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...

Intertextuality is not only a literary but also a rhetorical phenomenon. Though largely neglected by modern scholarship, rhetorical intertextuality nevertheless looks back on a long tradition in print and communicative practice. Its manifestations are above all the commonplaces (koinoi topoi, loci communes) which represent not only abstract sedes argumentorum but also concrete formulae taken from pre-texts, literary and non-literary ones, that offer themselves for reemployment in texts of a derivative kind, in “littérature au second degré” (Genette) or, metaphorically speaking, in second-hand literature. The following aspects of the commonplaces deserve closer attention: their place (of publication), their re-cognition, their disposition, their genres, their multi- and intermediality, and their normativity. These facets constitute a complex spectrum of an intertextual rhetoric leading up to an “interrhetoric” which makes possible the recognition and analysis of such rhetorical phenomena as transcend the limits of a single text and of a single (e.g. verbal) sign-system.

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...

Reviews Laurent Pemot ed., Eloges grecs de Rome: Discours traduits et commentés (Paris: Les Belles Lettres 1997) pp. 198. Carlos Lévy et Laurent Pemot eds, Dire l'évidence: Philosophie et rhétorique antiques (Paris: Ed. L'Harmattan, 1997) pp. 448. The first book contains in translation two epideictic orations: the famous speech To Rome, (Eis ‘Ρώμην, en l'honneur de Rome, Or. xxvi) delivered in 144 by the then still young and unknown sophist Aelius Aristides when sojourning in Rome, and an oration written by an unknown sophist about 247 in honour of Philippus Arabs and transmitted under Aristides' name, Praise of the Emperor, (Eis Βασιλέα, En l'honneur de l'empereur, Or.xxxv). Both speeches belong to the genre of encomium, concern the Roman empire, especially its centre, the city of Rome and its emperor. Hence the part éloges...de Rome in the title, whereas the word grecs refers to the source language but also, at the same time, to the fact that these praise-speeches are written from a Greek point of view. The two speeches are published here for the first time in a French translation. It is a pleasure to read this version but I must leave a verdict on its Frenchness to others. The strongest point of this book, I think, is its introduction. It shows Pemot as an accomplished critic of the scholarly discussions on these speeches as well as—and this is more important—as a master in analyzing and discussing them. Of course, much of what Pemot says here, is already known from his Rhétorique de l'éloge dans le monde grécoromain (Paris 1993), where one may also find detailed comparisons with other speeches by Aristides, something which would be out of place in an introduction meant for a larger public. But it is very pleasing to have a thorough discussion of these speeches by themselves. It was also a good idea for Pemot to take two orations both concerning Roman power which at the same time are different© The International Society for the History of Rhetoric, Rhetorica, Volume XVII, Number 2 (Spring 1999) 213 RHETORICA 214 from a rhetorical point of view: Aristides is, although (probably) about 26 years old, a talented speaker, who knows how to play with the rules of the genre, whereas the author of the second speech closely follows these rules. It has been suggested, therefore, that this oration is just a school exercise but Pemot finds many reasons not to accept this suggestion. So the author must have been a mediocre orator who was not able to transcend the rules of his art. Thus one can apply the scheme of the basilikos logos from the handbook of Menander Rhetor to explain almost every feature of this oration. Aristides, however, also knows the rules of the genre and Pemot duly annotates many occasions on which what Aristides says and the topoi he uses can be compared with the theory known from rhetorical handbooks and the practice of older orations. But, to take one example, whereas when praising a city it is almost obligatory to deal with its history, Aristides ignores this aspect. The second publication under discussion concerns 21 contributions to a 1995 colloquium organised by the French branch of our Society under the theme of Dire l'évidence. Already its subtitle, Philosophie et rhétorique antiques, shows that a part of this collection is of an immediate interest to readers of this journal but other articles also offer important insights. The volume contains four sections, évidence et argumentation, l'évidence, obstacle ou accès à la connaissance?, images, imagination^ and l'ineffable. The connotations of the word évidence are manifold and those of its Latin source, evidentia, also, or even more, because it is a Ciceronian translation of the Greek enargeia. In the very first paper Barbara Cassin discusses the differences between the philosophical use of enargeia as an notion "liée à la vision, critère de soi, index sui, liée au vrai et au nécessairement vrai", whereas "l'évidence des orateurs est ï'energeia comme...un effet de logos,..liée au 'comme si' de la vision, à la vision comme fiction". It will...

