Two noteworthy and successful vernacular rhetoric manuals printed in sixteenth-century England are actually writing manuals, books on how to compose letters: William Fulwood’s The Enimie of Idlenesse (1568), and Angel Day’s The English Secretorie (1586). Both works reflected and sought to influence literacy habits in the bookreading public, and reveal a wider range of cultural engagement than has previously been thought. In particular, three aspects are likely to have stirred reader interest: a connection for vernacular learners with both the humanist and dictaminal epistolary traditions that formed the core of prestige education; a focus on practical letter exchanges that carry familial and social significance; and a large collection of model letters, in which readers would have found exemplary discourse coupled with proto-fictional and amatory elements that could be enjoyed as entertainment. Understanding the varied appeals of these two books helps us fill out the larger picture relating to how vernacular literacy was valued, developed, and applied.

In this article, the authors analyze the history of 12th- century Byzantine intellectual Anna Comnena with attention to the use of rhetoric in her life and work. By analyzing the fragmentary historical record about Anna, they revise earlier readings of her relation to power, shifting critical scrutiny from a psychological perspective on Anna as an emotional and disappointed woman to her rhetorical performance and choices as a historiographer. By studying her strategies of self-presentation and use of figured discourse, they locate Anna as a participant in world-changing events: a writer who communicates the losses and pain experienced by those living in violent and politically volatile times.

202 RHETORICA rhetoric, as I read it, has never closed itself off to the possibilities of scientific knowledge, whatever form such knowledge may take at given periods of history. Gross is right to note the limitations of much scientific discourse when it purports to discuss subjectivity, society, and history. Where he sees those limitations as grounds for rejection of the very project of scientific explanation, others may well see an opportunity for and invitation to more productive interchange between scholars of various sorts, all of whom— humanistic and scientific alike—are both empowered and constrained by the conditions of their own disciplinarity. Thomas Habinek University of Southern California Francesca Santulli, Le parole del potere, il potere delle parole (Milano: Edizioni Franco Angeli, 2005), 186 pp. II connubio tra parola e potere ha, com'é ben noto, origini molto remóte. Giá nell'Atene del V secolo a.C. harte della parola assurse a protagonista assoluta della vita política, ruolo che conserva indiscutibilmente ancora ai nostri giorni. Questa considerazione fa da sfondo al volume di Francesca Santulli, Le parole del potere, il potere delle parole. Titolo emblemático, grazie al gioco chiastico deU'antimetabole che, invertendo la costruzione sintagmática di parole e potere, ne evoca con grande forza proprio la compenetrazione. II volume si dispiega in sei capitoli (Discorsi e política, pp. 11-30; Testi e contesti pp. 31-48; Strumenti e metodi, pp. 49-67; Premesse e retorica preelettorale , pp. 68-101; L'(auto)presentazione dei personaggi pp. 102-32; Argomentazione : la fonte, il rito, il racconto pp. 133-74), in cui procedono in maniera parallela e complementare considerazioni metodologiche e analisi empírica dei testi, e si chiude con una riflessione conclusiva dell'autrice (Una parola dopo, pp. 175-6), seguita da una ricca rassegna bibliográfica, composta da contributi teorici generali di natura linguistico-retorica e da studi specifici sul linguaggio político. Uno studio che abbia come/ocus l'analisi del discorso político necessita di una serie di chiarificazioni preliminari, prima tra tutte la definizione di discorso e, piú specificamente, quella di discorso político. Sull'illustre scia di Emile Benveniste, la studiosa propone la distinzione tra le categorie di storia e discorso, sottolineando di quest'ultimo il carattere personale e l'essenza di pratica sociale. Nel discorso la parola acquista valore performativo, si con­ figura, cioé, come forma di azione nella realtá (pp. 12-13). Ció é tanto piú vero nel caso del discorso político, inteso come discorso che coinvolge la ge­ stione del potere. A questo proposito possiamo ricordare quanto scrivevano P. Fabbri e A. Marcarino nel 1985 (II discorso político, pubblicato in "Carte semiotiche" 1, pp. 9-22): "quello político non é semplicemente un discorso "rappresentativo." Non si puó descriverlo come un insieme di enunciad in Reviews 203 relazione cognitiva con il reale ma va caratterizzato come un discorso in campo, destinato a chiamare e a rispondere, a dissuadere e a convincere; un discorso d uomini per trasformare uomini e relazioni fra uomini, non solo medium per ri-produrre il reale." Il dominio del discorso politico sembra tuttavia rimanere nell'incertezza. Talvolta esso assume un'estensione massima al punto da identificarsi con Tuso stesso del linguaggio e con il rischio di perdere le peculiarità che lo distinguono dalle altre tipologie di discorso. Se s'intende la política come dramma rappresentato da e a pubblici diversi in contesti sociali molto differenziati" (G. Fedel citato a p. 16), bisogna concludere che "il discorso politico, più che essere pensato come genere compatto, deve essere considé­ rate come una costellazione di generi (o "sotto-generi"), che comprendono forme e situazioni molto diverse in cui si esplica l'attività política" (p. 21). Secondo la Santulli, individuazione e classificazione delle sue forme specifiche possono e devono avvenire, in sintesi, sulla base dei seguenti parametri: l'ambientazione (setting) in contesti istituzionali o istituzionalizzati in cui agiscono in primo luogo personaggi politic! e con finalité decisamente politiche; il ruolo dei partecipanti e la posizione reciproca di emitiente e destinatario in cui il primo ha per obiettivo la convinzione del secondo. In questo panorama un'ulteriore complicazione ha origine con l'avvento di un "terzo attore," il...

Abstract This essay examines linguistic and contextual features to understand Anne Askew's ironic performances, her positioning in rhetorical history, and her texts' persuasive power. While Askew's tactical irony has been studied as silence, resistance, and protest, this essay shows that she uses irony to undermine the communicative event and to initiate discourse without committing to cooperative communication for all audiences involved. I argue that Askew's performances are best accounted for as relevant-inappropriateness, and that a close examination of embedded features in her discourse helps us view Early Modern women's performances as inventive and productive rather than patriarchal or anti-patriarchal.

This essay examines linguistic and contextual features to understand Anne Askew’s ironic performances, her positioning in rhetorical history, and her texts’ persuasive power. While Askew’s tactical irony has been studied as silence, resistance, and protest, this essay shows that she uses irony to undermine the communicative event and to initiate discourse without committing to cooperative communication for all audiences involved. I argue that Askew’s performances are best accounted for as relevant-inappropriateness, and that a close examination of embedded features in her discourse helps us view Early Modern women’s performances as inventive and productive rather than patriarchal or anti-patriarchal.

442 RHETORICA Judy Z. Segal, Health and the Rhetoric of Medicine (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 208 pp., $50.00 cloth, ISBN 0-8093-2677-9. Humanists who study medical discourse are a diverse crowd. They hail from disciplines ranging from anthropology and bioethics to rhetoric and composition studies. Lacking a lingua franca, these scholars understandably draw from the divergent traditions of their primary fields. What has ar­ guably been missing is a comprehensive account of medical discourse aris­ ing squarely from the rhetorical tradition. University of British Columbia rhetorical theorist Judy Z. Segal's Health and the Rhetoric ofMedicine fills this void. Demonstrating the heuristic potential of rhetorical principles for un­ derstanding health and medicine broadly construed, Segal offers a series of lucidly-rendered case studies investigating the role of persuasion in shaping patients, practitioners, and illnesses alike. Segal insists on the uniqueness of particular medico-historical moments. In “Chapter One: A Kairology of Biomedicine," she advances “a study of historical moments as rhetorical opportunities" (23). To illustrate kairology's application, Segal traces shifting accounts of the patient narrator from the eighteenth century forward. Her emphasis is not medical history per se, but how medical history reveals the types of persuasion enabled by particu­ lar changes in medicine. Kairology thus informs the rhetorically-focused medical histories to come. However, her analyses derive insights from Ken­ neth Burke and an eclectic mix of classical and contemporary rhetorical theory. Segal presents seven analysis chapters flanked by a theoretically-based introduction and conclusion in a compact 158 pages of text. These build on Segal's previous publications including reprinted portions of three essays. After the opening chapter on kairology, "Chapter Two: Patient Audience, The Rhetorical Construction of the Migraineur" examines how physicians' char­ acterizations of headache patients influence the doctor-patient encounter and preferred treatments. Segal tracks the construction of the migraineur in medical writing from 1873 through the twenty-first century wherein the migraine personality has become situated in pharmacological terms. "Chap­ ter Three: The Epideictic Rhetoric of Pathography" analyzes illness narra­ tives, and their study, as value-laden rhetoric of praise and blame. Segal focuses on three complicating narrators: the pro-anorexia internet narrator who interpellates the community, the resistant narrator of Barbara Ehrenreich who challenges the tyranny of cheerfulness in breast cancer narratives, and the commercialized narrator of Carla Cantor whose hypochondria queststory represents the pathologized subject. "Chapter Four: Hypochondria as a Rhetorical Disorder" unpacks the strategic ambiguity of hypochondriacs' discourse recasting the condition from a medical mystery to a mystery of motive with historical and current examples. In "Chapter Five: A Rhetoric of Death and Dying," the book's most haunting and personal chapter, Se­ gal interrogates end-of-life rhetoric by analyzing dialogue surrounding her Reviews 443 mother's death and advanced care planning interviews to argue that in­ stitutionalized end-of-life encounters structurally impede fair deliberation. "Chapter Six: Values, Metaphors, and Health Policy" awakens the "sleeping" metaphors in health-care-policv rhetoric, exposing the values underlying medicine is war, diagnosis is health, and body as machine, for example. "Chapter Seven: The Problem of Patient 'Noncompliance': Paternalism, Expertise, and the Ethos of the Physician" addresses problems of physician authority as embedded in the terms patient non-compliance, adherence, and concordance. In her concluding section, Segal underscores the rhetorical lexicon's utility for comprehending medicine and health. Segal ably mixes insightful application of principles to particular cases with mid-level theorizing about the place of rhetoric in medicine and health. Although she draws from an interdisciplinary reservoir, her core an­ alytic concepts are well known to suasion scholars: kairos, genre, audience, metaphor, narrative, interpellation, and ethos. A second strength is her at­ tention to intersecting interactional, public, and institutional discourses. Her persistent focus on persuasion, clear prose, and accessible explanation of concepts make this volume a solid choice for upper-division undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetoric. It should also be useful for medical human­ ists who want to access rhetorical insights: her book shows how rhetorical thinking can uncover historical particularities while fostering generalized insights. The scope of cases considered is impressive, as are the connections to history of medicine scholarship. One of the...

