Rhetorica
2062 articlesJune 1998
-
Pagan and Biblical Exempla in Gregory Nazianzen. A Study in Rhetoric and Hermeneutics by Kristoffel Demoen ↗
Abstract
Reviews 329 communicating what he had to say to his various audiences. For this reason Anderson is also right in insisting on the use of ancient rhetorical theory and practice in the original languages. I would add that further help may be gained from the commentaries of the fathers of the Church and those later writers who were more familiar with rhetoric than most of use are, e.g. Melanchthon or the Jesuits, and also from modem rhetoric. In addition to a select bibliography and full indices, there is a useful, select glossary of Greek rhetorical terms (pp. 259-302 and 303-14). This is a most welcome contribution to the debate which has suffered a great deal from various kinds of confusion, a book itself well-planned and clearly argued, offering a good deal of help to those who are interested in this controversial subject. It is important because it also raises some general questions as regards the possibilities and limits of rhetorical criticism, and while I disagree with the author on a number of points, I do not hesitate to recommend it to the critical reader. C. Joachim Classen Kristoffel Demoen, Pagan and Biblical Exempla in Gregory Nazianzen. A Study in Rhetoric and Hermeneutics, coll. Corpus Christianorum, Lingua Patrum, 2 (Tumhout: Brepols, 1996) 498 PP· Cet ouvrage a parfaitement sa place dans la collection prestigieuse du Corpus Christianorum, non seulement parce qu'il y côtoie l'admirable Corpus Nazianzenum, mais parce qu'il fait progresser de façon décisive la connaissance des oeuvres de Grégoire de Nazianze et de sa manière de composer. Il comporte deux grands ensembles, un exposé constitué de deux parties, et un répertoire (p. 325-458). Il s'agit d'une analyse rhétorique de Vexemplum, qui va donc au delà du procédé stylistique, pour l'étudier comme moyen de persuasion. Cela implique une enquête sur la tradition rhétorique dont Grégoire est tributaire, ainsi que l'examen des jugements explicites et sous-jacents portés sur les 330 RHETORICA vecteurs des deux courants culturels que fait se rencontrer "le Théologien", l'hellénisme et ses (xûôoi, le christianisme et la Bible. Le livre est issu d'une Dissertation doctorale présentée à l'Université de Gent (Gand) en février 1993. L'introduction part de l'attitude ambiguë de Grégoire à l'égard de la tradition classique, pour esquisser une idée qui prendra toute sa force au terme de l'ouvrage: voulant rivaliser avec les écrivains non chrétiens, Grégoire sépare l'hellénisme de la religion; cette conception restrictive lui donne le moyen de reconquérir l'hellénisme (après la tentative anti-chrétienne de l'empereur Julien); K. Demoen illustre cette reconquête par l'usage rhétorique d'exemples pris dans la mythologie, dans l'histoire et dans la Bible. Les éléments de l'étude sont de nature narrative. Les sources, du côté grec, sont la mythologie, les légendes, l'histoire, les fables et, par ailleurs, les récits bibliques (épisodes historiques de l'Ancien Testament, paraboles du Nouveau Testament). Ne sont retenues que les "histoires" qui ont une fonction exemplaire. Dès le début est proposée une définition du παράδειγμα, distingué de μεταφορά, παραβολή, γνώμη, σύγκρισις, définition élaborée à l'aide des théories antiques analysées dans le premier chapitre (p. 33-50): "l'évocation d'une histoire (de la Bible ou de la tradition païenne) qui s'est réellement produite ou qui n'est pas arrivée, dont la matière ressemble ou est liée au sujet traité, qui est associée implicitement ou explicitement à ce sujet comme argument (preuve ou modèle) ou comme ornement, et qui prend la forme d'une narration, de la mention d'un nom, ou d'une allusion" (p. 25). Le corpus est fait principalement des poèmes de Grégoire, très hétérogènes, les oeuvres en prose intervenant surtout à titre d'illustration ou de confirmation. L'entreprise se situe (p. 26) dans la perspective érudite de la Συναγωγή; kai; έξήγησις de Cosmas de Jérusalem, scholiaste du VIIIe si...
-
Abstract
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...
-
Abstract
Reviews 315 In the long and important chapter on Bossuet's sermons, for instance, Lockwood shows convincingly how the preacher's metadiscursive reflections on the difficulty, or indeed impossibility, of giving expression to the word of God and on the possibility of true knowledge which the listener creates by listening to his/her inner voice, forces the listener into active participation. As he puts it, "metadiscursive analysis through a figure such as the Inner Master [the preacher within us] becomes a response not to a philosophical problem, but to the pragmatic problems of authorizing the speaker and giving him the power to determine the audience's reaction to the speech" (p. 276). One of the engaging features of Lockwood's book is the way in which from time to time it too becomes self-reflexive, discussing the author's rhetorical problems and strategies and the reader's likely response: will he/she keep reading? What will be the relation between the reader at the outset and the reader at the end? As I read, I found myself wondering whether I was in fact embodying the reader figure laid down for me by the text, whether I was Pascal's good reader with his "esprit de discemement" who sees enough to be aware of what he/she doesn't see. Lockwood's text, as some of the passages quoted suggest, it not always easy reading, and sometimes a tell-tale "of course" suggests that the connections between one thing and another are clearer in the author's mind that in the (this) reader's. This is therefore a book to reread and reflect on. Peter France Richard L. Enos, Roman Rhetoric: Revolution and the Greek Influence (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press 1995) xiv+135pp. This book is not an analysis of the internal structure of ancient rhetoric in the manner of George Kennedy's several handbooks or M L Clarke's recently re-released Rhetoric at Rome: A Historical Survey. Instead, Enos offers an account of the interaction of Greek and Latin rhetoric as cultural phenomena and in the context of other cultural developments. The seven chapters (plus brief RHETORICA 316 preface and conclusion) are somewhat loosely connected studies of key moments in the history of roman rhetoric and (insofar as it is part of the Roman story) of Greek rhetoric. The goal is, to my mind, an admirable one; the execution is therefore all the more disappointing. The first chapter explores the political importance of sophistic rhetoric in the Western Greek colonies. It suggests that a similar politics (i.e. "democratic" imperialism) encouraged Roman absorption of rhetoric from south Italian sources. The second chapter traces the opportunities for and role of rhetoric in the changing political scene of the late Republic. This history is highlighted by a case study—chapter three—of state suppression of rhetoric at Rome in the second and early first centuries B.c. Chapter four traces the eventual acceptance of Greek rhetoric at Rome and particularly the role of declamation in Roman education. The next two chapters examine the influence of Roman patronage on the fortunes of rhetoric in Greece; this patronage was both of individual rhetors and of institutions and even entire cities (Athens) as educational centers. Enos considers first the Second sophistic in Athens, then the history of literary competitions at a relatively obscure festival at Oropos. The nonliterary (particularly epigraphic) evidence deployed in the latter chapter is probably the most novel and most substantive contribution of the book. Finally, an "epilogue" tries to account for the survival of rhetoric in various areas of the sometimes hostile Christian middle ages. The first important problem in this attempt to contextualize rhetoric is a sometimes dated and sometimes simply mistaken view of Roman history. For instance Enos uses the term "patrician" variously to mean the senate, the nobiles, political conservatives, or simply the economic upper-class. Not only does this mistake the technical sense of what was a largely unimportant caste term by the late republic, but it also means Enos has trouble explaining distinctions within the Roman elite: Catiline's opponents are non-aristocrats" (27)" and equestrian jurors are represented as the ' voice of the...
-
Abstract
En el presente artículo, tras hablar brevemente de la importancia de Fray Antonio de Guevara en la literatura inglesa, que guarda relación con el movimiento literario denominado eufuismo, se intenta describir el rasgo más definidor de su estilo, la antítesis. Para dar una imagen de los estudios sobre este respecto hasta el momento, incluimos las más significativas apreciaciones de los estudiosos actuales, relativos a nuestro autor, así como una comparación con algunas porciones del Panergírico de Isócrates y del Contra Conon de Demóstenes. Con ello, ilustraremos el gusto “gorgiano” e “isocrático” presente en la obra de Guevara y en la literatura inglesa de la época que le tocá vivir.