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 97 mystics and celebrated preachers in Spain during the sixteenth century. This is the first rhetorical treatise intended for missionaries converting people from the East and West Indies. Studies of other rhetorical guides are found in the chapters on Fray Diego Valadés (ch.3), Bartolomé de las Casas and José de Acosta (ch.4) and José de Arriaga (ch.6). The study of Bernardino de Sahagún's General History of New Spain is one of the most important chapters of this book. Sahagún's text inserts a considerable range of reflections of the spiritual conquest of New Spain, and also reveals to the western world a survey of all aspects of Mexican religion, society and natural philosophy. The Amerindian contribution to the rhetorical tradition in Latin America is found in the huehuehlahtolli. These were the speeches delivered by the learned men, "the speeches of the elders". Abbot also studies the use and influence of the European rhetorical tradition in the readings and interpretations by this historian of the huehuehlahtolli. Abbot provides a much needed comprehensive and detailed examination of the theories and practice of rhetoric during the sixteenth and seventeenth century in Spanish America. He is successful in two important tasks: finding the points of contact and rupture between the European rhetorical tradition and the new emerging ideas about writing, oratory, and theory in the New World, and linking rhetorical theory to experiential knowledge and cultural understanding provided in colonial texts. SANTA ARIAS Florida State University Robert Crawford ed., The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 259 pp. This collection of articles presents a counter-narrative to previous histories of English Studies that have ignored the crucial role of Scotland in the institutionalization of English as a modem discipline. As the title suggests, the twelve articles in the volume use a variety of approaches to develop the thesis that "English Literature as a university subject is a Scottish invention" and to 98 RHETORICA explore the implications of this thesis in the context of issues such as national identity, cultural politics, and gender in Scotland, England, America, and Australasia. Robert Crawford introduces the volume by situating it within the context of recent accounts of the development of university English. He then addresses the establishment of courses in Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at St. Andrews, focusing in particular on the career of Robert Watson, who was appointed Professor of Logic, Rhetoric and Metaphysics in 1756. In the second article, Neil Rhodes continues Crawford's discussion of the curriculum at St. Andrew's by detailing the influence of Ramus on the teaching of Belles Lettres. Rhodes argues that it was the dissemination of Ramist pedagogy through the work of Roland Macllmaine at St. Andrews which led in the eighteenth century to the "redescription of Rhetoric as Criticism", first in the lectures of Watson and later in the work of Lord Karnes (p. 31). Joan Pittock focuses on the Scottish development of English Studies by examining the curriculum at Aberdeen. In her article, she illustrates the philosophical approach to Belles Lettres in the works of Aberdonian scholars such as David Fordyce, Alexander Gerard, and James Beattie, as well as the critical connections these scholars make between the concept of taste and the social and ethical development of students. The important social function of English Studies is also taken up by Paul Bator in his discussion of the novel in the Scottish university curriculum. Bator demonstrates the rise of the novel as a serious genre of study through careful analysis of lecture notes from Professors of Rhetoric at St. Andrews and Aberdeen Universities, acquisition and library borrowing records, and activities of the Edinburgh Belles Lettres Society. He argues that for Scottish professors of rhetoric in the eighteenth century "the novel provided a unique and unstoppable vehicle by which their students could observe and learn vicariously the manners of their English brethren" (p. 90). The new genre, then, functioned as a form of conduct literature through which the values of mainstream British culture were perpetuated in Scotland. Bator's analysis of the Edinburgh Belles Lettres Society, however, indicates that the study of the novel in the Scottish universities...

Reviews 91 from the margins—Margaret More, Anne Askew, and Queen Elizabeth I. In Chapter Five Glenn stresses the performative value of her project: the "promise that rhetorical histories and theories will eventually (and naturally) include women" (p. 174). She presents "four ways...[to] work together to realize...[these] performative...goals": we must recognize our common ground, "explore various means of collaboration", reevaluate the notion of "silence", and recognize the unlimited opportunities for research in this area (p. 174-78). This was a difficult book to write. Feminist rhetorical scholars have already identified at least three limits such revisions must observe: any feminist account of the history of rhetoric cannot stand alone, but must be continuous somehow with mainstream rhetorical histories; simply inserting "exceptional women" into an otherwise unrevised traditional account is insufficient; and only by exposing the cultural oppressions that silenced women can we hope to break their hold. Glenn succeeds brilliantly in balancing these demands as she makes the best connections she can among new kinds of (feminist) interdisciplinary research, while observing a time limit necessary for publication. Her accomplishment is significant, even though there are probably readers who will want to set the record straight about this historical person or that fact, or to join the pieces of the story more amply. Nonetheless, the space her work creates teems with opportunities for research and for insights about possible rhetorical selves for us all. MOLLY MEIJER WERTHEIMER Pennsylvania State University Molly Meijer Wertheimer, ed., Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997) 408 pp. Studies of women's contributions and challenges to the rhetorical tradition are still sparse but, thankfully, growing. Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities ofHistorical Women constitutes a welcome addition to this blossoming field. Edited by Molly Meijer Wertheimer, Listening to Their Voices comprises an RHETORICA 92 impressive array of eighteen articles on women's rhetorical activities in contexts ranging from Ancient Egypt to twentiethcentury Europe and America. Authored by American scholars (with the exception of one Canadian), these articles greatly increase the available research on women in the history of rhetoric. The range of historical periods and cultural contexts that the articles address underscores the neglected richness and diversity of women's contributions to rhetoric, as well as the extent of all that remains to be recovered and reinterpreted. Notably, the collection stretches the realm of rhetorical activity beyond its traditional focus on public, argumentative speech or writing to include, in particular, the non-traditional genres of private letter­ writing and conversation. The inclusionary diversity of Listening to Their Voices reveals, as Wertheimer notes in her introduction, a feminist appreciation of difference and multiplicity (p. 4). At the same time, this collection is well-unified. Its unity stems, most fundamentally, from the authors' joint assumption that the study of women's rhetorical activities is worthwhile and important to the history of rhetoric. As well, the articles demonstrate a consistently fine historical contextualization of the women rhetors and rhetoricians they discuss, uniformly avoiding the imposition of contemporary social categories on these women of the past, highlighting instead the cultural and political realities which motivated and shaped their rhetorical activities. In some cases, these activities are presented as those of an "exceptional" woman who was "able to be heard in the male public sphere" (p. ix). More intriguingly, in my view, several of the studies foreground the practices of communities of women as well as rhetorical activities addressed to contexts beyond the "male public sphere". The volume is divided thematically into four main sections, an organization that allows us to perceive non-chronological links between the articles' differing historical points of focus. I will review each section in turn, commenting only—in the interests of brevity, not of ranking—on several but not all of the articles. The first section, entitled "Making Delicate Images", includes three articles that highlight the difficulties of recovering the rhetorical roles and contributions of women within a patriarchal tradition. Cheryl Glenn, for example, relocates Aspasia "on the rhetorical Reviews 93 map" by sifting through and reading against the "powerful gendered lens" of references to her in male-authored texts (p. 24...