Reviews 439 Those are a few additions to the documentation of Renaissance rhetoric, in the spirit of the open-minded exchange of knowledge which has distin­ guished all of Professor Plett's work. This is not his best book, but it is one which ev ery serious rhetoric library should have, and one from which few readers will fail to profit. Brian Vickers Andrew W. Robertson, The Language ofDemocracy: Political Rhetoric in the United States and Britain, 1790-7900 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005) xix 4- 264 pp. This is a reissue in paperback, with a new Preface, of a book originally published by Cornell Univ ersity Press in 1995. Readers who missed it the first time around hav e another opportunity to consider an interesting and well-reasoned argument that has significant implications for the history of 19th century British and American rhetoric. Robertson is concerned with political rhetoric, which he further restricts to campaign discourse, largely as reported in newspapers. This is a narrow, reductionist view of the subject that may limit the generalizability of his findings, but it does not damage his argument on its own terms. He examines how political culture evolved in Britain and the United States during the 19th century (between 1790 and 1900). The overall answer is that the audience for politics widened and political discourse became more vernacular. It shifted from a laudatory discourse deferring to men of distinguished character, to a hortatory discourse seeking support for specific policies. It appealed less to an elite audience and more to a popular audience. These changes effectively dissolved the boundary between deliberative and epideictic. Having identified this important change, Robertson seeks to account for it. He finds a significant relationship between newspaper coverage and political practice. Specifically, the evolution of printing technology and the institution of advertising made it possible to sell low-cost newspapers to a large audience. This capacity, in turn, influenced trends in newspaper content. And an emerging understanding of what would satisfy a mass audience affected the practice of politicians. Their talk became focused more on policy and less on character, more on demands for specific outcomes and less on deference to men of exceptional judgment. It became more tense, more intense, more partisan, and more competitive. In 1790 the 18th century norms of genteel discourse were still dominant; by 1900 the basis of 20th century politics had been established. Interestingly, however, this change came later in Britain than in the United States. There was a gradual shift in what the term "the people" was understood to mean. Originally it referred to the educated elite who were 440 RHETORICA assumed to be in agreement with political leaders; gradually it came to designate a larger, more heterogeneous public among whom disagreement was likely and whose support must be won and not assumed. The American political audience had enlarged and considerably democratized by the 1820s, when Andrew Jackson claimed to embody the public will. Not because of his noble character but because of his platform, was he deserving of public support. In contrast, the British debates on reform during the late 1820s and early 1830s took place without an expanded press or public. They were much less populist in character. Yet by mid-century, British editorial writers fused discussion of leaders and their policies, as in the United States. Robertson credits the transplanted American editor William Cobbett with instigating the use of hortatory rhetoric in Britain. While it might seem that evolutions in discourse reflected merely the impersonal forces of economics and technology, Robertson believes that they were solidified by the rhetorical prowess of Abraham Lincoln in the United States and William Ewart Gladstone in Britain. What both men had in common, he argues, was the ability to deliver to an immediate, elite audience a speech that was also (and perhaps primarily) intended to be read by a large and anonymous national audience. In overhearing messages and easily imagining themselves among the audience, the citizenrv became accustomed to thinking that political discourse really was intended for them. From that point, the distinction between politics and entertainment broke down. The emergence of the popular political cartoon in the 1870s is evidence of...

After the conference at Luca in 56 BC, where Caesar, Crassus, and Pompey renewed their Triumvirate, Cicero was forced to accept a compromise, which appears in the orations that he delivered to defend both the Triumvirs (De prouinciis consularibus) and his own enemies (defence of Vatinius and Gabinius). In a letter to Lentulus Spinther of December 54, Cicero justified his new political attitude toward the popular leaders. Designed as a plea, this letter, one of Cicero's longest, raises the question: “What similarity is there between a letter and a speech in court or at a public meeting?” (Fam.IX, 21, 1). Relying on the intertextuality of the letter to Lentulus with the oration Pro Plancio, delivered four months previously, this paper considers how Cicero adapts appropriateness and decorum to his addressee and displays a rhetoric that is half way between judicial eloquence and epistolary discourse.

After the conference at Luca in 56 BC, where Caesar, Crassus, and Pompey renewed their Triumvirate, Cicero was forced to accept a compromise, which appears in the orations that he delivered to defend both the Triumvirs (De prouinciis consularibus) and his own enemies (defence of Vatinius and Gabinius). In a letter to Lentulus Spinther of December 54, Cicero justified his new political attitude toward the popular leaders. Designed as a plea, this letter, one of Cicero’s longest, raises the question: “What similarity is there between a letter and a speech in court or at a public meeting?” (Fam. IX, 21 1). Relying on the intertextuality of the letter to Lentulus with the oration Pro Plancio, delivered four months previously, this paper considers how Cicero adapts appropriateness and decorum to his addressee and displays a rhetoric that is half way between judicial eloquence and epistolary discourse.

Abstract The celebrated inventor of the “Ocular Harpsichord” is less well known as the author of Mathématique universelle, published in 1728. In this work, the Jesuit teacher develops a cheerful method of instruction in inspired by his desire to popularize a discipline hitherto marked with the seal of austerity. In order to clear away the illusory superiority of professional geometers, Father Castel makes argumentative breaks from tradition, aiming to devalue the ethos of contemporary mathematicians. Through textual analysis of certain rhetorical professions such as candid directness (aretè), ostentatious goodwill (eunoia) and, in a more general sense, the dissociation of appearance from reality, the present study seeks to place in evidence certain ethical concerns which were shaking Jesuite learned world in its confrontation with the new epistemology of the century of the Enlightenment.

432 RHETORICA Rhetorica ad Herennium and what are we to make of these differences? How useful pedagogically is Cicero's approach and how innovative is his interest in prose rhythm? Overall, however, F. has provided us with a book likely to prove a turning point in the appreciation of De Oratore by modern Anglophone scholars and students of rhetoric. Armed with this introduction and the translation of May and Wisse, teachers will now be able to incorporate the text into surveys of ancient rhetoric in a convenient and accessible fashion. They will find in the dialogue stimulating views on key rhetorical issues, as well as a number of original contributions to the established tradition. And in F.'s survey they will find a first rate elucidation of them.7 Jon Hall University of Otago, New Zealand J. Axer, ed. Rhetoric of Transformation, Osrodek Badari nad Tradycj$ z Antyczn$ w Polsce i Europie Srodkowo-wschodniej, Studies and Essays 6 (Warsaw 2003). This collection of essays, most of them presented at the 13th Biennial Congress of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric held in Warsaw in 2001, was published by the Centre for Studies on the Classical Tradition in Poland and East-Central Europe, of which Axer, past president of the society, has been director since its inception in 1991. Rhetoric, Axer observes in the book's preface, is emerging as an important element in public life in regions that have been undergoing radical social and political transformations in recent years. Accordingly, several of the essays bear on developments in Poland and Ukraine; and others concern Kenya, South Africa, Spain, and post-unification Germany. There are some additional papers dealing with rhetoric as part of a liberal arts education. All of the papers save one are in English. Poland is the subject of five of the papers. Cezar Ornatowski's "Rhetor­ ical Regime in Crisis: The Rhetoric of Polish Leadership, 1980-1988" (pp. 91-106) traces shifts in the rhetoric of formal public policy speeches ("ex­ 7There are a few minor typographical errors that I list here in case they can be remedied in a paperback version (which, one hopes, will not be long in appearing): p. 110, n. 18: ius needs to be italicised; p. 155: Pro Archia 19 in one line, pro Archie 21 in the next; p. 180: dianoia needs to be italicised; p. 214: 'Cicero s speech much have created a sensation ; p. 227: period needed at the end of the paragraph before the sub-heading "Thanking the People"; p. 265: period needed after "Caesar Strabo (3.146)"; p. 271: bracket after “abasio, 45" not needed; p. 272: period needed after "(3.156-66)". On p. 230, n. 32, the speech delivered Pro Rabirio in 63 was not the Pro Rabirio Postumo but the Pro Rabirio Perduellionis Reo. Reviews 433 poses") by Polish prime ministers from Eduard Babiuch through Jaruzelski (1981) to Rakowski in 1988. What we see there, Ornatowski writes, is disengagement from classic communist discourse and a move toward a more pragmatic, less ideological mode of "democratic" socialism; and Ornatowski show this in his examination of shifts in the controlling pronouns from the ambiguous "we" to the "personal" "I." Jerzy Bartminski, in "Where Are We? A New Linguistic Conceptualization of the National Space in Polish" (pp. 107-13), examines key terms marking a cultural shift in Polish self-perception from an East-orientation to one more distinctly to the West, rehearsing a long debate on what constitutes "Central Europe" and whether to define it as at the periphery of Europe, on the one hand, or of the (former) Soviet Union, on the other. Piotr Urbanski's "blow (Not) to Speak about the End? Rhetoric of Contemporary Polish Eschatological Sermons" (pp. 140-48) calls attention to the rhetorical incompetence of much Polish preaching that betrays poor seminary training and fails to stay in touch with new theological trends. Stanislaw Obirek S.J. explains how deeply held dogmatic beliefs made real communication (dialogue) impossible as they transform theology into ideol­ ogy in "Theology Tempered by Ideology: Peter Skarga S.J. (1536-1612) and Jan Wyszenski (1545-1620)." And Tomasz Tabako attempts to track the develop­ ment...

Reviews 329 Analyse verdeutlicht sich die zentrale Stellung von Hirschvelders modus epistolundi ." (S. 71). Auch hier wird der Begriff "überlieferungsgeschichtlich" falsch verwendet, und die Behauptung einer Spannung zwischen Latinitàt und Humanismus laPt sich wohl nur als unsinnig qualifizieren. Ich breche an dieser Stelle ab, ohne auf Details weiter einzugehen ("Ausgew àhlte Folii (!)", S. 287; "Peter Zainer" statt Johann Zainer, S. 326; kein Nachweis von GW-Nummern bei Inkunabeln, GW fehlt auch im Literaturverzeichnis ; Überbewertung von Wasserzeichenbefunden für Datierungsfragen , S. 55 u.ô.; unbrauchbarer Vergleich mit Sangspruchdichtung Boppes, S. 84). Letztlich bleibt als Mehrwert der Arbeit gegentiber der bisherigen Forschung allein der Textabdruck, der einen für Germanisten und (Bildungs-) Historiker interessanten Textbestand verfügbar macht und dem einen oder anderen die Reise nach München oder die Bestellung eines Microfilms erspart . Auch hier wird man allerdings fragen dürfen, ob der Hinweis auf die Richthnieii fiir die Edition lundesgescluchtlieher Quellen von Walter Heinemeyer (2. Aufl. Hannover: Selbstverlag des Gesamtvereins der Deutschen Geschichts- und Altertumsvereine, 2000) als editionstheoretische Grundlage für eine germanistische Edition ausreichend ist. Insgesamt genügt das Buch den Anforderungen, die an eine historisch-philologische Arbeit gestellt werden müssen, nicht. Albrecht Hausmann Georg-Angust-Universitat Gottingen Michel Meyer, Lu rhétorique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004), 130 pages, ISBN 213053368X. As its title Lu rhétorique suggests, this little book has large ambitions only the most seasoned rhetorician can entertain seriously. And Michel Meyer is certainly that. Successor to Chaim Perelman in the Rhetoric Chair at the Brussels Free University and author of at least 16 related books (4 of which have been translated into English), Meyer is unarguably a leading figure in the fields of rhetoric and argumentation, especially in continental Europe. So Meyer clearly has the authority to take on such an ambitious project. The question is how successful is he in this case. Clearly the book is a success insofar as it succinctly summarizes and updates the original theory of rhetoric Meyer has been working on for at least twenty-five years. Judged on its novelty in comparison to his previously published work and judged by its potential impact in the field of rhetorical studies and beyond, my assessment is less rosy. First the strengths, which are substantial. Written for the popular series "Que sais-je?" (PUF) that seems to greet you just inside the door of every French bookstore, Lu rhétorique covers the field in a manner well designed for the educated nonexpert, and it does so in the systematic fashion that has become a hallmark of Meyer s work. After 330 RHETORICA defining rhetoric on page 10 as "the negotiation of the difference between individuals on a given question" (la rhétorique est la négociation de la différence entre des individus sur une question donnée), Meyer then recasts the entire history and theory of rhetoric from this point of view. And he does so with the confidence that can only come well into a lifetime of focused inquiry, when relevant hot points have been thought and rethought in a variety of contexts and with a variety of audiences in mind. Ancient rhetoric is recast to highlight Aristotle's placement of ethos, pathos, and logos on equal footing (versus those who would privilege the audience, the orator, or the speech); rhetoric's later history is briefly traced as it is "metastasized" in literature, politics, poetics and so on; a call is made for rhetoric's reunification in a systematic theory; and then Meyer delivers that theory with a final demonstration of how it can be used to recast our understanding of the human sciences, the study of literature, and the modern phenomena of propaganda and publicity. Quite a project in 123 pages! And no wonder it is not entirely successful. But let me further elaborate the strengths. Most important is Meyer's thorough commitment to question-andanswer as the motivating structure of all discourse. This perspective trulv sets him apart from both the classical rhetoricians he most admires, such as Aristotle, and his more immediate influences in the field of argumentation theory, such as Stephen Toulmin and Chaim Perelman, it is this perspective that leads to Meyer...