-
The Evangelical Rhetoric of Ramon Llull: Lay Learning and Piety in the Christian West Around 1300 by Mark D. Johnston ↗
Abstract
RHETORICA 336 Mark D. Johnston, The Evangelical Rhetoric of Ramon Hull: Lay Learning and Piety in the Christian West Around 1300 (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) xii + 274 pp. This book continues the author's already distinguished investigations into Ramon Llull's theories on language. While Johnston's previous work The Spiritual Logic of Ramon Llull (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) focuses on Llull's argumentative methods for justifying medieval Catholicism, his recent book articulates lullian principles of eloquence. The Evangelical Rhetoric of Ramon Llull demonstrates Llull's significant contribution to the field of rhetoric: the innovative use of his Great Art as an inventional tool. With fine organization, Johnston evokes a wide variety of lullian texts coalescing in a theory of rhetoric. The first three chapters outline Llull's premises for effective speech. Chapter 1 summarizes the heuristic method of the Great Universal Art of Find Truth, from which discourse proceeds. The Great Art employs an elaborate system of comparison, relying on nine letters of the alphabet—B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I and K—to symbolize absolute and relative principles, concepts and questions for discovery. When combined, these letters yield knowledge of divine truth which can illuminate a variety of arts, in this case, Christian wisdom for rhetoric. Like Augustine, who declares charity the ultimate end of reading and preaching, Llull calls theological understanding the end of speech whose material derives from the Great Art. Chapter 2 depicts Llull's vision of divine truth, a picture of interconnected creation, described in a representational language which correlates words and things. Chapter 3 discusses Llull's epistemology of resemblances in which humans, participating in God's universe, observe, think and finally speak according to the likenesses of creation. The middle section of the book, chapters 4 through 9, specifies how Llull's premises apply to particular offices of rhetoric and highlight Llull's emphasis on beauty, order and propriety. Finally, chapter 10 takes up Llull's sermons and brings the organization of the book full-circle by demonstrating Reviews 337 how the Great Art provides the heuristic for preaching material. The Liber de praedicatione reviews the Great Art; the Liber de virtutibus et peccatis employs the combinatory process in the Great Art to produce sermons. The concluding chapter introduces a polemic, so eloquent and compelling on the pertinence of Johnston's study, that this reader wished the argument had been dispersed throughout. Here, Johnston differentiates his own view of Llull from those who imagine him as either an inspired saint or a cutting-edge academic. While emphasizing Llull's contributions, Johnston repudiates claims to holy uniqueness in lullian rhetorical theory because of the preponderance of allusions to both classical and medieval lore. Moreover, exposing the narcissism in certain scholars' perceptions of Llull as an avant garde professor, Johnston reminds his readers of Llull's antipathy to the schools. Since Johnston's readers include those "unfamiliar with [Llull's] work, but interested generally in medieval intellectual or cultural history, and especially in the arts of eloquence" (10), it would have been helpful to describe, test and eschew pervading scholarly attitudes toward Llull throughout. Johnston, on the other hand, presents evidence that Llull was a Majorcan courtier, "born again" into the religious life and propelled into contemplation and study by his desire to convert. Having little background in language studies, Llull probably sought local tutoring and lectures in Paris in order to read divine writings and develop preaching skills. This exposure to learning allowed Llull to invoke well-known rhetorical authorities such as Cicero. However, Llull departed Paris with a distrust for scholasticism, which in his view, obscurely analyzes and thus fragments the picture of an integrated, unified creation. Throughout, Johnston observes Llull's differences with scholastic thought and practice. For instance, he notes Llull's failure to question the efficacy of language, an enduring issue for medieval schoolmen, but not for Llull, who relied on speech for evangelizing. Johnston concludes that "[Llull's] general regard for rhetoric as a means of fostering community in human society is one of the features that most distinguishes his accounts of eloquence from conventional Scholastic doctrines" (27). RHETORICA 338 Johnston establishes his...
-
Abstract
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...
-
Rhetoric and Pedagogy: Its History, Philosophy, and Practice: Essays in Honor of James J. Murphy ed. by Winifred Bryan Horner and Michael Leff ↗
Abstract
REVIEWS Winifred Bryan Horner and Michael Leff eds, Rhetoric and Pedagogy: Its History, Philosophy, and Practice: Essays in Honor of James J. Murphy (Mahwah, NJ: Elrhaum, 1995) 337pp. This commemorative volume honoring James J. Murphy is an eclectic collection of essays authored by scholars from around the world, colleagues and former students of Murphy whose own contributions to rhetorical history are well known. The collection pays tribute to Murphy's career as scholar and teacher and celebrates historical texts and figures for their cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural contributions to rhetorical history and pedagogy. Beth S. Bennett and Michael Leff's Introduction praises Murphy for his commitment to the history of the rhetorical tradition—both discipline and profession—through his integration of teaching and scholarship as well as his role in the founding of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric. They note that ISHR, in addition to publishing the field's premier journal, Rhetorica, has held biennial conferences since 1977 leading to the publication of important articles and edited volumes on Western rhetorical history and historiography "from the end of the Roman Empire through the 16th-century" (3). The intellectual status of rhetorical studies was thus elevated through Murphy's efforts. The collection's eighteen chapters are grouped chronologically into four sections: I. Theory and Pedagogy in the Classical and Medieval Traditions, II. Renaissance Textbooks and Rhetorical Education, III. Continuity and Change in 18th-Century Rhetorical Education, and IV. Rhetoric and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present. The Introduction forecasts the recurrence of three themes throughout the volume: "(a) Murphy and his work are 305 RHETORICA 306 ahead of their time; (b) Murphy not only studies rhetoric but also uses it to promote a communal effort; and (c) Murphy adopts a comprehensive view that opens an old tradition to future inquiry" (2). Bennett and Leff describe the ways in which each of the essays that follows illuminates one or more themes. They also advocate reading "across" chapters to trace the ways in which certain topics and controversies have evolved and enduring throughout rhetorical history. This way of reading, they suggest, can yield "the sense of unity in diversity" (16) that exemplifies Murphy's teaching and scholarship. The six essays in part one concern such topics as Aristotle's enthymeme as a doxastic rather than syllogistic form of reasoning (Lawrence D. Green), Cicero's criticism of philosophers (Robert Gaines), distinctions between Cicero's published court speeches and their oral presentation (Jerzy Axer), attitudes toward textual authority and ownership of ideas into the Christian era (George A. Kennedy), the use of poetry in the teaching of rhetorical tropes during the Middle Ages (Marjorie Curry Woods), and the contrasting missions and pedagogical practices at the universities of Oxford and Bologna in the late Middle Ages (Martin Camargo). Against long-held misperceptions of the "medieval fragmentation" of the classical rhetorical tradition, this first group of essays re-envisions the rhetorical tradition's passage from a "golden" to a "dark" age. Rather than "confused and confusing" (Woods 73), this early period in the history of rhetoric is rehistoricized as a period in which the study and practice of rhetoric flourished in new and various shapes, "each appropriate for its particular time and place" (Camargo 94). The second group of essays, the most esoteric in the collection, extends discussions of pedagogy into the Renaissance. John Ward s essay on Guarino da Verona includes lengthy discursive notes and references to primary texts as well as Latin excerpts for the specialized reader of Renaissance rhetoric. As scholar, teacher, and rhetor, Guarino contributed "toward the definition of 15th-century Italian paideia ...educative of the whole man", capable of developing his human, moral, social, and civic potential (101). Jean Dietz Moss's essay on Ludovico Carbone follows, offering a summary of the contents and significance of Carbone s On the Nature of Rhetoric and Eloquence", the first Reviews 307 book of his De arte dicendi (On the Arts of Speaking), a work organized as a series of disputations with classical rhetoricians. William A. Wallace's essay on Antonio Riccobono and rhetorical pedagogy in 16th-century Padua shows the persistence of such issues as whether rhetoric is an...
May 1998
-
Abstract
Research Article| May 01 1998 Sui topoi della lode nell'Evagora di Isocrate (1,11, 72 e 51-52) Maddalena Vallozza Maddalena Vallozza Via In Arcione 98, 00187 Roma, Italia. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1998) 16 (2): 121–130. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.2.121 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Maddalena Vallozza; Sui topoi della lode nell'Evagora di Isocrate (1,11, 72 e 51-52). Rhetorica 1 May 1998; 16 (2): 121–130. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.2.121 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.