Reviews 443 historians than for those studying the impact of rhetorical tradition, practice, or survival. Its lack of focus renders it uninviting, but its very specialized, well-documented articles have much to offer. Victor Skretkowicz University ofDundee Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle, Loyola's Acts: The Rhetoric of the Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) xv+274pp. In Loyola's Acts, Marjory O'Rourke Boyle demonstrates that Ignacio Loyola's account of his life is deeply influenced by the traditions and techniques of classical rhetoric. In doing so, she challenges "the premise of modern interpretation, which regards Loyola's life as "an autobiographical narrative" which is "a factually historical document" (p. 2). In Boyle's view, Loyola's Acts {Acta patris Ignatii) is far from an autobiography in the twentiethcentury sense of that term. The work is, rather, is an example of what Boyle calls "the rhetoric of the self", a variation of the classical genre of epideictic oratory. The epideictic character of the Acts determines the text: "Although epideictic rhetoric assumed the matters for praise or blame to be true, it could by the rules exploit the techniques of fiction, so that every detail was not necessarily factual" (p. 3). So it is with Loyola's life, a narrative that is morally true, but not necessarily empirically accurate. As epideictic rhetoric, rather than autobiography, the Acts is an exercise in praise and blame: praise of God's glory and condemnation of Loyola's vainglory. Although the title suggests that Loyola's Acts is about Loyola's life, Boyle's book is more properly about Renaissance rhetoric broadly conceived. Boyle shows how Loyola's narrative is dependent upon the writings of Cicero, Quintilian, Augustine, Petrarch, Erasmus, and the many other authorities of the rhetorical culture of early-modern Europe. So great is this dependence that Boyle maintains "Loyola's piety is established in the renaissance revival of that rhetorical culture" (p. 9). To support this contention she advances an impressive display of evidence from Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance theological, 444 RHETORICA philosophical, and literary sources together with contemporary scholarship from the corresponding disciplines. This display of erudition is all the more remarkable because it is presented with concision and clarity. These are two qualities often absent from current humanistic prose but, as Boyle reminds us, both explicitly and by example, clarity is a virtue of classical rhetoric (p. 5). One result of Boyle's broad intellectual and cultural approach to the Acts is that Loyola himself seems removed from his own narrative. This is a necessary consequence of analyzing the Acts as rhetoric rather than autobiography. Boyle contends that Loyola refuses a "prominent authorial role" and is therefore quintessentially a type rather than an individual (pp. 148-49). This preference for the archetypal over the individual facilitates Loyola's presentation of the broad epideictic themes of praise and blame. Thus in each of the four chapters ("The Knight Errant," "The Ascetic," "The Flying Serpent," and "The Pilgrim"), Boyle considers the qualities and circumstances of Loyola's character that offer edification for readers of the Acts. As instances of epideictic rhetoric the episodes depicted do not so much represent a literal account of events in Loyola's life as they present opportunities for demonstrative oratory. A good deal of recent scholarship has illuminated the ways in which rhetoric has exercised a formative influence on Renaissance literature. Although much has been done in this area, we probably still do not fully appreciate just how pervasive was rhetoric's role in the Renaissance. Boyle has certainly advanced this appreciation by offering a rhetorical reading of a work presumed to be autobiographical, a reading informed by the work's cultural and intellectual context, rather than by critical standards derived from other genres and other eras. Moreover, Boyle demonstrates the value of recognizing epideictic rhetoric for what it is, a moral voice which spoke forcefully to antiquity and the Renaissance and, if we attempt to understand it, continues to speak to us today. Thus in Loyola's Acts, Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle presents an impressive addition to our understanding of rhetoric and literature in the Renaissance. Don Paul Abbott University of California, Davis ...

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 333 L'inventaire final, plus large que la matière traitée (il englobe même les"histoires" qui ne servent pas d'exemples) complète admirablement l'exposé, en trois étapes: les exemples sont d'abord classés, selon l'ordre traditionnel des oeuvres de Grégoire, avec tous les critères de nature rhétorique exploités dans les deux premières parties; une deuxième liste suit l'ordre alphabétique, en distinguant matériau biblique et matériau "païen"; une troisième obéit à l'ordre traditionnel de la Bible. Un livre majeur, donc, sur l'oeuvre de Grégoire de Nazianze, et un livre exemplaire, pour des enquêtes analogues sur d'autres auteurs. Alain Le Boulluec Transmundus, Introductiones dictandi, ed. and trans. Ann Dalzell (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1995) x + 254 pp. Considering how few among the hundreds of medieval arts of letter writing have been printed at all, the appearance of such a text in a critical edition is in itself an important event. Ann Dalzell's edition of Transmundus' Introductiones dictandi is especially significant because it is the first edition of an ars dictandi to be accompanied by a modern English translation of the Latin text. As Dalzell points out, the treatise merits editing and translating for several reasons: (1) it provides a comprehensive introduction to the ars dictaminis, (2) its use of classical rhetoric illuminates the "state of classical learning in the late twelfth century and contemporary attitudes toward it," and (3) its author's service as protonotary of the paper chancery invests its contents with unusual authority (pp. ix-x). An additional attraction is that the treatise is presented in the form of a letter and frequently observes the rules for the Roman cursus and the other precepts of style that it teaches. Like Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova, with which it is exactly contemporary, the Introductiones dictandi is at once about the art of letter writing (de arte) and an example of that art (ex arte). 334 RHETORICA Dalzell provides a substantial introduction in which she treats under separate headings the life of Transmundus, as well as the composition, the sources, the style and syntax, the manuscripts, the editing, and the translating of the Introductiones dictandi. Like the equally full commentary that follows the edition and translation, the introduction not only provides the essential information about the text being edited but also about its generic context. In fact, the comprehensiveness of the text itself, the richness of the commentary, and the presence of a translation combine to make Dalzell's book an ideal introduction to the genre of the ars dictandi for advanced students of rhetoric. Among the most important scholarly contributions of the introduction is its precise description of the treatise's complex transmission. According to Dalzell, two versions of the introductiones dictandi survive. The earlier version is preserved in four copies, each of which differs from the others in significant ways. Dalzell believes that this version was composed while Transmundus was still at the papal chancery, possibly as early as the 1180s, and was subsequently revised at Clairvaux, after Transmundus had joined the monastic community there. Sometime after 1206 but still early in the thirteenth century, a second version was produced by Transmundus or someone else, probably at Clairvaux. This later, revised and expanded version is preserved in at least twelve copies, which exhibit greater consistency among themselves than do the copies of the first version. Although Version II almost certainly contains material not contributed by Transmundus, it is the version of the treatise that was most widely used and hence is the one edited and translated by Dalzell. To illustrate the relationships among the four copies of Version I and between Versions I and II, she also edits and translates the initial treatment of Style (appositio) from each copy of Version I in an appendix. Version II of the Introductiones dictandi, Dalzell further shows, is itself divided into an elementary course and an advanced course. The elementary course (sections 1-11, in her edition) sketches the basic rules on epistolary style and the parts of a letter; the advanced course is...