Reviews La potenza della patota. Destmatan, fimziotii, bersagli, Atti del convogno di studi (Siena, 7-8 maggio 2002), a cura di S. Beta, (Fiesole: Edizioni Cadmo, 2004), 179 pp. La potenza della parola è un agile volume, sesto tra i Quadernidel ramo d'oro, ed è il frutto di uno dei convegni organizzati dal Centro Interdipartimentale di Studi Antropologici sulla Cultura Antica dell'Università di Siena, che per istituzione coniuga discipline e approcci scientifici diversi per lo studio del Mondo Antico. Il tema è—come indica il titolo—quelle della parola efficace e dei suoi funzionarnenti sulle tracce in particolare delle teorie sugli speech acts del filosofo del linguaggio J. L. Austin (How to Do Things with Words, Oxford 1962) e dei più recenti sx iluppi dell'antropologia del linguaggio. I contributi spaziano dall'epica omerica al profetismo africano e aile odierne campagne elettorali americane. Ma alla diversité di culture e di approcci corrisponde una notevole interazione tra gli studiosi, che ha trovato la sua gestazione prima e durante il convegno, e poi ancora nella fase di redazione del volume (tra le moite indicazioni v. pp. 15 n. 1, 133-35, 149 n. 1). In particolare rappresenta un punto di convergenza di interessi e di prospettive di analisi per tutti gli autori (v. p. es. alie pp. 43s., 101s., 104 n. 8, 117, 130s., 136) l'intervento dal titolo II fare del linguaggio di Alessandro Duranti, che è posto a sigillo del volume (pp. 149-66). Infatti si tratta di un approccio per eccellenza interdisciplinare, quello proprio dell'antropologia lingüistica, che studia il linguaggio come prassi, divertiré, potenzialità e azione sociale (v. A. Duranti, Antropología del linguaggio, Roma 2000, p. 30). L'oratoria samoana, che è stata l'oggetto di numerosi studi da parte dell'A., costituisce il primo spunto per una verifica sul dire comefare: quando in un consiglio di villaggio si passa dalla celebrazione del passato alia discussione politico-giudiziaria, si puo osservare come la transizione sia marcata dalla formula tatou talatalanoa 'parliamo(ne) insieme', la quale indica una forte corrispondenza tra parola e azione. Per i Samoani il verbofai vale sia 'dire' che 'fare', cosí viga ha il valore sia di 'significato' che di 'azione'. Parole diverse—se ne deduce—rendono possibili mondi diversi. Salle tracce di Austin il dire come fare deve essere concettualizzato nella prospettiva del contesto e degli interlocutori piuttosto che in quella delle intenzioni (il cui ruolo è stato sottolineato invece da J. R. Searle e da H. P. Grice, cf. Durand Rhetorica, Vol. XXIV, Issue 2, pp. 217-232, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . U2006 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re­ served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm. 218 RHETORICA 2000, pp. 206-11). Il significato di un enunciato è il prodotto di un'interazione ed è proiettato verso gli effetti che esso produce. L'A. presenta poi una seconda prospettiva d'indagine sul linguaggio come costruzione del Sé nel rapporto con gli interlocutori. L'esempio proposto è relativo al discorso politico, in quanto parola che per eccellenza viene agita in pubblico. Per il candidato delle elezioni americane Walter Capps la potenza del racconto diviene azione, la narrativité è utilizzata di fronte agli elettori per creare una persona, un Sé politico nelPinterazione tra l'enunciato e gli interlocutori, anche al di là delle stesse intenzioni del locutore. È quello che avviene a Odisseo tra i Feaci—come possiamo osservare dalla nostra pro­ spettiva épica—, quando attraverso la narrazione ritorna a essere un eroe, anzi è proprio attraverso il suo stesso racconto che diviene l'eroe del nostos, prima ancora che attraverso i1 canto degli aedi. Un'ultima valutazione riguarda l'agentività (agency), di cui PA. propone una definizione: è «la propriété di quegli enti che (i) hanno un certo grado di controllo sulle loro azioni, (ii) le cui azioni hanno un effetto su altri enti (e a volte su se stessi), e (iii) le cui azioni sono oggetto di valutazione» (cf. A. Duranti, Performance and Encoding ofAgency in Historical-Natural Languages, in SALSA Proceedings, vol. 9, eds. K. Henning, N. Netherton...

Reviews 403 faith not only to sustain the congregation but also to encourage it to confront social injustice and work for racial uplift. Collectively, these women's spatial and rhetorical strategies point to an alternative method for crafting effective ethos and promoting Christian community. The epilogue addresses whether or not the "populist" preaching prac­ tices employed by O'Connor, Hill, and Moore are "feminine" ones. While acknowledging that a number of male church leaders (including Henry Ward Beecher, post-Vatican II priests, and African American preachers) have used similar methods, Mountford argues that women's abandonment of the pul­ pit, disclosure of the personal, and efforts to level hierarchy represent a significant "ritual transgression of sacred space" and tradition (156). In other words, women preachers choose alternative discursive methods and de­ livery styles in order to create ethos in a place and position traditionally antithetical to them. The Gendered Pulpit represents an important step toward understanding how gender affects discourse and rhetorical performance. Mountford con­ cludes by inviting other feminist rhetoricians into the new theoretical home afforded by a refigured fifth canon of delivery, and she encourages them to build upon her foundation and undertake further studies of women min­ isters in sacred spaces. Mountford's fine work makes a convincing case for the fifth canon as a promising site for investigating gender and rhetoric and, ultimately, for making the entire discipline inclusive and comprehensive. Lindal Buchanan Kettering University Cheryl Glenn, Margaret M. Lyday, and Wendy B. Sharer, eds., Rhetor­ ical Education in America. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004. 245 pp. This volume reconsiders contemporary rhetorical education from the perspective of the history of rhetoric. The editors provide a helpful intro­ duction (Glenn) and afterword (Lyday and Sharer). Many of the essays were plenary presentations at a Penn State Rhetoric Conference organized by the editors. The volume's most successful essays link a study of how rhetoric was historically taught with how it might be taught today. In "Lest We Go the Way of the Classics: Toward a Rhetorical Future for English Departments," Thomas P. Miller reviews the history of composition teaching as a history of crises of literacy, and suggests that we now need a curriculum that will move us from the traditional interpretive stance of the critical observer to the rhetorical stance of the practical agent involved in negotiation. Shirley Wilson Logan, in "'To Get an Education and Teach My People': Rhetoric for Social Change," examines the self-help schooling of nineteenth-century African 404 RHETORICA Americans for clues to help today's disenfranchised communities. Logan calls for "consilience," that is, a linking of knowledge across disciplines, and a rhetorical education that concentrates as much on critiquing and evalu­ ating contemporary discourses as on producing writing. With meticulous scholarship, in "Parlor Rhetoric and the Performance of Gender in Postbellum America," Nan Johnson reveals the conservative réinscription of gender roles in the potentially liberating growth of manuals for parlor rhetoric after the Civil War. Gregory Clark reminds us of the range of American rhetorics in his examination of the national park as a public experience establishing a shared sense of national collectivity, a training ground for citizens who need to respond to public conflict with transcendence. Essays by William Denman and by Sherry Booth and Susan Frisbie are not as strong. Denman argues that rhetoric lost its civic purpose during the nineteenth-century expansion that attempted to keep out the vulgar and the foreign by policing the borders of oral and written communication, but he ignores the growth in specialized textbooks and conduct-book rhetoric that offered rhetorical education to working class and female students. Booth and Frisbie argue that metaphor should be central to rhetorical education and analyze their qualified success in teaching metaphor to their students, but they mistakenly suggest that Aristotle did not find metaphor important to rhetoric and their claim that Renaissance rhetoric emphasized style not content has been significantly revised in recent scholarship. Other essays offer perceptive variations on the collection's theme of the history of rhetoric as a guide to future teaching. Susan Kates links James Raines's revision of the history of English to include respect for Appalachian English...

The parliamentary diary of Sir Henry Cavendish, probably the most detailed record of speaking practices in the eighteenth- century House of Commons, confirms the claims made, from the beginnings of the rhetorical tradition, for the power of ethos as a means of persuasion. Yet precisely because it is such a valuable rhetorical resource, the parliamentarian’s character inevitably excites contradiction and dissent. Drawing on the debates reported by Cavendish, this article argues that the influence of party divisions in the later eighteenth-century House sharpened these contests for character. It concludes by illustrating the tendency of the speaker’s character, even as it is constructed in parliamentary discourse, to disclose the terms in which it may be challenged or negated.