-
Theory, Text, Context: Issues in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory; Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception; Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodemism; Traditionen der klassischen Rhetorik im angelsachsischen England; The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces; Speaking for the Chief: Okyeame and the Politics of Akan Royal Oratory ↗
Abstract
Research Article| May 01 1998 Theory, Text, Context: Issues in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory; Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception; Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodemism; Traditionen der klassischen Rhetorik im angelsachsischen England; The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces; Speaking for the Chief: Okyeame and the Politics of Akan Royal Oratory Christopher Lyle Johnstone,Theory, Text, Context: Issues in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996) 196 pp.Kathy Eden,Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 119 pp.James L. Kastley,Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodernism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), pp. vi + 293.Gabriele Knappe,Traditionen der klassischen Rhetorik im angelsachsischen England (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 1996), xx + 573 pp.Thomas P. Miller,The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces, (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1997), x + 345 ppKwesi Yankah,Speaking for the Chief: Okyeame and the Politics of Akan Royal Oratory, African Systems of Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 194 pp. George Pullman, George Pullman Department of English, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia 30303-3083, USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Richard A. Miller, Richard A. Miller Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio 43403, USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Thomas M. Conley, Thomas M. Conley University of Illinois, 244 Lincoln Hall, 702 S. Wright Street, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Martin Camargo, Martin Camargo Department of English, 107 Tate Hall, University of Missouri Columbia, Missouri 65211, USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Kermit Campbell, Kermit Campbell Department of English, Parlin Hall, University of Texas, Austin, Texas 78712, USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Lynee Lewis Gaillet Lynee Lewis Gaillet Department of English, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia 30303-3083, USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1998) 16 (2): 227–242. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.2.227 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 George Pullman, Richard A. Miller, Thomas M. Conley, Martin Camargo, Kermit Campbell, Lynee Lewis Gaillet; Theory, Text, Context: Issues in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory; Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception; Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodemism; Traditionen der klassischen Rhetorik im angelsachsischen England; The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces; Speaking for the Chief: Okyeame and the Politics of Akan Royal Oratory. Rhetorica 1 May 1998; 16 (2): 227–242. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.2.227 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.
-
Abstract
Abstract: The fact that classical and early medieval allegorical personifications were exclusively female has long perplexed literary scholars and rhetoricians. Although arguments have been made about this gendering using grammatical formalism for the most part, an examination of rhetoric's own deep structure—that is, the discursive metaphors it has always employed to talk about tropes and figures—promises to better articulate the gendered bases of the figure. Using analytical tactics drawn from Paul de Man's discussions of prosopopeia, this essay re-examines some of the rhetorical record along with programmatic imagery from patristic writings in order to demonstrate how women theinselves could serve as the “figures of figuration.”
-
Abstract
Research Article| May 01 1998 La Rhétorique de I'Empire ou comment la rhétorique grecque a inventé I'Empire romain Laurent Pernot Laurent Pernot C.A.R.R.A., Université des Sciences Humaines de Strasbourg, 14 rue René Descartes, 67804 Strasbourg Cedex, France Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1998) 16 (2): 131–148. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.2.131 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Laurent Pernot; La Rhétorique de I'Empire ou comment la rhétorique grecque a inventé I'Empire romain. Rhetorica 1 May 1998; 16 (2): 131–148. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.2.131 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.
March 1998
-
Abstract
SHORT REVIEWS Christopher Lyle Johnstone, Theory, Text, Context: Issues in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996) 196 pp. In many ways, this collection of articles on Ancient Greek rhetoric in English offers the best of what contemporary historiography and rhetorical theory have to offer. Rather than reading texts in isolation, or presuming interpretive clarity, these articles interpret their objects in relationship to the social, political, and even physical circumstances that influenced their production. Taken together, they summarize much of what is new in ancient rhetoric. Christopher Lyle Johnstone introduces the collection by rehearsing current rhetorical historiography, attributing the term rhetorike to Plato but acknowledging the creative significance of a set of prototypical rhetorical conditions such as the rise of democratic institutions, the spread of literacy, and the concomitant transformation of mythos into logos which made abstract categorization possible. These social, political, and intellectual conditions nurtured rhetoric as a distinct discipline. Johnstone's perspective clearly differentiates this work from earlier creation narratives that attributed rhetoric to the spontaneous genius of specific individuals. Continuing this line of reasoning, the first article, one of Father Grimaldi's last, "How Do We Get from CoraxTisias to Plato-Aristotle in Greek Rhetorical Theory?" is an excellent overview of the sophists' contribution to the development of rhetoric, and thus a contribution to their ongoing rehabilitation. While Grimaldi acknowledges that his task is synthetic and therefore not highly original, the article is nevertheless thorough and cogent. The second article dedicated to sophistic origins, John Poulakos's "Extending and Correcting the Rhetorical Tradition: Aristotle's Perception of the Sophists" argues that Aristotle acknowledged the 227 RHETORICA 228 sophists for inaugurating the study of rhetoric but went to great lengths to correct the logical and linguistic inadequacies that were the inevitable result of their imperfect epistemology. Thus he concludes that Aristotle followed Plato insofar as he critiqued the sophists but "marked out an independent path", for himself by including their efforts as among those founding the rhetorical tradition. In the third piece on the place of sophistry within the tradition, Schiappa argues for what he calls a "predisciplinary approach" to the study of the sophists, by which he means avoiding "vocabulary and assumptions about discursive theories and practice imported from the fourth century when analyzing fifth-century texts" (p. 67). He makes the case for rigorous historiography by rereading Gorgias's Helen in such a way as to prove that it "advanced the art of written prose in general, and of argumentative composition in particular" (p. 78) while in no way succumbing to the tendency to perceive the sophistic piece as somehow indicative of the philosophy/rhetoric split which was an intellectual artifact of later developments. Leaving the sophists but remaining firmly within the realm of current theoretical issues, Michael C. Leff questions the general applicability of Dilip Goankar's assertion that contemporary rhetorical theory differs from ancient theory in that it is hermeneutic rather than performative and dubious about the possibility of human agency fully explaining rhetorical decisions. Leff reads Thucydides's account of the Mytilene disaster as evidence that the ancients were, or at least Thucydides was, aware of how rhetorical discourse could be shaped by circumstances beyond participants' control. Leff ends his argument, however, by asserting that Thucydides' observations were intended to have a therapeutic effect in that "The readers of History...become better equipped to assume the role of agent, for they are better able to interpret that role not just at the moment of action but also from within an understanding of history" (p. 96). Christopher Lyle Johnstone's own noteworthy contribution combines archaeology with acoustics to challenge one of the idols of traditional rhetorical history. Whereas we have always argued that deliberative rhetoric must have played an integral part in Athenian democracy, Johnstone points out that we have never taken into account the physical circumstances of delivery in the open spaces of the ancient agoras. The Pynx, in particular, he argues, was constructed such that even under ideal climatic conditions, perhaps only "half of the 5000 Reviews 229 present could understand what speakers were saying" (p. 126). If this compelling argument is true, then we need to...
-
Abstract
The fact that classical and early medieval allegorical personifications were exclusively female has long perplexed literary scholars and rhetoricians. Although arguments have been made about this gendering using grammatical formalism for the most part, an examination of rhetoric’s own deep structure—that is, the discursive metaphors it has always employed to talk about tropes and figures—promises to better articulate the gendered bases of the figure. Using analytical tactics drawn from Paul de Man’s discussions of prosopopeia, this essay re-examines some of the rhetorical record along with programmatic imagery from patristic writings in order to demonstrate how women themselves could serve as the “figures of figuration.”