RHETORICA 312 In chapter 11, "Philosophy and rhetoric", Stephen Halliwell considers the debate between rhetoric and philosophy along the lines suggested in several of Plato's and Aristotle's works. Although both Plato and Aristotle consider rhetoric "philosophically", Halliwell argues that Plato imposes on it the demands of his ethical and political standards while Aristotle accepts the commonsensicalness of rhetorical practice all along reinforcing it with the technical equipment that rendered it an intellectual force of consequence. In the final chapter, "The Canon of the Ten Attic Orators", Ian Worthington reconsiders the dating, the authorship, and the intellectual background of the canon of the Attic orators and concludes that both the rationale and character of the canon are unsatisfactory if only because they hamper scholarly efforts to study and assess the orations of those orators who are excluded. John Poulakos Richard Lockwood, The Reader's Figure: Epideictic Rhetoric in Plato, Aristotle, Bossuet, Racine and Pascal (Geneva: Droz, 1996) 310 pp. Epideictic has always been the joker in the pack. Where deliberative and judicial eloquence can be fairly readily defined, and their function briefly summarized, epideictic continually poses problems. In the first place, what is it? The demonstrative genre, we are told, is that in which the orator (or writer) attributes praise and blame. But this narrow definition is quickly expanded into something much more amorphous—epideictic comes to be the gathering up of all speech acts which are not deliberative or forensic, sometimes including the didactic or academic (as in the volume under review), and not infrequently spilling out to include all speaking whose purpose is not obvious, including, as the writing "for nothing" which came to be called literature. For the question "who does what to whom in epideictic" is by no means straightforward, as Richard Lockwood makes abundantly clear in this densely written and interesting book. Quintilian saw it as aiming solely at delighting its audience", Reviews 313 with the further aim of enhancing the "honour and glory of the speaker". The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "intended or serving to display oratorical skill". It is thus a form of entertainment, a performance meant to gather in applause. But of course there are other views. A speech of praise, for instance, is not necessarily a piece of self-indulgence or flattery. Many historians of the subject have written of the potential civic function of epideictic for inculcating values and creating social consensus. As Aristotle put it, "to praise a man is...akin to urging a course of action". Even Plato, with his sharp eye for the deceits of rhetoric, allows room in his republic for "hymns to the gods and encomia to good men". So what is going on in epideictic? The strength of Lockwood's study is that it homes in on these tensions within the genre. He argues that this type of speech or text carries within it a doubleness, and thus, even more clearly than other rhetorical performances, creates a double figure of the listener or reader, who can at the same time admire the orator and admire the thing praised. It is this doubleness, he claims, that accounts for the powerful effects of epideictic, effects that in the examples he gives are not infrequently unsettling, often fruitfully so. One of the most important points stressed here is the vital role played in epideictic by metadiscursive elements—those points at which the orator or writer reflects as he goes along on what he is doing. In an interesting preliminary, this tactic is seen at work in the Gettysburg Address, where "five full sentences out of ten discuss Lincoln's own act of speaking, and the rest focus largely on the parameters of its context" (p. 19)—the speech in other words is largely about "how to give speeches and how to listen", and in so doing seeks to create what Lockwood calls the "figure" of the reader/listener. In other words, theory and practice are closely interwoven, and there can be no question of a simple dualism whereby the naive take the bait while the sophisticated reflect critically on it; all readers and listeners are involved in the perils and pleasures of...