Reviews 301 Quintilian and the Law: The Art of Persuasion in Law and Politics, ed. Olga Tellegen-Couperus (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2003). While there is some evidence (pp. 1, 191) that the title of this book reflects its original scope (and that of the conference that underlies it), its actual contents range much more widely around the central figure of Quintilian. Many papers are entirely concerned with the history and analysis of rhetorical theory. Nonetheless, the papers concerning law are the most coherent group and, by and large, the most ambitiously argued. After making a few general observations on the whole volume and briefly treating the contents of the twenty-five individual papers, I will turn primarily to two questions regarding the utility of the Institutio Oratoria for lawyers which make up the most sustained topics of discussion. The essays collected here were written by scholars from diverse fields (law, classics, rhetoric, literary theory, comparative literature) and of diverse, mostly European, nationalities (Spain and Holland are particularly well represented). All papers have been rendered into what is for the most part very readable English. Also, despite their origin in a conference in 2001, most of the papers come equipped with the kind of scholarly apparatus one expects in a written work. Nearly all the papers treat a single book (or smaller segment of the text) as their subject, with a few verging on being running commentaries. Jorge Fernández Lopez studies sources of authority, both for texts and for persons. Serena Querzoli views Q.'s education project in the context of concrete evidence for contemporary educational practice. Tomás Albaladejo develops a theoretically informed analysis of the three genera of oratory, tying them to communicative function more than "occasion" (narrowly defined). Olivia Robinson investigates the opportunities and pitfalls of using Q. as a source for Roman law. Ida Mastrorosa argues Q.'s text is substantively shaped by his court-room experience. Giovanni Rossi discusses the reception of classical rhetoric by (mostly) seventeenth century Venetian lawyers (this piece has the least to do with Q. specifically). Belén Saiz Noeda treats the theory of proof within and according to Q., especially with respect to the use of topoi. Andrew Lewis clarifies a usually under-translated phrase at 5.13.7 by reference to the facts of legal procedure. Maria Silvana Celentano demonstrates the value of self-exemplification in book 6. Jeroen Bons and Robert Taylor Lane translate and analyze IO 6.2 from a philosophical point of view. Richard A. Katula discusses the means of exploiting emotion in venues (ancient and modern) in which that practice is normatively disfavored. José-Domingo Rodríguez Martín investigates the relative weight of oratory (especially pathos) and law in the Roman courtroom. (Katula's piece is to some extent "how to"; Rodríguez Martin's is relatively more historical.) David Pujante's discussion of status theory shows that dispositio is not just an afterthought to inventio, but is itself constitutive of interpretation. Maarten Henket advocates the use of Quintilianic strategies to bring more predictability to judicial law-making. Jan Willem Tellegen reinterprets the 302 RHETORICA casua Curiana by reevaluating the Quintilianic evidence. Francisco ChicoRico analyzes the virtues of style and their hidden connections to the other operations of rhetoric. The editor offers two contributions of her own. In one she offers a compelling rereading of a quoted sententia (8.5.19) by consideration of the legal context. In the other she gives a similarly constructed interpretation of a troubled passage at 9.2.65-6. Barend van Heusden gives a cognitive semantic account of the notion of figured discourse. James J. Murphy explains Q.'s plan for adult education. Sanne Taekema focuses more specifically on the motives behind Q.'s choice of canon, by way of a comparison with the goals of the modern Law and Literature movement. Peter Wiilfing gives an account of ancient and modern gestural culture. Esperanza Osaba tries to reconstruct the circumstance ofjudicial appeal alluded to at 11.1.76. Vincenzo Scarano Ussani shows how the Quintilianic perfect orator is fitted to the circumstances of the contemporary (i.e. imperial) community Willem Witteveen argues that Q.'s deep rhetoric...

AbstractIndirect discourse presents problems in that it is speech that has been altered from the oral strategy that is deployed in direct discourse. Most particularly, references to actio seem to be irrelevant since indirect discourse is not a constituent of the context to which it refers. It appears, nevertheless, to be placed in context by references to words and gestures which are derived directly from actio. The gestures that reinforce speech arise from a veritable rhetoric of seduction, especially in respect of their theatricality, and vocal characteristics can be sensed even at the level of phrasing in indirect discourse. This too, therefore, is part of the rhetoric of speech.

310 RHETORICA especially troubling for colonial discourse analysis, which is given a cursory treatment in Chapter Four but could have been developed in more depth and usefully applied in all of the examples. The last point draws attention to the fact that Schuetz does not develop an overarching thesis for her study in her brief introduction, and offers no separate conclusion. It is thus never clear what might hold these eleven very different chapters together beyond their interest as examples of governmentIndian relations or as examples of the diversity of rhetorical theories. The individual chapters consist mainly of summaries of the relevant history for the particular case study; surprisingly, there is little actual analysis. The conclusions to the individual chapters will likely seem obvious both to scholars actively engaged in American Indian studies and to American Indian peoples who live in the aftermath and ongoing legacies of these histories. The explanatory, theoretical, and activist potential of rhetorical analysis for these cases is left largely untapped. Chadwick Allen Ohio State University Jeffrey M. Suderman, Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: George Campbell in the Eighteenth Century. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001. 293 pages. Readers of Rhetorica are not the audience Jeffrey Suderman targeted in writing Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: George Campbell in the Eighteenth Century. Suderman writes that he was motivated to undertake this study to correct the imbalance of Campbell's modern reputation—as the author of the Philosophy of Rhetoric—and his contemporary reputation, which rested more on his Dissertation on Miracles and on his translation of the Gospels. Furthermore, Suderman claims that historians of the Enlightenment have devoted too much attention to atypical figures, especially skeptics such as Hume, Voltaire, and Gibbon, to the neglect of representative figures, such as Campbell. As a result, today Campbell is known "only to a few specialists" in rhetoric who read the Philosophy ofRhetoric "without a broader appreciation of his life and thought" (4-5). In contrast, Suderman would reconstruct the George Campbell that eighteenth-century audiences knew, and ... find what was representative in his thought" (6). To me, Suderman's seems a wrong-headed approach to Campbell, whose work (except for the Philosophy of Rhetoric) is as unremarkable as it is representative, but his perverse accounting of Campbell's achievement does not much compromise the usefulness of a book that is a model of a scholarship. Suderman divides his book into three parts: a biographical section (968 ); a section on the "Enlightened Campbell," which examines the origins of Campbell's thought in eighteenth century empiricism (69-178); and a section Reviews 311 on the "Religious Campbell," which examines Campbell as a biblical scholar and Christian polemicist. In appendices, Suderman lists all of Campbell's extant letters, each identified by library and manuscript number, and the manuscripts Suderman used in his study, some of which were not previously identified. Future Campbell scholars owe him thanks. The picture of Campbell that emerges from Suderman's biographical chapters is not substantially different from what we could piece together from Lloyd Bitzer's Introduction to his edition of the Philosophy of Rhetoric and from Lewis Ulman's work on the Aberdeen Philosophical Society. But Suderman adds more details to make this the most complete and reliable biography we have. Section II groups together the Philosophy of Rhetoric, the Dissertation on Miracles, and the Lectures on Ecclesiastical History as constituting Campbell's program to establish Christianity on rational grounds. Suderman therefore reads the Philosophy of Rhetoric in order to derive Campbell's philosophy of mind, concluding that Campbell's faculty of psychology and his discussion of evidence support the conclusion that belief in God and Christian morality can be rationally justified on empirical grounds. Scholars of rhetoric will find of particular interest Suderman's analysis of memory and his stress on the importance of the argument from design as the guarantor of the reliability of our reasoned conclusions. In Section III, "Revealed Knowledge: the Religious Campbell," Sud­ erman attempts to delineate Campbell's theology, discusses Campbell's en­ gagement with his Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, and Dissenting critics, and examines his translation of the Gospels. Suderman identifies Campbell's the­ ology as "mitigated" Calvinism (205). My conclusion...

Reviews Janice Schuetz, Episodes z/z the Rhetoric ofGovernment-Indian Relations. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002. ISBN 0-275-97613-0. xxii + 316 pages. Relations between the United States government and American Indian nations, tribes, or individuals, in all periods of U.S. history, are notoriously resistant to easy analysis or straightforward conclusions. For one thing, the written record is typically incomplete and often heavily biased, in both form and content, against Indian interests. For another, the U.S. academy has been slow to develop adequate research methodologies or innovative theoretical tools that promote scholarship that will be relevant not only to academics but also to Indian peoples themselves. The interdisciplinary fields of ethno-history and American Indian studies have made important strides in these directions over the past couple decades, but there is still a high level of disagreement over which approaches are most appropriate and productive. A carefully researched and specifically-situated rhetorical analysis of significant texts in the history of U.S.-Indian relations would add an important perspective. Unfortunately, Episodes in the Rhetoric of Government-Indian Relations by Janice Schuetz, Professor of Communication at the University of New Mexico, offers neither ground-breaking archival research nor innovative theory. The book's main appeal is its ambitious scope: each of the eleven chapters analyzes a different "episode" in U.S.-Indian relations, from the mid-nineteenth century through the late twentieth century. Moreover, like an introductory textbook to rhetorical theories, each case study employs a different method of analysis: the dramatistic theories of Kenneth Burke are applied to the Pugent Sound War of 1854-58: genre theory is applied to the so-called Sioux Uprising of 1862; speech act and political spectacle theory is applied to the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864; colonial discourse analysis is applied to the history of the Navajo Long Walk and Internment of 1846-68; Victor Turner's theories of ritual and redress are applied to Zuni Witch Cases of 1880-1900; and theories of lamentation are applied to the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. Given the range and diversity of cases, Schuetz's presentation and analysis of individual episodes is necessarily limited. Although the breadth of her reading in Indian history is impressive, it is also highly selective for any particular case and, in general, does not add new evidence or points of view. Furthermore, it is often unclear why individual theories were chosen for, and restricted to, particular cases. This is© The International Society for the History of Rhetoric, Rhetorica, Volume XXI, Number 4 (Autumn 2003). Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center St, Ste 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223, USA 309 310 RHETORICA especially troubling for colonial discourse analysis, which is given a cursory treatment in Chapter Four but could have been developed in more depth and usefully applied in all of the examples. The last point draws attention to the fact that Schuetz does not develop an overarching thesis for her study in her brief introduction, and offers no separate conclusion. It is thus never clear what might hold these eleven very different chapters together beyond their interest as examples of governmentIndian relations or as examples of the diversity of rhetorical theories. The individual chapters consist mainly of summaries of the relevant history for the particular case study; surprisingly, there is little actual analysis. The conclusions to the individual chapters will likely seem obvious both to scholars actively engaged in American Indian studies and to American Indian peoples who live in the aftermath and ongoing legacies of these histories. The explanatory, theoretical, and activist potential of rhetorical analysis for these cases is left largely untapped. Chadwick Allen Ohio State University Jeffrey M. Suderman, Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: George Campbell in the Eighteenth Century. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001. 293 pages. Readers of Rhetorica are not the audience Jeffrey Suderman targeted in writing Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: George Campbell in the Eighteenth Century. Suderman writes that he was motivated to undertake this study to correct the imbalance of Campbell's modern reputation—as the author of the Philosophy of Rhetoric—and his contemporary reputation, which rested more...