-
Abstract
Reviews 233 dramatic characters and explain their actions as though they were real people. The Socrates Kastley portrays seems less like the Socrates of Plato than that of Cameades's Academy. And if Persuasion shows us how, in the wake of social transformations, it became necessary for women to discover how to speak, cannot the same be said of men? On the other hand, Kastley's argument that Sartre quietly allows Kant in by the back door and his detailing of the paradoxical results of de Man's favoring knowledge over action are both persuasive. Even more impressive is the subtlety with which he thinks through the problems posed by post-Enlightenment thinking to reject the temptation to find some place to stand "outside the rhetorical flux" and move, rather, toward a world in which we act, toward a community that is pluralized, temporal, and a provisional form of sharing, where we might begin to wrestle with the injustice and injury that are inevitable, but not insurmountable. Kastley's "refutations" are, in the end, affirmations; and for those he is to be commended. THOMAS M. CONLEY University ofIllinois Gabriele Knappe, Traditionen der klassischen Rhetorik im angelsachsischen England (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 1996), xx + 573 pp. According to Gabriele Knappe, previous efforts to assess the knowledge, use, and function of classical rhetoric in Anglo-Saxon England have failed to distinguish between the tradition of ancient rhetoric proper and elements of rhetorical instruction taken over by grammarians. The goal of the former was the production of prose texts designed to have a specified effect on an audience, while the principal goal of the latter was the proper interpretation of texts and only secondarily their production. Systematic evaluation of all available evidence indicates little or no direct knowledge of classical rhetoric per se in England from the seventh through the eleventh centuries: Knappe demonstrates convincingly that the sources of "rhetorical" instruction available in early medieval England invariably belong to the grammatical tradition. RHETORICA 234 The study is divided into four large parts. Part I raises the central problem of the different traditions of classical rhetoric, surveys and critiques previous research on classical rhetoric in Anglo-Saxon England, and concludes with a brief overview of the book’s goals and procedures. In Part II, Knappe sketches the major developments in the teaching and transmission of rhetoric in late antiquity, with particular emphasis on the ways in which the teaching of the figures was incorporated into grammatical textbooks, such as that of Donatus; into other works, notably Cassiodorus's Expositio psalmorum, that may have been used in teaching grammar; and, along with the progymnasmata, into a grammar instruction that was broadened to include not only "correct" but also "good" speaking and writing and even the production of texts. The heart of the book documents the reception of the traditions of classical rhetoric in Anglo-Saxon England. Drawing on the evidence of surviving insular manuscripts, book lists, and contemporary testimony, Knappe concludes that the Anglo-Saxons appear not to have participated in the transmission of ancient rhetorical texts. Even the single work by an Anglo Saxon author that is directly based on such texts, Alcuin's Dialogus de rhetorica et de virtutibus, was written and circulated on the Continent. In his panegyrical verses on York, Alcuin claims that archbishop Alberht taught Ciceronian rhetoric; but if this is true, no other traces of that teaching survive. By contrast, Knappe finds abundant evidence for the availability and use of grammatical texts with rhetorical contents. In considerable detail, she shows that texts such as Bede's Liber de schematibus et tropis, Elfric's grammar, and Byrhtferth's Manual derive their treatments of the figures exclusively from grammatical sources. Part IV approaches the question of influence from the perspective of text production, especially in the vernacular. Although Knappe is able to make some distinctions regarding rhetorical techniques—for example, writers of prose prefer figures that enhance clarity and accuracy, whereas writers of verse are more likely to employ figures for aesthetic effect—the considerable overlap with native Germanic traditions makes it impossible in most cases to prove that a given passage was influenced by rhetorical doctrines taught in the context...
-
Abstract
RHETORICA 232 James L. Kastley, Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodernism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), pp. vi + 293. At a time when so many are trying to "rethink" rhetoric by making up stories about "the sophists" or parroting de Man's version of Nietzsche, Kastley's book is most welcome. In it, we have a thoughtful and illuminating contribution to the conversation that needs to be promoted about the ways in which the past may meaningfully speak to the present. His list of "required reading" is not the standard one. The book begins with readings of the Gorgias and the Meno that present a Plato who was not an enemy of rhetoric but its subtlest theorizer. The two dialogues, Kastley argues, constitute a critique of the rhetoric of private interests. Socrates, by his practice of refutation (elenchos), gets us to see the inevitable entanglements with injustice and injury that ensnare anyone who engages in symbolic action in political concerns. Sophocles' Philoctetes and Euripides' Hecuba are then shown to address problems of the availability of audience, the crisis of trust, and the consequences of marginalization. In the second half of the book, Kastley reads Austen's Persuasion as an allegory confronting the lost public sphere of discourse, offering rhetoric not as a solution, but as a problem. He then presents critiques ("refutations") of Sartre's views in What is Literature? and, in one of the book's most successful chapters, of de Man's views on rhetoric. In his reading of de Man, he offers an adroit demonstration of the ways in which de Man's position is blind to the dangers of collapsing position to truth and of framing rhetoric in terms of cognition rather than action. The final chapter, "Rhetoric and Ideology," takes us to Kenneth Burke—partly by way of Lentricchia's misreading of him—and to an insightful reconsideration of the nature of ideology and of community that yields a vision of a rhetoric that can use the strategies of classical skepticism as critical devices to "expose the exercises and deformations of power operating as a set of structured relationships" (p. 257). Kastley's readings are not without problems. Not everyone will agree, for instance, that Gorgias (in Plato's dialogue) has the best interests of the community at heart (p. 35); and some may feel uncomfortable with Kastely's tendency to shape his expectations of Reviews 233 dramatic characters and explain their actions as though they were real people. The Socrates Kastley portrays seems less like the Socrates of Plato than that of Cameades's Academy. And if Persuasion shows us how, in the wake of social transformations, it became necessary for women to discover how to speak, cannot the same be said of men? On the other hand, Kastley's argument that Sartre quietly allows Kant in by the back door and his detailing of the paradoxical results of de Man's favoring knowledge over action are both persuasive. Even more impressive is the subtlety with which he thinks through the problems posed by post-Enlightenment thinking to reject the temptation to find some place to stand "outside the rhetorical flux" and move, rather, toward a world in which we act, toward a community that is pluralized, temporal, and a provisional form of sharing, where we might begin to wrestle with the injustice and injury that are inevitable, but not insurmountable. Kastley's "refutations" are, in the end, affirmations; and for those he is to be commended. THOMAS M. CONLEY University ofIllinois Gabriele Knappe, Traditionen der klassischen Rhetorik im angelsachsischen England (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 1996), xx + 573 pp. According to Gabriele Knappe, previous efforts to assess the knowledge, use, and function of classical rhetoric in Anglo-Saxon England have failed to distinguish between the tradition of ancient rhetoric proper and elements of rhetorical instruction taken over by grammarians. The goal of the former was the production of prose texts designed to have a specified effect on an audience, while the principal goal of the latter was the proper interpretation of texts and only secondarily their production. Systematic evaluation of all available evidence indicates little or no direct knowledge of...
-
Abstract
In the late Renaissance in England and France women appropriated classical rhetorical theory for their own purposes, creating a revised version that presented discourse as modeled on conversation rather than public speaking. In Les Femmes Illustres (1642), Conversations Sur Divers Sujets (1680), and Conversations Nouvelles sur Divers Sujets, Dediées Au Roy (1684), Madeleine de Scudéry adapted classical rhetorical theory from Cicero, Quintilian, Aristotle, and the sophists to a theory of salon conversation and letter writing. In The Worlds Olio (1655), Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, feminizes rhetoric by analogies from women's experience and inserts women into empiricist rhetoric by assuming discourse based on conversation rather than public speaking. In Women's Speaking Justified (1667), Margaret Fell revises sermon rhetorics, claiming preaching for women, but preaching in private spaces, in the Quaker prophetic fashion. In A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1701), Mary Astell adapts Augustine, proposing a women's college to promote a "Holy Conversation", and a rhetoric of written discourse treating writer and reader as conversational partners. These women use categories of the ideal woman to contest the gendering of discourse in their culture, questioning "private" and "public" as defining terms for communication.
-
Abstract
Dans les premiers siècles de l'ère chrétienne, Rome régnait sur l'ensemble du Bassin Méditerranéen; sa domination couvrait les provinces occidentals, de langue latine, et les provinces orientales (Grèce, Asie Mineure, Proche-Orient, bords de la mer Noire, etc.), de langue grecque. On étudie id les conséquences rhétoriques de ce nouvel ordre politique mondial. Les Grecs ont adapté la rhétorique qui était la leur, ont recyclé leur héritage, afin de rendre compte du phénomène romain, de dire la réalité romaine en termes grecs et d'interpréter Rome au nom des valeurs grecques. Cette rhétorique rénovée marque à la fois la loyauté des sujets grecs à l'égard du pouvoir romain et l'affirmation de leur identité culturelle de Grecs dans un empire bilingue et biculturel.