324 RHETORICA Milonis F2, where it should be pointed out that the words sine ore used to describe Clodius are parallel to an expression at Pro Caelio 78. Crawford's comments on this fragment (at the beginning of a speech) offer a good explanation of the personal invective in the Pro Caelio passage (end of the speech) which is ignored in the standard edition. Jane Crawford has provided a rich and valuable book that will be the necessary starting point for future work on the fragments. Historians and students of classical rhetoric are in her debt. Now that we have commentaries on the fragmentary speeches, let us hope that they will help inspire some much needed commentaries on Cicero's surviving orations. Robert W Cape Jr. R. Dean Anderson Jr., Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Paul (Kampen: Kok Pharos Publishing House, 1996) 315 pp. Rhetorical criticism appears to have become fashionable in biblical studies lately, and some people seem to regard it as a kind of magic providing answers to all questions and solutions to all problems of interpretation. Critics of modem literature discovered some decades ago that rhetoric had something to offer for the interpretation of texts, while classicists never lost sight of the ancient handbooks of rhetoric and their precepts. It is most fortunate, therefore, that a scholar with both a classical and a theological training should have chosen to write a book on Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Paul, addressing himself to two questions: whether Paul knew and consciously worked with rhetorical theory (or some aspect of it) in mind (p. 249) and what kind of help ancient rhetoric has to offer for the interpretation of Paul's letters. The author begins with a very brief historical account of rhetorical criticism of the Bible—St Augustine, Melanchthon, Muilenberg, Kennedy, Mack and a few remarks on Perelman— mentioning neither Chrysostom nor Marius Victorinus or Betz to whom he refers later. This section is not very satisfactory, because Reviews 325 in its first part it is largely derivative and far too short to be useful, in the second it contrasts Perelman's "New Rhetoric" with ancient rhetoric instead of emphasizing how much the former is indebted to the latter. The second chapter is devoted to the sources for ancient rhetorical theory from the Rhetorica ad Alexandrum to Quintilian, ending with an overview in which the usefulness both of the various aspects of rhetorical theory and of the individual works and their methodology for rhetorical criticism are considered. Here the author shows himself a well-informed master of the subject, though somewhat arbitrary in the selection of secondary literature and editions he is referring to, as he omits all works in French and (with one exception) in Italian. As regards the basic issue whether ancient rhetorical theory may offer help in interpreting Paul's epistles today, Anderson stresses several important points: a) "Given that the specific topoi allocated to the three genres of rhetoric have little in common with the arguments and topoi used in the letters of Paul .., we must conclude that rhetorical genre analysis of Paul's letters has little value" (p. 90); b) "Such labelling (sc. of an extant speech by various terms for arguments and figures).. does not really help us much unless we can say something about the use and function of such arguments or figures" (p. 92). But I find it difficult to agree with Anderson , when he says: "Our conclusions, then, tell us more about how ancient critics might have viewed Paul's literary abilities, than about what Paul himself may have thought"; surely, our conclusions may tell us what Paul thought and how he tried to impart his ideas and views to his readers and audiences. In the section on the "relation of rhetoric to epistolography" Anderson discusses first a few of the earlier attempts by a number of scholars to define various types of letters, then the ancient handbooks of epistolography, at the end tentatively suggesting "that it is in vain to strictly apply a scheme of classification designed for speeches to letters" (p. 100) and criticizing Betz, Kennedy and Stowers. Next, after rejecting Betz's claim that Galatians is an apologetic letter...

RHETORICA 308 these six essays demonstrate the breadth, status, and versatility of rhetoric as a field of inquiry, study, and practice. In their introductory essay, Bennett and Leff remark, "Working quietly against the grain of a specialized [academic] culture, Murphy has opened a conduit between historical scholarship and the classroom" (4). A lengthy bibliography of Murphy's publications and work in progress, contributed by Winifred Horner, follows the Preface. Like Murphy's own contributions to the field, the essays collected in Rhetoric and Pedagogy successfully "hold historical scholarship and current pragmatic interests in a useful relationship to one another" (4). By their own interest in bridging historical scholarship and current teaching practice, the contributors to this Festschrift honor Murphy's legacy and continue his work. Cynthia Miecznikowski Sheard Ian Worthington ed. Persuasion: Greek Rhetoric in Action (London: Routledge, 1994) xi+277pp. This collection of twelve essays is interesting for three reasons. First, it constitutes one more sign that rhetoric is undergoing a veritable renaissance. Second, it shows that classics, a discipline once indifferent or hostile to the rhetorical enterprise, is now willing to join other disciplines in recognizing rhetoric as a major force in the shaping of western culture (nine of the contributors to this collection are classicists). Third, and most important, this volume does not concern itself with rhetoric in isolation. Rather, it examines its many intersections with such genres as politics, history, law, epic, tragedy, comedy and philosophy. The various treatments of the particular intersections combine traditional and new insights, and open the path to many provocative questions. Likewise, they generally invite reflection and criticism. More importantly, however, the collection as a whole points to a maximalist project that takes rhetoric beyond the orators, who practised it and the philosophers, who discussed Reviews 309 it. In so doing, it suggests that richer understandings can be had when placing rhetoric at the center of the Hellenic culture and crossing it with other genres (i.e. epic, tragedy, comedy, history). In this regard, the collection recommends itself in its entirety much more than any one of its chapters. The common framework that all contributors share comes from the distinction as well as the connection between rhetoric as the study, and oratory as the practice of persuasion. According to the editor, "The aim of this book is to bring together...discussions of the relationship of Greek oratory and rhetoric to a variety of important areas and genres, at the same time reflecting new trends and ideas now at work in the study of rhetoric" (ix). In the first chapter, "From orality to rhetoric: an intellectual transformation", Carol Thomas and Edward Webb trace the emergence of rhetoric along the orality-literacy continuum. Relying on but also refining the work of George Kennedy, Eric Havelock, Walter Ong and Thomas Cole, the authors point out that even though rhetoric benefited from the contributions of literacy it nevertheless retained its initial oral character. This chapter examines rhetoric along the registers of composition, delivery, and analysis, and pays attention to four features: uses, persuasive intent, magical aura, and the speaker's esteem. In chapter 2, "Rhetorical means of persuasion", Christopher Carey argues that of the three Aristotelian pisteis, pathos and ethos are more indirect while the third, logos, is a more direct means of persuasion. Carey illustrates the uses of pathos and ethos in the actual speeches of orators such as Demosthenes, Aeschines and Lysias, and concludes that Aristotle's distinctions are considerably "neater" than their actual use shows. In chapter 3, "Probability and persuasion: Plato and early Greek rhetoric", Michael Gagarin seeks to minimize the Platonic influence on our understanding of classical Greek rhetoric. His thesis is that Plato's widely accepted claim that the orators prefer probability over the truth is demonstrably wrong. Gagarin reviews the uses of probability arguments in the surviving speeches of orators and sophists and finds no evidence supporting Plato's claim. Gagarin's study shows convincingly that the orators generally value truth; however, they resort to probability when RHETORICA 310 the truth of a case is unknown, unclear, or subject to differing interpretations. In chapter 4, "Classical rhetoric and modem theories of discourse", David Cohen takes a brief but...