Reviews 199 nitá della sua opera per attribuirla ad Aristotele, affidandogliela come ad un padre adottivo. Ed in realtá, come ben osserva il Velardi, la Rhetorica ad Alexandrum deve non soltanto la sua fama, ma molto probabilmente la sua stessa sopravvivenza fino ai nostri giorni, al fatto di essere stata ritenuta opera aristotélica. Il volume é corredato da una serie di indici: Indice dei luoghi citati, Indice delle cose e della parole notevoli, Indice dei nomi. Ferruccio Conti Bizzarro Universita Federico ÍI, Napoli Nan Johnson, Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866-1910, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), pp. 220. Nan Johnson's first book, Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America (1991), has been called "the most comprehensive assessment yet published of the rhetorics that shaped the teaching of English composition and pub­ lic speaking in the nineteenth century" (Miller 1993). It is an admirably well-researched account of how American college and university students were taught the rhetorical skills necessary for careers in the courtroom, leg­ islature, and religious professions, and has proved an invaluable resource for both historians and teachers of rhetoric and composition. However, in Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America, Johnson is silent about women's relationship to this dominant male tradition of rhetorical instruction. It is this relationship which her second book, Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866-1910, takes as its focus. Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866-1910 is one of three inaugural titles in a new series, Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms, edited by Cheryl Glenn and Shirley Wilson Logan for Southern Illinois University Press. In part, the book is a project of historical recovery, reconstituting a separate tradition of rhetorical training for women in postbellum American society. In this respect, it fits into a body of feminist scholarship on the history of rhetoric that begins with Doris Yoakum's 1943 article "Women's Introduction to the American Platform" and includes Lillian O'Connor's Pioneer Women Orators: Rhetoric in the Antebellum Reform Movement (1954), Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's two-volume Women Public Speakers in the United States: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook (1993, 1994), Andrea Lunsford's Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition (1995), Shirley Wilson Logan's "We Are Coming: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women" (1999), and Jacqueline Jones Royster's Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women (2000). However, while Johnson praises these texts for carrying out the vital and ongoing work of situating prominent and forgotten women speakers in rhetorical history, 200 RHETORICA she differentiates her own historiographical method from such remapping projects (7). Johnson's purpose is not to redraw the rhetorical map by restoring forgotten contributions to the rhetorical tradition, but to ask why it is that women's contribution had been—until the advent of these projects—so com­ pletely excluded from the twentieth-century canon (10). To answer this ques­ tion, Johnson examines a wide range of nonacademic rhetorical materials, including elocution manuals, conduct books, and letter writing guides, that comprised a late nineteenth-century pedagogy of "parlor rhetoric" (2). Draw­ ing upon terms and concepts established by feminist historians to describe the gendered ideology of nineteenth-century American culture—the "cult of domesticity," the "cult of true womanhood," "Republican motherhood"— Johnson argues that the parlor rhetoric movement, while purporting to offer rhetorical training for both sexes, prescribed separate and unequal roles for both men and women (4). Men were to exercise oratorical power in the political domain, while women were to use their rhetorical skills to exert influence in the domestic sphere. This popular pedagogy defined a very tra­ ditional role for women and effectively guarded "access to public rhetorical space in American life" (16). The history of the erasure of women from the rhetorical canon, Johnson suggests, began in the nineteenth century, since the parlor rhetoric movement's relegation of women to a subordinate rhetorical role legitimized their erasure from twentieth-century histories of rhetoric (10). Johnson's argument seeks to answer why it was that, in spite of their struggle for a greater public role, white middle-class women at the end of the nineteenth century were...

Nicolaus Caussin’s Eloquentia sacrae et humaneae parellela (1619) forges a distinctly modern history of rhetoric that ties discourse to culture. What were the conditions that made this new history of rhetoric possible? Marc Fumaroli has argued that political exigency in Cardinal Richelieu’s France demanded a reconciliation of divergent religious and secular forms of eloquence that implicated, in turn, a newly “eclectic” history of rhetoric. But political exigency alone does not account for this nascent pluralism; we also need to look at the internal dynamics of rhetorical theory as it moved across literate cultures in Europe. With this goal in mind, I first demonstrate in this article how textbooks after the heady days of Protestant Reformation in Germany tried in vain to systematize the passions of art, friendship, and politics. Partially in response to this failure, I then argue, there emerged in France a new rhetoric sensitive to the historical contingency of passionate situations. My claim is not simply that rhetoric is bound to be temporal and situational, but more precisely that Caussin initiates historical rhetorics: the capacity to theorize how discourse is bound to culture in its plurality and historical contingency.

Reviews Scott Consigny, Gorgias: Sophist and Artist (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001). 296pp. Why the Sophists? Why Gorgias? Why now? W. K. C. Guthrie points to a rupture in the history of sophistic studies that leads to some preliminary answers: "It is true that the powerful impetus of this movement [i.e., the revival of sophistry since the 1930s] was given by the rise of totalitarian gov­ ernments in Europe and the second world war, and it was indeed disturbing to learn that the aim of the German Nazi Party, as described in its official programme, was the production of 'guardians in the highest Platonic sense'" (The Sophists, Cambridge University Press, 1971, p. 10). Among classicists, historians, and philosophers, the interest in sophistic studies that emerged out of this historical rupture was defined by a negative impulse: If Plato's ideas support immoral ideologies, then we must turn instead to the ideas of his most bitter rivals, the Sophists. Yet the revival of sophistry specifically within rhetorical studies took on a different character. Instead of being defined by a negative impulse, studies of sophistic rhetoric were defined by the positive search for affinities between ancient and modern theories of persuasion. Robert Scott and Michael Leff, for example, found precedents for epistemic rhetoric among the sophistic fragments, and John Poulakos invoked sophistic notions of propriety and the opportune moment in his universal definition of rhetoric. Scott Consigny's Gorgias: Sophist and Artist represents a new phase in studies of sophistic rhetoric. In this complex and well-written book, Consigny avoids making problematic generalizations about "the Sophists," who were, in reality, a thoroughly disparate group of traveling teachers; he does not rely excessively on Plato's dialogues as source materials for Gorgias's art of rhetoric; and he resists the neosophistic impulse to appropriate ancient doctrines for modern purposes. In his introduction, Consigny discusses prior scholarship on the Sophists and the method of historiography that informs his analysis. Here Consigny contends that the fragmentary nature of Gorgias's texts, their questionable authenticity, and the ambiguous language in which Gorgias wrote create a "hermeneutic aporia," an interpretive impasse. Some "objectivist" scholars attempt to escape this aporia by suggesting that there is a single, correct interpretation of Gorgianic rhetoric, and it is the function of historical schol­ arship to discover it. Other "rhapsodic" scholars argue that the meaning© The International Society for the History of Rhetoric, Rhetorica, Volume XX, Number 3 (Summer 2002). Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center St, Ste 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223, USA 299 300 RHETORICA Gorgias intended in his writings is now lost forever, and they use subjective interpretations of Gorgianic rhetoric to construct neosophistic theories that have modern relevance. Consigny, on the other hand, draws from Stanley Fish's notion of interpretive communities, arguing that pure truth is inacces­ sible and pure subjectivity is insufficient. Scholarly conventions established in academic discourse communities should guide our interpretations of Gor­ gianic rhetoric. While much prior scholarship identifies Gorgias as either a subjectivist or an empiricist, Consigny favors a newly emerging third school of criticism that identifies Gorgias as an antifoundationalist. Consigny begins his antifoundationalist reading of Gorgianic rhetoric with an interpretation of On Not-Being as an attack against both philosophical truth and empirical realism. In other texts (Epitaphios, Helen, and Palamedes), Gorgias articulates a more positive antifoundationalist theory of language based on the ancient notion of the contest or agon. Here language is defined by context, by the play of interaction among participants in a linguistic game that is governed by communal rules, and words derive meaning from their role in this interaction. Within such a framework, foundational truth is impossible since each context brings with it a different set of constraints, and radical subjectivity is also impossible since these very same constraints prevent chaos. Next Consigny argues that Gorgias articulates a nascent social con­ structionist view of knowledge in which established social conventions (or "tropes") condition individuals to act in communally authorized ways. Yet Gorgias is not in favor of a micro-social theory of conventions that separate communities by focusing on their foundational...

This essay examines Montaigne’s admiration for ancient Sparta from a rhetorical and an ideological standpoint. The praise of Sparta in the Essais takes the form of a paradoxical encomium which allows Montaigne to challenge the received opinions of his time and to define his own values against the prevailing discourse of humanism. In the process the Essais also confront the problem of comparing the past to the present and of reconciling ancient and modern institutions. In this way the praise of Sparta emerges not only as a rhetorical exercise but also as an essay of self-definition and an inquiry into historical relativism.

Although Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–1673), did not belong to the scientific community which after 1660 formed itself around the Royal Society, several of the philosophical issues discussed there are reflected in her writings. Lengthy reflections on language and style which run through her philosophical works provide evidence that the linguistic and rhetorical debates of the early Royal Society also left their mark. The isolation which Cavendish faced as a woman writer obliged her to discuss problems of terminology and style even more intensively, thereby adhering to the rhetorical principle of perspicuity which Thomas Sprat demanded in his proposal for a scientific plain style. The influence of the New Science on Cavendish’s work becomes obvious when her later writings are compared to her earlier ones where traces of a courtly and more elitist understanding of style can still be found. In this paper the development of Cavendish’s stylistic attitudes is traced in several of her works, including her Utopian narrative The Blazing World (1666).

Reviews Thomas A. Szlezak, Reading Plato, trans. Graham Zanker (New York: Routledge, 1999), xii + 137 pp. This short book will be interesting to all readers of Plato and all those who have pondered the relationship of oral and written discourse. It consists of twenty-seven short sections (2-6 pages each) the totality of which makes the following argument: Plato's philosophy can best be understood when read in the light of his critique of writing in the Phaedrus. According to Szlezak, nineteenth and twentieth-century readers have misunderstood and misinterpreted Plato's dialogues. This is so, he explains, because they have paid insufficient attention to Plato's critical comments on writing, because they have tended "to align the great thinkers of the past with the attitudes of [their] own times" (p. Ill), and because thy have confused Plato's esotericism, which is directed to a cause, with the notion of secrecy, which is directed to power (p. 115). Szlezak observes that starting with Schleiermacher "the modern devo­ tees of the god Theuth" (p. 41) have missed the intent of Plato's critique of writing. Consequently, they have supplemented the text of the Phaedrus in in­ admissible ways. Their graphocentric orientation and anachronistic readings have kept them from seeing Plato's repeated point that written philosophy itself can only go so far; to go further, it needs support, the kind that only the dialectician's oral logos can provide. Szlezak applies Plato's critique of writing to most Platonic dialogues, and shows that most of the recent interpretations have little, if any, merit. This is so, he argues, because the internal evidence of several dialogues points not to what is written but to what remains to be spoken about the texts at hand. Rather than read each dialogue separately, Szlezak reads across several dialogues, and identifies seven structural features they all share: 1) they typically depict conversations, with only occasional monologues within the conversational framework; 2) the conversations are place- and time-bound, happen between true-to-life participants most of whom are historically verifi­ able; 3) they all have a discussion leader, generally Socrates; 4) the discussion leader converses with one partner at a time, and in some cases he replaces the real partner with an imaginary one; 5) the discussion leader answers all objections, introduces all elements helpful to the conversation, refutes all other participants but is never himself refuted; 6) the conversation is raised to a higher level in the course of warding off an attack; and 7) none of the© The International Society for the History of Rhetoric, Rhetorica, Volume XIX, Number 3 (Summer 2001). Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center St, Ste 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223, USA 341 342 RHETORICA dialogues comes to a definite conclusion, they all point to the need for further investigation and reflection, and they all have one or more "deliberate gaps" (pp. 18-19; 103-108). Szlezak does not argue for the general superiority of oral discourse over its written counterpart. Rather, he shows that oral discourse has a higher status but only for those capable of playing the role of a philosopher, more specifically a dialectician in the Platonic tradition. To play such a role requires that one identify significant topics for discussion (it is simply not the case that any one topic is as good as any other), expedite the discussion through poignant questions, refute objections, and defend doctrines committed to writing. Effectively, a Platonic dialectician possesses something of higher value (ta timiotera) than his philosophical writings (p. 49). This something consists of doctrines whose articulation happens orally and whose function is to support, defend, or extend written doctrines. Reading Plato is a good piece of scholarship, it guides the reader through Plato's dialogues carefully and thoughtfully. And it raises questions that expose the limitations of the disciples of Derridolatry. At the same time, however, it brings attention to several theoretical issues that Szlezak does not address. For example, how is a contemporary reader to "adapt himself to the perspective of the author, against all kinds of prejudices and resistance which are specific to...