-
Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception by Kathy Eden ↗
Abstract
RHETORICA 230 unify. As in the past, he continues to argue for the multiple moments of composition theory. George Pullman Georgia State University Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 119 pp. Those interested in the evolution of particular discursive practices that helped shape antiquity, especially the theoretical relationship between reading and interpretation, will benefit from this study in locating classical antecedents that ally rhetoric and hermeneutics. Unlike most studies of hermeneutics that spring from the Germanic tradition of Schleirmacher and Dilthey or the recent perspectives of Gadamer or Riceour, this study prizes the rhetorical precedent of an ancient mode of reading, known as interpretatio scripti, as crucial to the development of the field study of hermeneutics. By tapping into this rhetorical tradition largely overlooked in philological studies, Eden historically discerns and synthesizes a convincing case for the recognition and study of interpretatio scripti as a meaning making agent common to both the rhetorical and hermeneutical enterprises that have gained renewed prominence in humanistic inquiry today. In what may be the most valuable portion of the book, the first chapters construct the significance of interpretatio scripti as a model of reading that Roman rhetoricians inherited—from the Hellenistic rhetorical tradition—as "a loosely organized set of rules for interpreting the written materials pertinent to legal cases" (p. 7). As a point of origin, Eden moves decisively to Cicero, particularly De inventione and De oratore, in contextualizing how transforming character of interpretatio scripti often complicates treatments of proof and style in his rhetorical manuals, and plays a deciding role in appropriating legal arguments between the intention (voluntas) and the letter (scriptum) of an author or text under scrutiny. Interpretation, to Cicero, is understood in terms of controversy; thus interpretation theory (and by later implication Reviews 231 hermeneutics) finds a habitual home in rhetorical theory. Eden notes that while Cicero was not the first one to do this, his work has enjoyed the widest reception and can be seen as a generative point from which to track the influence of interpretatio scripti in her book's subsequent chapters. Such a discursive heredity becomes convincing as Eden links the interpretive principles of interpretatio scripti to the classical arts of poetry and grammar as seen through Plato, Aristotle and Plutarch. The prerequisite study of grammar, in classic times, is seen to develop similar concerns as its rhetorical counterpart in the coordinating and complementary notions of decorum and oeconomia which prove crucial in "underlying the hermeneutical concept of contextualization, historical and textual, respectively" (p. 41). Eden extends her coverage of the influence of interpretatio scripti through the Christian appropriation of classical culture, in Basil, Paul and most notably in Augustine. Amidst this backdrop of Patristic hermeneutics, Eden achieves a fine sense of dialogue between the concepts of Cicero, Quintillian and Augustine, and accommodates both a spiritual and historical order that extends into the rehabilitating humanism of Erasmus. Though less substantial than the first part of the book, the final few chapters bring the selected work of Philip Melanchthon and Flacius's Clavis scripturae sacrae into the interpretive landscape as a whole. In the end, this book serves a vital role in establishing the credibility of classical scholarship in legitimizing what Ricoeur would call the hermeneutics of tradition. As a centerpiece in the debate between the role of equity and spirit in the ancient act of reading, interpretatio scripti emerges as a meaningful landmark in charting the never-ending task of interpretation, and suggests an expansion in the intellectual history of both hermeneutics and rhetoric. As an instalment in the Yale Studies in Hermeneutics, this book works an effective balance between written economy and great scholarly depth. Such a stylistic blend should provide ample access points for both experts and novices interested in theories of interpretation, antiquity and rhetoric. RICHARD A. MILLER Bowling Green State University ...
-
The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces by Thomas P. Miller ↗
Abstract
RHETORICA 236 Thomas P. Miller, The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces, (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1997), x + 345 pp. Thomas Miller's excellent work The Formation of College English examines a strand in the development of English studies—the civic domain of rhetoric—neglected in other important histories of the discipline: Gerald Graff's Professing English Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), Franklin Court's Institutionalizing English Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), and Robert Crawford's Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). In the role of respondent to the 1997 Conference on College Composition and Communication session "Octalog II: The (Continuing) Politics of Historiography", Miller stressed the "civic sense of the work that lies before us" as historiographers of the discipline of composition and rhetoric. In particular, he praised historical research based on a "civic philosophy of teaching that links critical understanding with collaborative action toward social justice" and applauded archival work "that take[s] up the project of reconstituting the experiences of those who have been erased from accounts of the dominant tradition." In The Formation of College English, Miller "takes up" the little examined "provincial traditions that introduced modem history, politics, rhetoric, literature, and science into the college curriculum as case studies of how the teaching of culture functions as a means of social reproduction and transformation" (p. 19). He offers a comprehensive and unique treatment of territory introduced in recent institutional accounts of the development of American classes in rhetoric/composition, including Nan Johnson's Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in American Colleges (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992) and Winifred Bryan Homer's Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric: The American Connection (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993). Miller asks "from a historical perspective, what then are the practical values of rhetoric and composition?" (p. 285). The answer: studying parallels between "historical situations" leads to Henry Giroux's conception of "teachers as transformative intellectuals" who strive for self-awareness and view "education as a public discourse" (p. Reviews 237 288). Beginning with an examination of the "civic domain, where rhetoric concerns itself with popular values in political action," Miller applies key concepts defining Antonio Gramsci's rhetorical theory ("civil society," "cosmopolitanism," "organic and traditional intellectuals") to his exploration of "how the humanities can prepare students to become productively involved in political debates over popular values in practical action" (p. 7). In the first chapter, Miller points to print economy and the resulting expansion of the reading public as the driving force responsible for effacing rhetoric: "Professors...de-emphasized the composition of public discourse and concentrated on teaching taste to adapt higher education to the mission of instilling a common culture in the reading public" (pp. 60-61). In chapter two, Miller examines the role of professors at the elite English universities, the "antiquarians who divorced the learned tradition from the needs of contemporary learners", in an attempt to preserve English culture against change (p. 64). Conversely, the utilitarian approach to education characteristic of the dissenting academies and subsequently the provincial colleges introduced modem culture into higher education. The new pedagogy at these institutions was based on the belief that "free inquiry would advance liberal reform, economic progress, and rational religion" (p. 85). The next three chapters closely examine the development of the "new rhetoric" at: the Dissenting Academies, which encouraged students to assume a critical perspective on received beliefs; the provincial Scottish Universities, which reformed the university curriculum against a critical reexamination of classicism; and the colonial Irish "contact zones", where outsiders had to teach themselves the proprieties of English taste and usage. Miller's investigation of the classical tradition in Ireland, focusing on the elocutionary movement and English studies outside the university, represents a novel and fascinating contribution to rhetorical studies of this period. Miller devotes the following chapters to closely appraising the contributions to rhetorical theory and practice of perhaps the three most influential figures and movements of the period—Adam Smith and the rhetoric of a commercial society, George Campbell and the "science of man", and Hugh Blair and the rhetoric of belles lettres. In the final chapter, Miller examines the expansion of higher...
-
Abstract
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.
-
Abstract
Nell’Evagora sono certo presenti elementi di contenuto analoghi a quelli dell’epinicio, in particolare di Pindaro. Ma, come dimostrano alcuni esempi concreti (1, 11, 72), numerose difficoltà sorgono se si tenta d’interpretare in modo schematico il testo quale sistema di motivi, di rigide unità stereotipe. Appare invece opportuno riconoscere in questi elementi di contenuto una duttile e inestricabile griglia di topoi, forme vuote che permettono di esplorare l’oggetto dell’elogio in un continuo processo di ridefinizione e arricchimento semantico. Una griglia che affiora in embrione nell’epinicio e che Isocrate applica in modo già pieno e consapevole. L’analisi puntuale di un passo (51–52) prova infine che, pur all’interno della griglia, Isocrate seleziona e varia i topoi adattandoli a ogni esigenza specifica del discorso.
February 1998
-
Note critique sur un plagiat: les véritables auteurs du <i>Traité de l'éloquence dans tous les genres</i> ↗
Abstract
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.
-
Abstract
Research Article| February 01 1998 From Aristotelian λέξις to elocutio Gualtiero Calboli Gualtiero Calboli Via Riccoboni 12, 40127 Bologna, Italy. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1998) 16 (1): 47–80. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.1.47 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Gualtiero Calboli; From Aristotelian λέξις to elocutio. Rhetorica 1 February 1998; 16 (1): 47–80. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.1.47 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search Copyright 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.
-
Abstract
Abstract: In On Invention, Cicero discusses both induction and deduction. In regard to the latter, Cicero presents a controversy between those who advocate a five-part analysis of deductive reasoning and those who prefer three parts. The issue is not practical or pedagogical, but conceptual in nature. Cicero himself prefers analysis into five parts, and rather confusingly he presents the argument of the advocates of five parts as if it were his own. The argument is striking in that it makes elaborate use of mixed hypothetical syllogisms in order to argue for five parts. Cicero claims that the five-part analysis has been preferred by all who take their start from Aristotle and Theophrastus. A survey of what Theophrastus is reported to have said concerning the hypothetical syllogism renders Cicero's claim intelligible. That is not to say that Theophrastus himself advocated a five-part analysis. Most likely the association with him derives from his known interest in hypothetical syllogistic. Later rhetoricians who identified themselves with the Peripatos made the cormection with the founders of the school, thereby gaining authority for a controversial analysis.
