Copyright 1998, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1998 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.