Ever since Plato, the Sophists have been seen as teaching "the art of persuasion", particularly the art (or skill) of persuasive speaking in the lawcourts and the assembly on which success in life depended. I argue that this view is mistaken. Although Gorgias describes logos as working to persuade Helen, he does not present persuasion as the goal of his own work, nor does any other Sophist see persuasion as the primary aim of his logoi. Most sophistic discourse was composed in the form of antilogies (pairs of opposed logoi), in which category I include works like Helen where the other side—the poetic tradition Gorgias explicitly cites as his opponent—is implicitly present. The purpose of these works is primarily to display skill in intellectual argument, as well as to give pleasure. Persuasion may be a goal of some sophistic works, but it is not their primary goal; and teaching the art of persuasion was not a major concern of the Sophists.

346 RHETORICA Roman notions of politics and ethics. Marijke Spies studies the claims made by an Amsterdam chamber of rhetoric, the Eglantine, that its writings on the art of rhetoric - which focused on natural human reason, took its examples from the vernacular and familiar, and gave instances of negotiation - were part of a process of reconciliation after the city left the Spanish crown to join the Dutch Republic in 1578. Several articles use ideas from classical rhetoric to interrogate modern German literature. Helmut Schanze discusses the relationship between the­ atrical speech and political oratory by examining the use of the metaphors of theatre and forum in Goethe, Jean Paul and recent studies of television and digital media. Gert Otto examines modern funeral orations by Max Frisch, Heinrich Boll and Christa Wolf in the light of the classical (Thucydides) and romantic (Grillparzer, Borne) traditions of consolatory oratory. Theodor Verweyen discusses the use of metonymy in Bertolt Brecht and Gottfried Benn in the light of modern analyses of classical theories this trope. Several of the modern pieces focus on the speech act and its context Rainer Schulze describes how studies of rhetoric have interacted with cognitive linguistics in the analysis of metaphors as constituents of understanding. Thomas O. Sloane mischievously argues that playing with words engenders a famil­ iarity and therefore a competence in playing with ideas—within defined playgrounds. As this brief notice has shown, the volume should be read as an un­ usually generous number of Rhetorica rather than a exploration of different aspects of a single topic (the editors wisely steer clear of an introduction). The wide range of the essays, literary critical, historical and theoretical, is a just tribute to the dedicatee's scholarship. Ceri Sullivan University of Wales, Bangor Georgia Clarke and Paul Crossley eds, Architecture and Language: Con­ structing Identity in European Architecture c. 1000—c. 1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). This volume of collected papers is noteworthy as containing the first extensive studies by art historians to acknowledge and explore the influence of teaching and theory of rhetoric on writings about architecture and on architectural practice in the Renaissance and early modern period. We have had a number of good books and articles on the influence of rhetoric on painting and on music in the Renaissance, and many works on architecture discuss political and social meanings of buildings without actually using the word rhetoric or employing rhetorical terminology, but until now we have lacked good assessments of the indebtedness of architectural treatises to Reviews 347 rhetorical invention, arrangement, and style, including viewing the classical orders of architecture in terms of rhetorical commonplaces, all of which is done in chapters of this book. The first four chapters discuss the language used by medieval writers to describe features of architectures in England, France, Italy, and Germany. It was only with Leon Battista Alberti, writing in the mid-fifteenth century, that the concepts and vocabulary of classical rhetoric entered architectural treatises. In "Architecture, Language, and Rhetoric in Alberti's De Re Aedificatoria ", Caroline van Eck shows that Alberti's source for theory and termi­ nology was not so much Vitruvius's De Architecture, as usually believed, but classical works on rhetoric by Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and others. (There is an English translation of Alberti's treatise by J. Rykwert et al., published by the Harvard University Press, 1988.) Cammy Brothers then continues the subject with a chapter entitled 'Architectural Texts and Imitation in Late-Fifteenth- and Early-SixteenthCentury Rome". Debates ox er imitetio and eemuletio among Renaissance rhetoricians are echoed in architectural writing, and Brothers concludes that "the desire for authoritative models emerges from architectural treatises with increasing clarity over the course of the sixteenth century and parallels the development of an increasingly strict Ciceronianism" (p. 100). Subsequent chapters that will especially interest students of the history of rhetoric include "Sanmichelli's Architecture anti Literary Theory", by Paul Davies and David Hemsoll; "Architects and Academies: Architectural Theories of Imitetio and Literary Debates on Language and Style", by Alina A. Payne; and "The Rhetorical Model in the Formation of French Architectural Language in the Sixteenth Century: The Triumphal Arch as a Commonplace", by Yves Pauwels. Important rhetorical terms...

342 RHETORICA dialogues comes to a definite conclusion, they all point to the need for further investigation and reflection, and they all have one or more "deliberate gaps" (pp. 18-19; 103-108). Szlezak does not argue for the general superiority of oral discourse over its written counterpart. Rather, he shows that oral discourse has a higher status but only for those capable of playing the role of a philosopher, more specifically a dialectician in the Platonic tradition. To play such a role requires that one identify significant topics for discussion (it is simply not the case that any one topic is as good as any other), expedite the discussion through poignant questions, refute objections, and defend doctrines committed to writing. Effectively, a Platonic dialectician possesses something of higher value (ta timiotera) than his philosophical writings (p. 49). This something consists of doctrines whose articulation happens orally and whose function is to support, defend, or extend written doctrines. Reading Plato is a good piece of scholarship, it guides the reader through Plato's dialogues carefully and thoughtfully. And it raises questions that expose the limitations of the disciples of Derridolatry. At the same time, however, it brings attention to several theoretical issues that Szlezak does not address. For example, how is a contemporary reader to "adapt himself to the perspective of the author, against all kinds of prejudices and resistance which are specific to modern times"? How can one identify the author's intention? Granted, "Plato's own devaluation of writing" (p. xii) has been devalued or inverted; but how are we to locate his oral or unwritten philosophy? What processes are involved in the move from the written to the spoken? Had Szlezak engaged these questions, his book would hav e been more interesting. Despite his silence on these matters, Szlezak renews the incentive for reading Plato and enjoying "the artistic perfection of his philosophical dra­ mas" (p. 1). Likewise, he tacitly reaffirms the notion that reading and inter­ preting Plato silently are only two steps of a three-step process; the third step involves participating in oral discussions of the written doctrines Plato left behind. John Poulakos University of Pittsburgli Greig Henderson and David Cratis Williams eds, Unending Conversa­ tions: New Writings by and about Kenneth Burke (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), xviii + 233 pp. Jack Selzer, Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village: Conversing with the Moderns, 1915-31 (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1996), xx + 284 pp. These recent studies of Kenneth Burke make significant strides towards a reappraisal of Burke s theories by situating their arguments within a variety Reviews 343 of academic discourses. However, neither text does so at the expense of Burke's relevance to rhetoric. Selzer's study skillfully demonstrates Burke's wider literary relevance. Likewise, Unending Conversations publishes for the first time selections from Burke's unfinished aesthetic theory and compiles essays considering his inter-disciplinary relevance. Adopting current notions of a modernist period "less a coherent and lin­ ear movement today.. .and more a controversy or conversation" (p. 4) Selzer demonstrates his familiarity with current trends in modernist scholarship at the same time as he employs Burke's famous metaphor of life as an "unend­ ing conversation". Primarily using Burke's extensive correspondence, Selzer tracks his intellectual development throughout the 1920s. The text's first two chapters describe Burke's integration into a number of Greenwich Village's artistic cliques and present the text's thesis: Burke "shaped and was shaped by modernist ideas during the first fifteen years of his career" (p. 6) of his participation in the modernist "conversation". Chapter 3 contextualizes Burke's early "classroom" attempts at symbol­ ist poetry within its overall influence on modernist art and his sometimes contentious relationship with his friend William Carlos Williams. The chap­ ter continues to suggest that Burke's early interest in symbolist poets led to his first pieces of analytical criticism (p. 84). Chapters 4 and 7 examine Burke's short fiction and only novel respec­ tively. Among the most interesting aspects of the book are these chapters' description and analysis of his work, both in terms of their aesthetics and as a means of suggesting their theoretical anticipation of...

Reviews Jeffrey Walker, Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), xii + 396 pp. In this lengthy, densely argued volume, Jeffrey Walker engages two particularly contentious issues in the history of rhetoric, offering a novel reconstruction of rhetoric's origins and a revised account of the relation­ ship between rhetoric and poetics in Classical Greece and Rome. This dual focus is reflected in the organization of the study. Parts I and II (ch. 1-4) concentrate primarily on a reading of the rhetorical tradition originating in pre-Aristotelian sources and extending to the "second sophistic" of im­ perial Rome. In Parts III and IV (ch. 5-11), Walker uncovers the rhetorical dimensions of archaic Greek poetry and then traces the tension between grammatical and rhetorical elements in the major (and several minor) Greek and Latin poetic theories. In the first two chapters, Walker advances three claims that are defended at length in the remainder of the book: (1) that the distinction between rhetoric and poetics featured in the standard histories is illusory and has resulted in distorted characterizations of both arts; (2) that the fundamental or "primary" manifestation of rhetorical art is not deliberative or forensic oratory, but rather the various verse and prose forms of epideictic discourse; (3) that accounts of rhetoric's periodic decline in the face of restricted op­ portunities for "practical", political oratory neglect the vital socio-political significance assumed by epideictic eloquence in nearly all periods. Cen­ tral to Walker's argument, then, is an expanded conception of "epideictic". Developing an insight of Chaim Perelman, Walker rejects the traditional characterization of epideictic as a decorative genre, simple entertainment or "mere display", and attributes to it broad suasive and ideological functions: epideictic, for Walker, is "that which shapes and cultivates the basic codes of value and belief by which a society or culture lives" (p. 9). Thus conceived, the epideictic category cuts across the prose-poetry divide, as Walker would include much poetry—including archaic lyric poetry—within it. This enlarged conception of epideictic enables Walker to locate the ori­ gins of rhetoric in discourse practices that predate by centuries the theoretical conceptualization of the art of persuasive oratorical speech (this is the thrust of ch. 2). In this respect, Walker's study represents a healthy alternative to the recent work of scholars such as Thomas Cole and Edward Schiappa which identifies the "birth" of rhetoric with the fourth-century advent of a prop­ erly technical and theoretical vocabulary or "metalanguage". If Walker's 125 126 RHETORICA redescription of epideictic gives grounds for rejecting the narrow concep­ tion of rhetoric offered by Cole and Schiappa, it also confounds the wellknown distinction between "primary" and "secondary" rhetoric. In George Kennedy's formulation, primary rhetoric is associated with practical oratory, with speeches delivered orally in deliberative and forensic settings. This for­ mulation encourages epideictic's treatment as secondary, textual, literary and aesthetic. Walker reverses this narrative and the impoverished notion of epideictic it inscribes: "the epideiktikon is the rhetoric of belief and desire; the pragmatikon [dikanic and demegoric genres] the rhetoric of practical civic business...that necessarily depends on and appeals to the beliefs/desires that epideictic cultivates" (p. 10). Viewed in this frame, epideictic becomes "the 'primary' or central form of rhetoric" while deliberative and forensic speeches are derivative, applied forms of a more general logon techne (p. 41). In Part II (ch. 3-4), Walker considers the fortunes of rhetoric in the Hel­ lenistic and Roman imperial periods. Opposing the traditional characteriza­ tion of these periods as marking rhetoric's decadence and decline, Walker offers a more complicated narrative of a competition between two relatively distinct rhetorical traditions. The first version is that founded by the early sophists and given fullest expression in Isocrates' logdn paidea; it stresses the broad, culture-shaping function of poetic-epideictic eloquence. This tradi­ tion, Walker contends, is preserved in the fragments of Theophrastus and in later authors as diverse as Demetrius, Hermagoras, Dionysius, and Cicero (in De oratore). The second version of rhetoric is more narrow and technical, and by the late Hellenistic period focused almost exclusively on the practice of judicial oratory. This is...