-
Abstract
Abstract: Despite Joseph Priestley's contemporary importance, little has been written on his rhetoric, A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (1762). Most commentators group him with the other new rhetoricians Smith, Campbell, and Blair, ignoring the philosophical foundations as well as the political and educational practices that informed Priestley's rhetorical theory. Located within a larger context of reform and a specific rhetorical situation at Warrington Academy, Priestley's Lectures illustrate his attempt to establish rational argument as the most compelling way for Dissenters to argue for religious and civil liberty, a goal that clearly distinguishes Priestley from his Scottish contemporaries and that marks the source of his most original contributions to eighteenth-century rhetoric.
January 1998
-
Note critique sur un plagiat: les véritables auteurs du Traité de l’éloquence dans tous les genres ↗
Abstract
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.
-
Abstract
In the course of this paper, I shall say some things about Cicero’s discussion of induction, but my primary concern will be with his account of deduction. In particular, I want to call attention to Cicero’s argument for a quinquepartite analysis of deductive reasoning (Ded. 3). It is remarkable in that it makes elaborate use of the mixed hypothetical syllogism, and also of some importance in that it supplements our evidence for early Peripatetic interest in syllogisms of this land. Recent scholarship on the history of ancient logic has generally focused on later sources—like Alexander of Aphrodisias, Boethius, Philoponus and Simplicius— and pointed to Theophrastus as a significant contributor to the development of hypothetical syllogistic. Cicero, writing three centuries before Alexander, seems not only to confirm the importance of Theophrastus but also to indicate that his contributions were recognized as such by Hellenistic rhetoricians. In presenting this thesis, I shall not be accepting Cicero’s claim to have written more accurately and diligently than others (Ded. 7), but I will suggest that the argument in favor of quinquepaitite analysis (Ded. 3) is more coherent than what precedes (Ded. 2) and that this difference is largely attributable to Cicero’s use of sources.
-
Abstract
Gualtiero Calboli From Aristotelian \é£iç to elocutio 1. Introduction o ver the last few years it has become fashionable to criticize Robert Pfeiffer for overestimating the contribution of the Stoics and underestimating drat of the Peripatetics towards the development of rhetoric, grammar and philology. In fact Aristotle deserves the credit for connecting rhetoric with dialectic and poetry, without losing sight of its practical employment in the assembly and courts of law. Another development of rhetoric which occurred after Aristotle and perhaps Theophrastus was the development of an excessive number of rules, especially in the doctrine of tropes and figures of speech. That happened during the second century B.C. on the island of Rhodes and may be considered a kind of Asianic rhetoric. It was introduced into Rome through at least two handbooks, Cicero's De Inventione and the Rhetorica ad Herennium. However, in 55 B.C., at the beginning of his Platonic dialogue De Oratore, Cicero disowned his early work {De orat. 1.5). 1 R. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship, From the Beginnings to the End of the Hellenistic Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). 2 This is the opinion of F. Montanari in La philologie grecque à l'époque hellénistique et romaine, ed. F. Montanari (Vandoeuvres - Genève: Fondation Hardt, Entretiens XL, 1994), p. 29. I agree with him but recall that Pfeiffer also pointed out the importance of Aristotle and the Peripatos for Hellenistic philology: cf.z e.g., pp. 192; 197 of the Italian translation by M. Gigante and S. Cerasuolo (Napoli: Macchiaroli, 1973). 3 The origin and development of the doctrine of tropes and figures is not clear. It has been investigated by K. Barwick, Problème der stoischen Sprachlehre und Rhetorik (Berlin: Abhandlungen der sàchsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, Philol.-hist. Kl., Bd. 49, Hft. 3, Akademie-Verlag, 1957), pp. 88-111, but must be reconsidered now (see below)._____________ __ __________© The International Society for the History of Rhetoric, Rhetorica, Volume XVI, Number 1 (Winter 1998) 47 RHETORICA 48 The date of composition of De Inventione is about 87 B.C., only one year after Cicero heard Philon of Larissa in Rome, as has been recently noted by C. Lévy.4 5 Both Cicero's De Inventione (8887 B.C.) and the Rhetorica ad Herennium (86-82) were composed at a time when the democratic party dominated Rome and before Sulla came back from the Orient (82). I do not want to discuss the political position of the author of Rhetorica ad Herennium here, although the idea that he was a democrat has recently been confirmed by G. Achard and J.-M. David.6 In the period between the Ars Rhetorica written (but not completed) by the great orator M. Antonius (about 96 B.C.)7 and Sulla's dictatorship (82), there are about fifteen years of rhetorical activity8 during which the censorial edict by L. Crassus and D. Ahenobarbus of 92 was ineffective. This edict, as has been demonstrated by Emilio Gabba, became effective with Sulla who continued the action that the nobility's faction had brought under the law proposed by the tribune Livius Drusus in 91 B.C. in order to reorganize the Roman State.9 We know that the orator L. Crassus, a teacher of Cicero, was another of the promoters of this law but died before its approval. After considering Gruen's position on this subject, I 4 Cf. Cic. Brut. 306; Tusc. 2.9. When did Philo come to Rome? The answer is given by W. Kroll in his Commentary ad loc., p. 217f.: "Die glücklichen Erfolge des Mithridates verleiteten die Athener, an deren Spitze sich der Peripatetiker Aristo stellte, im J. 88 von den Rômem abzufallen und sich mit Archelaus, dem Feldherm des Mithridates, zu verbünden. Die Optimaten, welche treu zu den Rômem hielten, mufiten nun flüchten". Cf. also J.-M. David, Le patronat judiciaire au dernier siècle de la republique romaine (Roma: Ecole Française de Rome, Palais Famèse, 1992), pp. 371 f. C. Lévy, "Le mythe de la naissance de la civilisation chez Cicéron", in Mathesis e Philia, Studi in onore di...
-
Abstract
Despite Joseph Priestley’s contemporary importance, little has been written on his rhetoric, A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (1762). Most commentators group him with the other new rhetoricians Smith, Campbell, and Blair, ignoring the philosophical foundations as well as the political and educational practices that informed Priestley’s rhetorical theory. Located within a larger context of reform and a specific rhetorical situation at Warrington Academy, Priestley’s Lectures illustrate his attempt to establish rational argument as the most compelling way for Dissenters to argue for religious and civil liberty, a goal that clearly distinguishes Priestley from his Scottish contemporaries and that marks the source of his most original contributions to eighteenth-century rhetoric.