High-modernist writers professed a disdain for rhetoric and yet found it hard to escape. They scorned the artifice of traditional, overt rhetoric and they did not wish to acknowledge that all communication is rhetorical, whether frankly or covertly. They especially distrusted “persuasion by proof” just as they distrusted traditional religion, aversions which had significant consequences for modernist literature. Modernists such as Pound favored poetry over the more frankly rhetorical genre of fiction. They valued the poet’s privilege, first articulated by Aristotle and later by Sidney, of writing only of possibilities and therefore escaping the constraints of rhetoric and of historical veracity. Nevertheless, in order to justify their poetics, these modernists developed the concept of poetic belief first popularized by Matthew Arnold and elaborated upon by I. A. Richards and T. S. Eliot. Ultimately that modernist poetics became not only a substitute for religion but a new form of the rhetoric which modernists had hoped to avoid. The poetic theory helped the literature create a covert religious rhetoric that frequently denied its own existence in a ploy for audience belief.

Research Article| February 01 1998 Note critique sur un plagiat: les véritables auteurs du Traité de l'éloquence dans tous les genres Saiviy Ben Messaoud Saiviy Ben Messaoud 9 rue Francois Mansard, 69800 Saint-Priest, France. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1998) 16 (1): 111–119. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.1.111 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 Saiviy Ben Messaoud; Note critique sur un plagiat: les véritables auteurs du Traité de l'éloquence dans tous les genres. Rhetorica 1 February 1998; 16 (1): 111–119. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.1.111 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1998, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1998 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Pendant la seconde moitié du dix-huitième siècle, l’édition française a connu une prolifération des plagiats. Le Traité de l’éloquence dans tous les genres (1757) en est un exemple. Il est considéré comme un plagiat de Rollin, mais l’étude critique révèle qu’il s’agit d’une version abrégée de La Rhétorique ou les règles de l’éloquence (1730) de Gibert, à laquelle le plagiaire anonyme a ajouté des extraits du Traité des études (1726–1728). Ainsi, Balthazar Gibert et Charles Rollin furent, dans une certaine mesure, les auteurs du Traité de l’éloquence dans tous les genres.

Ever since Aristotle noted in the Rhetoric that, when fashionable, delivery ταύτό πoiήσϵι τη υποκριτική (has “the same effect as acting”; 1404a), classical and medieval rhetorical theorists fulminated against a crowd-pleasing oratory that had devolved into a theatrical spectacle more akin to that provided by the comic “actress” or the “effeminate” male. It cannot be coincidental, however, that, as the fifth rhetorical canon documents the theatricalization of rhetoric, it also offers companion testimony about the so-called emasculation of eloquence. In this essay, I examine the early belief that legal and religious rituals crossed gender lines into effeminacy at they same time that they crossed genre lines into theater. Close analysis suggests that the persistent association between theatrics, bad rhetoric, and effeminacy struck four different targets in a single, well-conceived blow: it marginalized women, homosexuals, bad oratory, and theater by casting certain types of speakers and speech as perverse and disempowered. Delivering delivery today thus entails exposing the ways in which early theorists themselves attempted to deliver it from evil.

Reviews George A. Kennedy, A New History of Classical Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), xii + 301 pp. Françoise Desbordes, La rhétorique antique (Paris: Hachette, 1996), 303 pp. Ces dernières années ont vu se multiplier, en Europe et en Amérique, les ouvrages de synthèse, manuels, guides ou recueils, sur la rhétorique. Le marché éditorial en atteste : il y a un besoin croissant en ce domaine, pour la formation des étudiants et pour le perfectionnement des collègues. Les deux ouvrages recensés ici constituent des spécimens particulièrement distingués de cette production. Tout en étant synthétiques, ils restent rela­ tivement circonscrits, puisqu'ils portent, l'un et l'autre, exclusivement sur la rhétorique antique. Il est inutile de présenter George Kennedy aux lecteurs de Rhetorica. Membre fondateur de l'ISHR, George Kennedy a joué un rôle capital dans le regain de l'histoire de la rhétorique à partir des années 1960. Il a montré, à une époque où cela n'allait pas de soi, que la rhétorique antique n'était pas une vieillerie desséchée, vouée aux catalogues de figures, mais une nervure essentielle de la culture gréco-romaine. Trois livres majeurs, devenus des classiques, ont scandé son enquête : The Art of Persuasion in Greece (1963), The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World (1972), Greek Rhetoric under Christian Emperors (1983). Le présent ouvrage, A New History of Classical Rhetoric, fond ensemble ces trois livres, en les abrégeant. La partie de Greek Rhetoric ... qui portait sur Byzance n'a pas été reprise ; inverse­ ment, quelques pages ont été ajoutées sur la rhétorique latine de la fin de l'Antiquité, qui n'était pas évoquée dans les ouvrages précédents. Le petit livre sur le Nouveau Testament, fort apprécié des connaisseurs (New Testament Interprétation through Rhetorical Criticism, 1984), a été également mis à contribution. Tout ce travail de remaniement s'est accompagné, comme il se doit, d'un aggiornamento visant tant les références bibliographiques que cer­ taines questions de fond. Les chevauchements qui pouvaient poser prob­ lème ont été éliminés (à propos de Denys d'Halicamasse, traité à la fois dans The Art of Persuasion ... et dans The Art of Rhetoric ou des progymnasmata , traités à la fois dans The Art ofRhetoric ... et dans Greek Rhetoric La discussion a été partout réduite à l'essentiel : par exemple, le chapitre sur les orateurs attiques se concentre sur Lysias et Démosthène, les autres noms étant seulement énumérés. La bibliographie est restreinte, dans une très large mesure, aux publications en anglais. On pourra discuter, ici ou 211 212 RHETORICA là, des points d'érudition, ou contester telle vue cavalière (par exemple, p. 241, à propos du IIe siècle après J.-C. : « the intellectual exhaustion of the period » ). Mais là n'est pas l'important pour un ouvrage de ce genre. Ce qui compte, c'est que le lecteur dispose d'une histoire complète de la rhé­ torique antique, depuis les origines jusqu'au VIe siècle après J.-C., parfaite­ ment dominée, claire, bien informée. Elle servira de compendium ou de propylées vis-à-vis des ouvrages plus détaillés sur la question, à com­ mencer par ceux de George Kennedy lui-même. Françoise Desbordes rend hommage, dans sa préface, à « l'œuvre monumentale » de George Kennedy (p. 6). Elle a choisi, quant à elle, de poser d'abord la problématique de la rhétorique antique. Une première partie, intitulée modestement « Situation de la rhétorique », passe en revue les questions, antiques et modernes, que soulève l'art de la parole : notam­ ment, la définition de la rhétorique, le problème de sa valeur morale, son enracinement institutionnel (dans la cité, dans l'école), ses rapports avec l'environnement culturel (avec la philosophie, le christianisme, la dialec­ tique, la grammaire). Cet exposé frappe par sa puissance synthétique remarquable. Toutes les questions cruciales y sont réunies, admirablement expliquées en très peu de pages, et constituent une...