This article examines the ideological functions of seventeenth-century ceremonial oratory by distinguishing between two related rhetorical strategies: textual image and propaganda, defined as the promotion of a policy. This distinction helps characterize the particular nature of Louis XIV's régime, instead of anachronistically equating it with modern totalitarianism. If pursued in other contexts it can serve to illuminate the mechanisms of personality cult in general. Fashioning an image of the ruler with the help of an institutional apparatus which varies with the régime is a way to create public confidence in his/her ability. A well-established absolutist monarchy should not require propagandistic discourse; yet it was ubiquitous in Louis XIV's global design for government. This suggests a dialectical interpretation. When belief in the monarch's greatness fails to produce blind faith in his/her infallibility, propaganda may take over to bolster persuasion. When counter-propaganda, or facts, become insistently present, image may again appear as an expedient alternative.

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...

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...

Research Article| February 01 2000 Short Reviews: Plato's Sophist, by Martin Heidegger, Chaucer and the Trivium: The Mindsong of the Canterbury Tales, by J. Stephen Russell, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters, by Lynne Magnusson, “We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women, by Shirley Wilson Logan and Critiques of Knowing: Situated Textualities in Science, Computing, and the Arts, by Lynette Hunter Martin Heidegger,Plato's Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and AndréSchuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), xxvii + 476 pp.J. Stephen Russell,Chaucer and the Trivium: The Mindsong of the Canterbury Tales (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), x + 266 pp.Lynne Magnusson,Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), x + 221 pp.Shirley Wilson Logan,“We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 255 pp.Lynette Hunter,Critiques of Knowing: Situated Textualities in Science, Computing, and the Arts (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), vi + 239 pp. Michael J. MacDonald, Michael J. MacDonald Department of English, The University of Illinois at Chicago, 601 South Morgan Street, Chicago, Illinois 60607-7120, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Anne Laskaya, Anne Laskaya Department of English, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon 97403, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Judith Rice Henderson, Judith Rice Henderson Department of English, University of Saskatchewan, 9 Campus Drive, Saskatoon SK S7N 5A5, Canada Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Jacqueline Jones Royster, Jacqueline Jones Royster Department of English, The Ohio State University, 421 Denney Hall, 164 West 17th Avenue, Columbus, Ohio 43202, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar C. Jan Swearingen C. Jan Swearingen Texas A & M University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2000) 18 (1): 103–117. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2000.18.1.103 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 Michael J. MacDonald, Anne Laskaya, Judith Rice Henderson, Jacqueline Jones Royster, C. Jan Swearingen; Short Reviews: Plato's Sophist, by Martin Heidegger, Chaucer and the Trivium: The Mindsong of the Canterbury Tales, by J. Stephen Russell, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters, by Lynne Magnusson, “We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women, by Shirley Wilson Logan and Critiques of Knowing: Situated Textualities in Science, Computing, and the Arts, by Lynette Hunter. Rhetorica 1 February 2000; 18 (1): 103–117. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2000.18.1.103 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 2000, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric2000 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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...

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...

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...

This essay argues that in 1 Thessalonians, Paul uses eschatological discourse—language about the end of time—in order to evoke a symbolic world-view in which his readers become God’s elect, living at the end of time and awaiting the sudden, imminent return of Christ from heaven. This self-identification explains their present misfortunes, while at the same time demanding that they fulfill the ethical and moral demands of the Christian faith. More broadly, this essay points to the role that eschatological discourse played within early Christianity in general, suggesting that it formed a central, paradigmatic drama which helped to define ontological and teleological reality for the movement’s adherents.

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.

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

Reviews 441 discrepancy between ideal simplicity and actual practice, as for instance among the Byzantine iconoclasts who were also patrons of secular art. At the least, this study on the tensions between modes of discourse suggests interesting directions for further study. Jameela Lares University ofSouthern Mississippi 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. This is a collection of essays by different authors on women who either wrote against, or were victimized by, misogynists. It closes where it begins, with Carole Levin and Patricia Sullivan associating Hillary Clinton and four queens: Isabel, Catherine de Médicis, Elizabeth I and Mary II (pp. 7, 275-81). It is a connection made in other papers, but here it is supported by another between the Republican Rev. Pat Robertson and John Knox (pp. 4-5). Where these title essays are destined to be short-lived, the critical essays sandwiched between vary enormously in subject and approach, are learned, and bear re-reading. But as there is no apparent theme to the entire book, and the organization is simply chronological, I try to group the material here into meaningful clusters. Only Jane Donaworth, choosing examples from Madelaine de Scudéry, Margaret Cavendish, Margaret Fell, Bathusa Reginald Makin, and Mary Astell, especially in Part 2 of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1697), deals with the call for a revival of classical rhetorical education for women. Throughout the rest of this book "rhetoric" has other meanings. Daniel Kempton explores how Christine de Pizan teaches women to survive male oppression by 'dissimulation' or hypocrisy in Cité des Dames (1405) and Trésor de la Cité Des Dames. "Rhetoric" means "cant" or "slander" in the demonising of Anne Boleyn that Retha Wamicke describes; in the reiteration of allusions to women as breeding stock that Jo Eldrige Carney identifies in Shakespeare s Henry VIII; and in the representation of women as commodities to 442 RHETORICA be bought, sold, won or lost in the wagers of Puritan Whigs that Arlen Feldwick produces multiple examples of in the royalist Margaret Cavendish's comedies. In balancing the accusations of promiscuousness leveled by Jacobites against Mary II, or eulogies by her supporters, W. M. Spellman urges rejection of conventional seventeenth-century biographical material in order to reassess Mary's active political role in episcopal appointments. There are three essays on Elizabeth I. Ilona Bell contrasts de Feria's and de Quadra's accounts of Elizabeth's "rhetoric of courtship", comparing "Camden's retrospective vision of the virgin queen" (pp. 61, 77). Lena Cowen Orlin collects examples of Elizabeth's "spousal trope", of her "fictional motherhood" of her state and nobles, and her "trope of royal kinship" towards a "figurative family of European sovereigns" (pp. 89-95). Dennis Moore places Henry Howard's unpublished "Dutiful Defence of the Lawful Regiment of Women" (1590) into the context both of other defenses of female rule, and attacks upon it. Elaine Kruse compares propaganda against Hillary Clinton with that used against Catherine de Medicis after the 1572 massacre at Paris, and Marie Antoinette, all vilified on the grounds that they control power. And Elizabeth Mazola sees in Anne Askew's semiautobiographical Examinations her "larger project to educate her accusers about their epistemological faults" (p. 164). In the remaining essays the focus is not on rhetoric so much as on women and politics. Gwynne Kennedy describes Margaret Cavendish's reformist intentions in the History of the Life, Reign and Death of Edward II, where Cavendish repeatedly urges better government in practice rather than rebellion. The fly in the ointment is the Queen's vindictively cruel streak that manifests itself after she gains power: a "rhetorical marginalisation" that ' calls attention to...a disjunction in Isabel's characterization". There is also a separate note on Cavendish's authorship. And finally, Carole Levin describes two case histories of impersonation, the claim by Mary Boynton to be the daughter of Henry VIII and of Anne Burnell to be daughter of Philip II, reviewing the unfortunate consequences waiting those who almost talk their way into power. Although this book is in the SUNY series...

436 RHETORICA Takis Poulakos, Speakingfor the Polis: Isocrates' Rhetorical Education (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1997), xii +128 pp. Two ambiguities in Takis Poulakos's title provide a synopsis of the themes developed in this slim volume. In Isocrates' time and practice rhetoric was becoming domesticated; by performing classroom exercises students learned the art of speaking for—and not to—the polls. The rhetorical education designated as "Isocrates'" denotes both the rhetorical education Isocrates received and, Poulakos emphasizes, gleaned for himself; and the rhetorical education he crafted for his students. Perhaps the most innovative thesis advanced in Poulakos's re-reading of Isocrates' model speeches and teaching methods is the claim that the Athens Isocrates speaks for was moving away from an an elite, often xenophobic, hegemonic self conception at the end of Pericles' era and toward an acceptance of its diversity, and its need to negotiate with rather than conquer its neighbors. "Isocrates attempted to close the gap separating individual and collective interests as well as the gap separating Athenian and allied interests" (p. 53). Although Pericles' speechwriters were almost all foreigners, they crafted a discourse of Athenian superiority and homogeneity. Isocrates, the native Athenian, developed a curriculum based on assuming difference and thereby the necessity of creating commonality through training in character, agency, political, and social reform. In this, Poulakos locates Isocrates as a synthesizer of earlier divergent and often hostile rhetorical traditions, represented by Gorgias, Protagoras, and Plato. Poulakos traces the growing conceptualization of logos, oikos (as a domestic model for the city and for its discourse), agency, eloquence, reflection, deliberation, and education itself. These common places of Athenian speeches are preserved in Isocrates' speeches. As with Pericles' oration but with perhaps more deliberateness, each of Isocrates' speeches is a handbook of how to make a speech: once committed to memory each of the set themes and stock oppositions would transmit rhetoric about rhetoric and education about education to successive generations, transmitting a common language to an increasingly diverse Reviews 437 culture. Reversing the usual emphasis on the uniformity of classical rhetorical culture, Poulakos's discussions provide ample food for thought, and a number of contentions that readers will quarrel with, such as the claim that for Isocrates rhetoric resumes the role Plato had dreamed for it: "instruction in philosophy" (p. 9). The use of Greek is inconsistently accompanied by translations and transliterations, creating a sense that this is only half written for the Greekless reader. In the general project of reclaiming Isocrates as much more than a hack, Poulakos's work joins that of Kathleen Welch and others in reminding us that neither philosophy nor classics have been particularly kind to rhetoric. C. Jan Swearingen Texas A&M University David Roochnik, Of Art and Wisdom: Plato's Understanding of Techne (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996) xii + 300 pp. Roochnik claims that the conventional view of Plato's texts that link techne with moral knowledge must be modified. According to Roochnik, moral knowledge cannot be analogous to techne without insurmountable logical problems resulting. Roochnik reads many of Socrates' arguments in Plato's early texts as proving that wisdom cannot be rendered technical. Because wisdom is not a techne, Plato wrote dialogues rather than technical treatises to illustrate the performance of nontechnical wisdom. The book is organized into four lengthy chapters accompanied by four useful appendices. Chapter one provides a thorough examination of the preplatonic meanings of techne in Homer, Solon, Aeschylus, Sophocles, the Hippocratic writings, Gorgias, Isocrates, and Anaximenes of Lampsacus. The chapter culminates with an examination of the rhetorical techne of the sophists to illustrate the claim that the sophists believe that moral knowledge could be taught as a techne. I note in passing that in his analysis Roochnik accepts the conventional accounts of the rhetorical technai of the sophists that Thomas Cole and I have been doing ...