-
Abstract
Lucia Calboli Montefusco c Omnis autem argumentatio...aut probabilis aut necessaria esse debebit (Cic. lnv. 1.44) icero's most technical treatment of argumentatio is to be found in the first book of De inventione.' This treatment is divided into three sections. First, Cicero lists the adtributa personis and the adtributa negotiis, that is those loci argumentorum from which the orator has to draw his argumenta, second, he distinguishes between necessaria or probabilis argumentatio, and third, he considers induction and deduction as forms of arguments. In accordance with the dialectical method, each section begins with a dichotomy: (1) lnv. 1.34 omnes res argumentando confirmantur aut ex eo, quod personis aut ex eo quod negotiis est adtributum ("all propositions are supported in argument by attributes of persons or of actions") (2) lnv. 1.44 omnis autem argumentatio, quae ex iis locis, quos commemoravimus sumetur, aut probabilis aut necessaria esse debebit ("all argumentation drawn from 1 As Cicero himself announces (lnv. 1.34; cf. 1.49), he first wants to give a general overview of the tools of argumentation, shifting to the second book the treatment of the topics for the singula genera causarum. In his later works we do not find such a detailed discussion of the logical means of persuasion, although Antonius in the long passage of De oratore concerned with rational persuasion (docere) takes on the task of providing precepts for argumentation (De Orat. 2.11575 ). Cicero's interest, however, is there focused on the topics and particularly on the distinction, which, apparently recalling Aristotle's distinction between ttlgtcis cvtcxvoi and iriaTcis aTexvoi, contrasts those loci which non excogitantur ab oratore with those which, on the contrary, are tota in disputatione et in argumentatione oratoris. Only a few sections later, still in the second book of De oratore, Cicero briefly hints at the deductive mode of inference (De orat. 2.215 'aut demonstrandum id, quod concludere illi velint, non effici ex propositis nec esse consequens'); for similar allusions cf. also Brut. 152, Orat. 122, Part. 46,139. 2 English translations of Cicero's De inventione are taken from the edition of H. M. Hubbell in the Loeb Classical Library. ________ __ ____________________© The International Society for the History of Rhetoric, Rhetorica, Volume XVI, Number 1 (Winter 1998) 1 RHETORICA 2 these topics which we have mentioned will have to be either probable or irrefutable") (3) Inv. 1.51 omnis igitur argumentatio aut per inductionem tractanda est aut per ratiocinationem ("all argumentation, then, is to be carried on either by induction or by deduction") Leaving aside the first section on the topics, I would like to focus on sections (2) and (3) to underline some similarities, but also many differences, between the text of De inventions and Aristotle's Rhetoric. The relationship between these works is difficult indeed, because of the heavy Stoic influence on Cicero and because Hellenistic rhetorical handbooks served as sources for this youthful work of Cicero. Cicero says that he wants to limit himself to the rhetorical aspects of argumentatio because its philosophical rationes, which go beyond the needs of the orator, "are intricate and involved, and a precise system has been formulated" (Inv. 1.77; cf. 1.86). This statement is important because it shows that Cicero could also draw material from philosophical sources. And in a way he did so when he supplied precepts for both inductio and ratiocinatio, because this subject, "necessary to the highest degree", had been, he says, "greatly neglected by writers on the art of rhetoric" (Inv. 1.50). But we should be cautious about the truth of this claim. Referring to ratiocinatio, Cicero actually says that it was a form of argument which was "most largely used by Aristotle ... and Theophrastus, and then was taken up by the teachers of rhetoric who have been regarded as most precise and accomplished in their art" (Inv. 1.61). Who are these accomplished and skilful teachers of rhetoric (rhetores elegantissimi atque artificiosissimi)? They are likely to be the Hellenistic masters, probably the same ones who, some sections later, appear to have been no less interested in rhetorical argumentation than Cicero himself, although he claims to have written down its precepts more...
November 1997
-
Abstract
Research Article| November 01 1997 INTRODUCTION: Rhetorical Incunabula: A Short-Title Catalogue of Texts Printed to the Year 1500 James J. Murphy, James J. Murphy Department of Rhetoric and Communication, University of California, Davis, CA 95616-8695, USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Martin Davies Martin Davies Curator of Incunabula, The British Library, 96 Euston Rd, London NWl 2DB, United Kingdom. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1997) 15 (4): 355–362. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1997.15.4.355 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 James J. Murphy, Martin Davies; INTRODUCTION: Rhetorical Incunabula: A Short-Title Catalogue of Texts Printed to the Year 1500. Rhetorica 1 November 1997; 15 (4): 355–362. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1997.15.4.355 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 1997, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1997 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
-
Abstract
Research Article| November 01 1997 PREMTER INDEX Rhetorica (1997) 15 (4): 457–465. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1997.15.4.457 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 PREMTER INDEX. Rhetorica 1 November 1997; 15 (4): 457–465. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1997.15.4.457 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 1997, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1997 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
September 1997
-
Abstract
James J. Murphy and Martin Davies Rhetorical Incunabula: A Short-Title Catalogue of Texts Printed to the Year 1500 INTRODUCTION T he fifteenth century was perhaps one of the most important periods in the history of rhetoric, when the printing press changed the slow, labor-intensive hand production of single books into a mass-production system based on machine replication of texts. As Elizabeth Eisenstein has observed, "As an agent of change, printing altered methods of data collection, storage, and retrieval systems and communications networks used by learned communities throughout Europe. It warrants special attention because it had special effects."1 This study deals with the earliest printed books dealing with rhetoric, the rhetorical "incunabula." The Latin term incunabulum (pi. incunabula) means "cradle" or "swaddling clothes" or "birthplace." When Cornelius a Beughem published the first specialized list of fifteenth-century printed books (i.e., from Gutenberg up to and including the year 1500), his title Incunabula typographiae (Amsterdam, 1688) gave a name to the books printed in that period. We do not yet know the extent to which printing may have changed rhetoric in the fifteenth century and after. Two major efforts need to be made before that judgment can be made. One is the identification and study of manuscript books dealing with rhetoric, to see what kind and number of texts were made by hand during the fifteenth century. This is a complex matter, both Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1980), 2:xvi.©The International Society for the History of Rhetoric, Rhetorica, Volume XV, Number 4 (1997) 355 356 RHETORICA because we lack the apparatus for precise location and dating of the manuscripts, and because some works existed in manuscript for a long time before being printed.2 The second necessary effort is the identification and study of books on rhetoric printed up to the year 1500. This present short-title catalogue is a first step in that direction. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to rhetoric in the second half of the fifteenth century. Generally, historians of rhetoric lump all of the "Renaissance" together as one entity, without considering the incunable period separately. The nearest thing to a survey is the brilliant piece by John Monfasani, "Humanism and Rhetoric," in the three-volume Renaissance Humanism edited by Albert Rabil, Jr.3 Monfasani discusses a number of incunable authors, but also ranges over nearly two centuries of development and thus does not concentrate on the incunable period itself. There is also a brief pointing essay by James J. Murphy.4 Some attention has been given to individual authors,5 or to certain lines of influence,6 or to particular countries.7 At the same time there is an enormous range of modern scholarship dealing with other aspects of incunables, especially physical characteristics like bindings, inks, typefaces, and paper, which are often useful in identifying printers, or dates and places of publication. There has been less attention to rhetorical aspects 2The groundwork has been laid, however, by the herculean labors of Paul Oskar Kristeller in the extensive manuscript catalogues of his Iter Italicum, vols. 1-6 (Leiden, 1963-92). Sometimes the time lag between composition and printing is a complicating factor: for example, Lorenzo Valla died in 1457, but his commentary on Quintilian's Institutiones oratoriae was not printed until 1494. 3Rcnaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy, ed. Albert Rabil, Jr. (Philadelphia, 1988), 3:171-235. 4James J. Murphy, "Rhetoric in the Earliest Years of Printing, 1465-1500," Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984): 1-11. See also Murphy, "Ciceronian Influences in Latin Rhetorical Compendia of the Fifteenth Century," in Acta Conventus NeoLatini Guelpherbytani: Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies, ed. Stella P. Revard, Fidel Radie, and Mario A. Di Cesare (Binghamton, N.Y., 1988), pp. 522-30. 5George A. Kennedy, "The Rhetorica of Guillaume Fichet," Rhetorica 5 (1987): 411-18; and Lawrence D. Green, "Classical and Medieval Rhetorical Traditions in Traversagni's Margarita eloquentiae," Quarterly Journal of Speech 72 (1986): 185-96. 6 John Monfasani, "The Byzantine Rhetorical Tradition and the Renaissance," in Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and...
August 1997
-
Abstract
Abstract: Alexander of Ashby's De artifldoso modo predicandi has the distinction of being the first medieval sermon rhetoric since the De doctrina Christiana to apply classical rhetorical terms to preaching. The text ineludes a dedicatory prologue to Alexander's abbot (of the Augustinian canons at Ashby), the treatise proper on a sermon's construction, and five sample sermons. In contradistinction to current formalist descriptions of the De artificioso modo predicandi, this essay focuses on its audience awareness. I argue that the historical importance of this treatise lies not merely in its revival of classical terminology, but also in its theorization of rhetorical scenes in which classical teachings might apply to the sermon.
-
Abstract
Research Article| August 01 1997 History as Rhetoric: Style, Narrative, and Persuasion Ronald H. Carpenter,History as Rhetoric: Style, Narrative, and Persuasion (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1995). S. Michael Halloran S. Michael Halloran Department of Language, Literature, and Communication, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY 12180-3590, USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1997) 15 (3): 347–349. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1997.15.3.347 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 S. Michael Halloran; History as Rhetoric: Style, Narrative, and Persuasion. Rhetorica 1 August 1997; 15 (3): 347–349. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1997.15.3.347 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 1997, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1997 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
-
Rhetoric as Character-Fashioning: The Implications of Delivery's “Places” in the British Renaissance Paideia ↗
Abstract
Abstract: Pronuntiatio teaches charaeter creation and analysis. Because the rhetorical curriculum in the British Renaissance considers pronuntiatio essential, retains the educational goal of facilitas, treats every “text” as a declamation, and depicts inventio, dispositio, elocutio, and memoria in behavioral metaphors with rules mirroring those of pronuntiatio, Renaissance rhetoric is in practice an art of behavior centrally concerned with decorum. This connection between Renaissance rhetoric and ethics suggests a defense for the claim that the good orator is the good man and expands the domain of rhetoric from an art of expression, composition, or persuasion to an art of character-fashioning.