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

Reviews William M. Purcell, Ars Poetriae: Rhetorical and Grammatical Invention at the Margins of Literacy, Studies in Rhetoric/ Communication (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 193 pp. In the context of the evolution from oral to written discourse in the classical and medieval periods of western Europe, Purcell discusses six texts on the art of versification, or artes poetriae: 1) Matthew of Vendome, Ars versificatoria; 2) Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria nova and Documentum de modo et arte dictandi et versificandi; 3) John of Garland, De arte prosayca, metrica , et rithmica (Parisiana poetria); 4) Gervasius of Melkley, Ars poetica; and 5) Eberhard the German, Laborintus. Composed in the twelfth and thir­ teenth centuries, these texts are revolutionary in their adaptation of rhetoric and grammar to poetry, which in that period was usually read aloud or recited. The book offers a useful introduction to material which may be difficult for most undergraduate students to obtain or to under­ stand; however, the critical framework into which Purcell places these texts needs justification, as it is part of a growing debate on the history of orality and literacy. The book is divided into two parts. Part I, consisting of two chapters, establishes the two main assumptions of the theoretical framework into which Purcell has placed the six treatises on poetic composition. The first assumption sets up a diachronic dichotomy between orality and literacy, from the Greek tradition to the invention of the printing press. Purcell argues that rhetoric in classical Greece and Rome was a discipline designed for oral delivery. Grammar was a written activity, developed for analysis and correction of text. As the societies of the Middle Ages pro­ gressed in literacy, grammar was increasingly applied to written material. Thus, Purcell sets up an oral-literate time spectrum. He treats the ancient Greek and late medieval periods as two poles, the former primarily oral and the latter increasingly text-based or literate. Citing Paul Prill, Purcell asserts that the arts of poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries stand at the cusp of the shift from orality to literacy. The second major assumption of Purcell's theoretical framework is that grammar and rhetoric exchanged functions along the oral-literate time spectrum. In the classical period, rhetorical theory was used as a system of composition for oral delivery, while grammar was a system to correct and to analyze written text. By the time the arts of poetry were composed, these roles had begun to be reversed: "Ultimately, with the advent of the printing press, the text became the thing in and of itself, moving away 107 108 RHETORICA from the oral end of the spectrum and toward the literate end. At the same time, rhetoric—a more orally focused technology—moved toward the literate, and grammar—a more literally focused technology—moved toward the oral. The tension created by the rhetorical/grammatical move­ ment is reflected in the theoretical treatises in the artes poetriae themselves" (p. 5). Part II consists of five chapters, arranged chronologically, on the artes poetriae which illustrate the developments in the matrix of orality, literacy, grammar, and rhetoric which Purcell has set up in the first section of his book. Purcell provides excellent summaries of these treatises by giving an overview of their sections on invention, arrangement, and style. Less attention is given to invention and arrangement, as the author's primary interest is the overlapping of grammar and rhetoric in the domain of style, a unique contribution of poetic theory in the Middle Ages. Purcell's study of figures in the artes poetriae shows how the medieval tradition leads to the systematic relation of style to stasis theory in Renaissance rhetoric. This is the most valuable contribution of the book. Purcell argues that these treatises are not simply extensions or adapta­ tions of classical rhetoric, but that they establish a unique genre of rhetori­ cal theory at a time when orality and literacy coexisted. To demonstrate this point, he observes that the existing editions of the texts can be mis­ leading in causing readers to assume a debt to the classical sources. For example, the Faral edition and the Nims translation of Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria Nova...