Reviews 447 Thomas W. Benson, Rhetoric and Political Culture in NineteenthCentury America (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997) 200 pp. This collection of essays developed out of the third biennial conference on Public Address that was held in 1992. The contributors range from scholars such as Edwin Black who helped define modern rhetorical criticism to critics who are working to adapt rhetorical criticism to broader trends in contemporary critical theory. The respect paid to "old historicist" examination of individual orators is balanced by "new historicist" attempts to situate individual agency within the social construction of discursive practices. Thomas Benson characterizes the collection as a "a series of close textual readings of significant texts in American rhetoric, inquiring into the text, the context, the influence of pervasive rhetorical forms and genres, the intentions of the speaker, the response of the audience, and the role of the critic" (p. xiii). However, the works that he has brought together often challenge the assumption that critics determine significance by looking into texts and outside to contexts to discover the intentions of authors and the responses of auditors. For this and other reasons, this collection should be read not only by those who specialize in the "art of public address" but also by others outside communications departments who are interested in revitalizing the civic orientation of rhetoric and composition. The contributors engage in critical dialogues that give the book a coherence and richness that is too often lacking in collections of isolated essays. After a foreword by James Andrews and an equally brief preface by Thomas Benson, Edwin Black's essay, "The Aesthetics of Rhetoric, American Style", introduces a theme that echoes throughout the collection and resounds in Robert Hariman's concluding "Afterword: Relocating the Art of the Public Address". Black calls for attending to the aesthetic dimension of rhetoric by distinguishing two aesthetic modalities: "a dispositional or structural aesthetic that is associated with a rhetoric of power, and a stylistic or textural aesthetic that is associated with a rhetoric of character" (p. 4). Black's essay is followed by four pairs of essays: James Farrell and Stephen Browne on Daniel Webster's Eulogy to Adams and Jefferson, John 448 RHETORICA Lucaites and James Jasinski on Frederick Douglas's "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?", Martha Solomon Watson and David Henry on the "Declaration of Sentiments" from the 1833 American Anti-Slavery Society and the 1848 Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention, and Michael Leff and Maurice Charland on appropriations of Lincoln in works by Henry Grady, Frederick Douglass, and Jane Adams. The second contributors respond to the methods of their predecessors to develop and often provocative discussion of critical assumptions and modes of interpretation. These exchanges broaden the significance of the explications themselves, especially for readers who are interested in assessing the state of the art in research on public discourse. Such an assessment is offered in the concluding "Afterword: Relocating the Art of Public Address" by Robert Hariman. According to Hariman, research on public address has interdisciplinary significance because "public performances" provide an insider's perspective on discursive structures in action (pp. 164-5). Hariman characterizes the tension between "the traditional study of oratory and modern communications studies" as leading to a current "standoff between a neoclassical revival and an appropriation of poststructuralism" (p. 166). He insightfully explores the limitation and potentials of each perspective and then argues that both could be enriched by an attention to "persuasive artistry" that accommodated a "hermeneutics of fragmentation" as well as a concern for "civic memory" (pp. 166-171). By complicating rather than resolving the conflicts among his predecessors, Hariman's conclusion provides a rich context for rereading their explications and considering their broader significance. Research on the arts of public address gains in significance as distinctions between public and private and aesthetics and rhetorics are being reconfigured across the academy. This collection should provide a useful point of reference for mapping and advancing those interdisciplinary trends. Thomas Miller University ofArizona ...

Reviews 439 scrutiny, it is the search itself that Plato portrays as exemplifying the life of philosophy. Roochnik says he is motivated, in part, by the belief that Plato's dialogues "can benefit us in these hypertechnical times" (p. xii). How Plato's writings can benefit us in this regard is unclear, though he appears unsettled by the rise of postmodernism nee rhetoric. Roochnik notes that "philosophy v. rhetoric is a fundamental dispute" that animates the entire book (p. 181). According to Roochnik, rhetoric is not a techne, rhetoric is distinct from philosophy, and Socrates was rhetorical but not a rhetorician. In sum, book offers a marvelously clear and thorough explication of the platonic case against rhetoric with which most readers of this journal are probably all too familiar. Edward Schiappa University ofMinnesota Peter Auksi, Christian Plain Style: The Evolution of a Spiritual Ideal (Montreal:McGill-Queen's University Press, 1995). Professor Auksi contends that there has been no broad study ■z of the Christian plain style in the West, and he proposes to fill the gap by tracing this stylistic ideal from its prehistory in classical rhetoric, through its biblical beginnings, its foundations in Paul and Augustine, its treatment by church fathers, and its fortunes in the middle ages to its culmination in the English Reformation, and particularly the seventeenth century. Such an ambitious study is indeed needed, and Auksi's text at least moves in the direction of its goal. Auksi's overall claim, made in his title and at intervals throughout, is that simplicity "evolves" as an ideal in Christian art, and particularly in Christian discourse. His numerous examples, however, demonstrate just the opposite. Rather than proving causal links between venous stages of an evolution record, Auksi shows that all the theorists ultimately derive their authority from Christ, Paul, and Augustine. It is the example of Christ, the statements in the Pauline epistles and De doctrina Christiana to which Auksi's theorists always return. Even the terms 440 RHETORICA he employs suggest the recursiveness of their enterprise: "renewal or reform" (p. 178), "return ad fontes" (p. 238), "restored or recovered" (p. 268). They also return to a finite number of scriptural commonplaces about the proper employment of classical rhetoric, likening it to the spoils of Egypt refashioned to godly use by the Israelites or to the captive heathen woman who may be married once her head is shaven and her nails pared. Christian plain style proves to be a changeless ideal which is constantly being rediscovered rather than a mutation in the history of rhetoric That there are no dinosaurs in this fossil record other than Christ, Paul, and Augustine is worth noting. Auksi's study unfortunately is compromised by its historical vagueness or even inaccuracy. In spite of the wide readership intended by his broad study, he provides little information as to the particular historical situations of various texts. Thus, for instance, he mentions the Byzantine iconoclastic controversies without any overall framework of dates of parties (pp. 84-86). Indeed, historical figures are inconsistently introduced. We hear for instance of Thomas of Celano (p. 107), but not when he lived nor why his account of Francis of Assisi is important. Throughout, examples are cited in no observable order, as when John Wilkins's late preaching manual is introduced before William Perkins's, albeit "the first and best" (pp. 289, 296). Auksi's terminology also sometimes ignores historical realities. The vexed term "puritan" goes undefined, and is often used either as if it represented a denomination separate but equal to the established Church of England, although there was but one church through the early 1640s in which many "puritans" were also "Anglicans", or as an unexamined synonym for the more enthusiastic sects, as the term was sometimes used at the time. But one asks an historical study to distinguish polemical labels from actual loyalties. Indeed, Auksi's occasional readiness to take his sources at face value leads him to some rather startling factual errors. He says, for instance, that Robert of Melun (f. 1150) "understands Plato's style" (pp. 100-101), when only a translated portion of the Timaeus was available to him. Auksi does however provide...

Short Reviews George Kennedy, Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Crosscultural Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Comparative rhetoric, the study of rhetoric across different cultural traditions, is a potentially rich, extremely challenging, and thus, largely untouched area of study. Anyone reviewing George Kennedy's book on this subject must begin by commending him for his scholarly dedication and, even more, his courage, in venturing into such a demanding subject. As he describes it in his prologue, comparative rhetoric involves using comparison to identify the universals and the particulars in various rhetorical traditions, and then formulating "a General Theory of Rhetoric that will apply in all societies", with concepts and terms applicable across cultures. Kennedy construes the object of this inquiry equally broadly, defining rhetoric as "a form of energy that drives and is imparted to communication". But Kennedy's comparative rhetoric very quickly becomes something much less ambitious. Kennedy gives pride of place to the terminology and theories of Western rhetoric, not just as a heuristically convenient starting point, but also as the limit of his inquiry. From Kennedy's perspective, the project is one of "test[ingj the applicability of Western rhetorical concepts outside the West" (p. 5). Specifically, to what extent can the rhetorical terminology of the Greco-Roman tradition describe the practices of other traditions? Kennedy makes two highly questionable methodological choices as he pursues this question. First, he rules out serious consideration of rhetorical terms and systems developed by other cultures, even as a categorization of their own practices, on the grounds that they are "unfamiliar" and their use would be "confusing" to the reader. Second, he refuses to explore the 431 432 RHETORICA possibility that Greco-Roman terms or concepts might be rooted in particular presuppositions that are not widely shared across cultures. With these two moves Kennedy has erased the most obvious sources of checks on, correction of, and resistance to his readings of these cultures. The "testing" of Greco-Roman rhetoric is reduced to a simple identification of similarities and differences; as Kennedy puts it, "I see no objection to the use of Western terminology to describe parts of a non-Westem discourse where these are clearly present" (p. 236). This is comparison with no methodological safeguards, and thus no struggle against such ever-present dangers of cross-cultural work as unreflective projection, forced comparison, and unexamined ethnocentrism. Caveat lector. The reader might be surprised to find that the first half of this book, titled "Rhetoric in Societies without Writing", begins with communication in animal societies. This reflects Kennedy's desire to ground rhetoric, not merely in human nature, but in nature itself; "[tjhe existence of elements of invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery in animal communication suggest that they are all natural parts of rhetoric" (p. 220). Kennedy then turns to speculation about the origins of human language, as a bridge to his discussion of rhetorical practices and terms in various non­ literate societies. The organizational principle here is developmental, for Kennedy believes that Australian aboriginal culture may allow us to see more clearly our (rhetorical) closeness to the animals, and also preserves the early stages of human rhetorical development. The objections to this kind of developmental theorizing have been voiced so often elsewhere that I see no need to reiterate them here. The second half of the book, titled "Rhetoric in Early Literate Cultures", starts with the Ancient Near East, moves to Classical China, then to India, and ends where it all began, with Classical Greece and Rome. In each chapter Kennedy introduces the culture's rhetorical practices, concepts, and theorizings, analyzes some representative examples of oratory or literary composition, and provides references and a bibliography. It is in these introductions to other literatures and the accompanying reference lists that I see one of the greatest values of Kennedy's book. These individual chapters will doubtless be Reviews 433 the starting points for quite some time for those interested in other rhetorical traditions. Although Kennedy validates these traditions by placing them under the aegis of Greco-Roman rhetoric, this still constitutes a step forward in our study of world rhetorics, and we can be grateful to him for taking this...