Reviews 117 material. Concentrating on the prose and Samson Agonistes, she does best with Areopagitica, Iconoclastes, and Samson itself. Even here, her analysis some­ times lacks rhetorical or lexical precision. An acute analysis of Milton's appalled history of censorship, which recounts how a Pope "excommunicat­ ed the reading of heretical books" (p. 126), would be even richer if she had noticed other aspects of the metonymy which she apparently does not recog­ nise (though semantic innovation might well work in a quite distinctive way through this trope). She misreads "the single whiff of a negative" character­ ising royal arrogance (p. 156) as a bad smell, rather than a puff of wind. But it is invigorating to see the iconoclastic reading extended to positive images like Areopagitica's metaphor of books as men, and she gives a fine account of Milton's demolition job, not only on the false image of Charles I but also on his false religion and his idolised prayers. Her theory works well here, to illuminate the rhetoric of Milton's own rhetorical analysis. Finally, her discussion of Samson forms a challenging summation of the whole approach. Dalila and Harapha are read as metaphors for two related states of mind which Samson must transcend, his "icons of shame and glory." This is persuasive, like the broad idea that Samson "becomes a metaphor for the paradox of bearing witness that is true to transformative desire, true to an impetus toward that which cannot itself be known" (p. 176). But the sharpness of Samson's agon, the complexity of his feelings and the labyrinth of his moral reasoning, remain underplayed. Far more than the other displeasing features of the book, such as its overblown word-processor prose, this failure to integrate a very valuable line of inves­ tigation with a broader and more balanced concept of rhetoric, stands out. Robert Cockcroft Albert W. Halsall, Victor Hugo et l'art de convaincre - Le récit hugolien: rhétorique, argumentation, persuasion (Montréal: Éditions Balzac, 1995), 496 pp. "L'art de convaincre" - c'est sous ce titre qu'Albert Halsall avait déjà publié en 1988 une très intéressante étude consacrée à la rhétorique du récit (aux Éditions Paratexte, à Toronto). Il y insistait sur la nécessité de soumettre les genres narratifs - qui sont devenus depuis deux cents ans les genres littéraires par excellence -, au delà des analyses narratologiques courantes, à un examen rhétorique, afin de mettre en relief leur caractère idéologique, confirmant ou attaquant la doxa (d'une nation, d une péri­ ode). C'est ainsi que l'analyse rhétorique apportera une contribution 118 RHETORICA importante à ¡'histoire des idées. Le présent livre fait suite au premier; il en est une application pra­ tique, non pas à un type particulier de récit mais à l'ensemble de l'œuvre narrative d'un seul auteur. Le choix de Victor Hugo ne paraît surprenant qu'à première vue: nous savons, certes, que dans un vers célèbre et sou­ vent cité des Contemplations le grand poète romantique avait déclaré "la guerre à la rhétorique", mais existe-t-il en fait une écriture qui en soit entièrement dénuée? Halsall montre fort bien que la doctrine romantique de l'originalité peut être considérée comme une stratégie rhétorique et que, en réalité, Hugo entend substituer une nouvelle rhétorique à la vieille: à la mesure classique, il opposera la démesure, aux figures d'atténuation (comme la litote) les procédés hyperboliques d'exténuation (p. 24). Ses fi­ gures préférées seront l'hyperbole et l'antithèse. Loin de rejeter l'art ora­ toire, il en intervertit systématiquement les termes: selon un texte de Hugo datant de 1834, le grand orateur c'est Mirabeau, précisément parce qu'il est "reprochable de toutes parts", parce qu'il possède toutes les pro­ priétés qu'un orateur ne devrait pas posséder: il est laid, il a l'organe dur, il est haï de toute l'assemblée, etc. (p. 30). Dans l'immense bibliographie de...

Research Article| February 01 1989 Special Review Essay: Some Perspectives on Rhetoric, Science, and History The Rhetoric of Economics, by Donald N. McCloskey. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. pp. xx + 209.The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs, ed. John S. Nelson, Allan Megill, and Donald N. McCloskey. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. pp. xiii + 445.Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science, by Charles Bazerman. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. pp. xi + 356. Carolyn R. Miller Carolyn R. Miller Department of English, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina 27695. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1989) 7 (1): 101–114. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1989.7.1.101 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 Carolyn R. Miller; Special Review Essay: Some Perspectives on Rhetoric, Science, and History. Rhetorica 1 February 1989; 7 (1): 101–114. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1989.7.1.101 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 1989, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1989 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| November 01 1986 Ancient Philosophic Protreptic and the Problem of Persuasive Genres Mark D. Jordan Mark D. Jordan Program of Liberal Studies, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556 USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1986) 4 (4): 309–333. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1986.4.4.309 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mark D. Jordan; Ancient Philosophic Protreptic and the Problem of Persuasive Genres. Rhetorica 1 November 1986; 4 (4): 309–333. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1986.4.4.309 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 1986, The International Society for The History of Rhetoric1986 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| November 01 1985 Origins of a Significant Medieval Genre: The Musical "Trope" up to the Twelfth Century Nancy Van Deusen Nancy Van Deusen Department of Music, California State University, Northridge, CA 91330 USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1985) 3 (4): 245–267. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1985.3.4.245 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Nancy Van Deusen; Origins of a Significant Medieval Genre: The Musical "Trope" up to the Twelfth Century. Rhetorica 1 November 1985; 3 (4): 245–267. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1985.3.4.245 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1985, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1985 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| August 01 1985 L'histoire de la rhétorique et la rhétorique des genres A. Kibédi-Varga A. Kibédi-Varga Oostelisk Halfrond 64, 1183 GB Amstelveen, The Netherlands. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1985) 3 (3): 201–221. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1985.3.3.201 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation A. Kibédi-Varga; L'histoire de la rhétorique et la rhétorique des genres. Rhetorica 1 August 1985; 3 (3): 201–221. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1985.3.3.201 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 1985, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1985 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.