-
Abstract
Research Article| August 01 1997 Science, Reason, and Rhetoric Science, Reason, and Rhetoric, eds. Henry Krips,J. E. McGuire, and Trevor Melia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995). Jean Dietz Moss Jean Dietz Moss Department of English, Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, 20064 USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1997) 15 (3): 344–347. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1997.15.3.344 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jean Dietz Moss; Science, Reason, and Rhetoric. Rhetorica 1 August 1997; 15 (3): 344–347. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1997.15.3.344 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 1997, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1997 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
-
Abstract
Research Article| August 01 1997 Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structure of Renaissance Thought Ann Moss,Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structure of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), xvi + 345 pp. Terence Cave Terence Cave St. John's College, Oxford University, OXl 3JP Oxford, Great Britain Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1997) 15 (3): 337–340. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1997.15.3.337 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Terence Cave; Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structure of Renaissance Thought. Rhetorica 1 August 1997; 15 (3): 337–340. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1997.15.3.337 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 1997, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1997 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
-
Acutum dicendi genus. Brevità, oscurità, sottigliezze e paradossi nelle tradizioni retoriche degli Stoici ↗
Abstract
Research Article| August 01 1997 Acutum dicendi genus. Brevità, oscurità, sottigliezze e paradossi nelle tradizioni retoriche degli Stoici Gabriella Moretti,Acutum dicendi genus. Breuità, oscurità, sottigliezze e paradossi nelle tradizioni retoriche degli Stoici (Bologna, Pà tron Editore, 1995), pp. 214. Laurent Pernot Laurent Pernot Université des Sciences Humaines de Strasbourg, U. F. R. des Lettres, 14 rue René Descartes, 67084 Strasbourg cedex, France Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1997) 15 (3): 335–337. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1997.15.3.335 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Laurent Pernot; Acutum dicendi genus. Brevità, oscurità, sottigliezze e paradossi nelle tradizioni retoriche degli Stoici. Rhetorica 1 August 1997; 15 (3): 335–337. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1997.15.3.335 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 1997, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1997 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
-
Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Transformations in the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric ↗
Abstract
Research Article| August 01 1997 Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Transformations in the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Transformations in the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric, eds. Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993). Rosa A. Eberly Rosa A. Eberly Department of English, University of Texas, Austin, TX 78712, USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1997) 15 (3): 340–344. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1997.15.3.340 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Rosa A. Eberly; Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Transformations in the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric. Rhetorica 1 August 1997; 15 (3): 340–344. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1997.15.3.340 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 1997, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1997 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
June 1997
-
Abstract
Reviews 347 dimension often missing (a point mentioned by Trevor Melia in his erudite Comment). Here rhetoric reaches its fullest extension, becoming one with the domain of poetics - but that should come as no surprise to historians of rhetoric. Jean Dietz Moss Ronald H. Carpenter, History as Rhetoric: Style, Narrative, and Persuasion (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1995). Ronald Carpenter's History as Rhetoric argues that the stories of past events we call "history" draw upon the resources of rhetoric and can serve to shape a public understanding of the world. For postmodernists, this may not qualify as news, but Carpenter is no postmodernist. He relies pri marily on methods that would satisfy the most doctrinaire neoAristotelian or New Critic. He uses the tools of "scientific history" and traditional literary analysis to demonstrate the rhetoricality of history. The focus of Carpenter's book is on American historians of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Frederick Jackson Turner, Carl Becker, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Frank L. Owsley, and Barbara Tuchman. He attempts to show how each of these writers employs techniques of style and/or narrative in an effort to achieve "opinion leadership" beyond the realms of academic history. In the cases of Turner, Becker, Mahan, and Tuchman, Carpenter argues that they achieved an effective "rhetorical impress," making his case by means of close readings of their texts com bined with documentary evidence of the responses of actual readers. As his one negative example, Carpenter attempts to show that Frank Owsley's contribution to the agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand failed in its persuasive purpose. Carpenter devotes three chapters (one each on Turner, Becker, and Mahan) to the effects of style, and three chapters (another on Mahan, plus one each on Owsley and Tuchman) to techniques of narrative. In a long concluding chapter, he ranges more broadly across historical and popular writings and even motion pictures to show the pre science of Turner's frontier hypothesis in respect to twentieth-century American attitudes toward warfare, and to urge the need for alternatives to the frontiersman metaphor in war-related public discourse. Carpenter is at his best when working as a rhetorical analyst on archival materials. In his chapter on Frederick Jackson Turner, for exam- 348 RHETORICA pie, Carpenter traces the evolution of Turner's style, starting with analyses of primary sources from Turner's high-school and college days, and mov ing from those to the later professional writings. Drawing upon both clas sical and modem stylistic theory, Carpenter teases out the stylistic lessons Turner learned as a student and shows how those lessons found their way into his mature work. Carpenter then uses published reviews and corre spondence from readers to support an argument that, through the power of an "oratorical" style, Turner helped establish the frontiersman as an archetype of American culture. The chapter is a model of stylistic analysis and of cautiously developed argument. Equally interesting and somewhat more venturesome in interpreta tion is Carpenter's treatment of Barbara Tuchman's The Guns ofAugust and its role in John Kennedy's decision making during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. That Kennedy had drawn lessons from Tuchman was previously established, and here, as elsewhere in the book, Carpenter acknowledges his debts to other writers with meticulousness and grace. Carpenter's own purpose is to get at specific rhetorical techniques that might account for Tuchman's influence. He draws on Tuchman's correspondence with edi torial adviser Denning Miller in an effort to understand the compositional choices made in the writing of her book, and uses Hayden White's tropical theory to characterize the resulting narrative form. He simultaneously develops a speculative argument that draws on documentary evidence to show how specific narrative and stylistic features of The Guns of August might account for its role in Kennedy's thinking during the crisis. Throughout the chapter, Carpenter interweaves narrative, rhetorical analysis, theoretical explication, and the citation of documentary evidence in an admirably coherent and persuasive form. In the Tuchman chapter, Carpenter focuses on the rhetorical effect of a single work on an audience of one. In other chapters he examines rhetori cal effects wrought on audiences...
-
Abstract
344 RHETORICA and yet know all it takes to be American" (p. 245). In the Afterword, Clark and Halloran reiterate that one of their inten tions in editing this volume was to encourage more narratives of the histo ry of rhetorical theory and practice in the nineteenth century. In its poten tial for encouraging additional studies and new theories of cultural and public discourses, this volume has certainly taken a considerable step toward fulfilling its editors' hopes. Rosa A. Eberly Science, Reason, and Rhetoric, eds. Henry Krips, J. E. McGuire, and Trevor Melia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995). This volume of twelve essays and six comments treats a continuingly provocative subject. The book, the product of a conference convened to inaugurate a new program in the rhetoric of science at the University of Pittsburgh, offers some illuminating discussions of the varied appearances of rhetoric in the practice of science. That practice the editors describe carefully in the introduction to the volume. Describing three possible approaches to science, they seek to adopt the third: studies which would "stress the variety and complexity inherent in the production of scientific knowledge and also the attendant human contexts within which science is made and established." Thus they would accept even "accounts of science that are patently not rhetorical." The paths not chosen include a Gorgianic view—science, unable to produce truth, develops strategies of inquiry and uses rhetoric to construct tropes and audiences—and the view that science is sub specie rhetoricae. The book promotes reflection about the relation of rhetoric and science, but, unfortunately, it contains no index to facilitate the examination of concepts, terms, and names. My focus here will be on what seems to me to be the contribution of the volume to rhetoric of sci ence studies and on the problems presented by the ahistorical approach of some of the essays. From the editors' introduction, it should not be surprising that the nature and practice of science is the focus of the volume. The nature and practice of rhetoric as an art in itself, however, receives little attention. Most authors proceed as if rhetoric is simply a familiar term without a his tory or a discipline, but whose presence in science should be remarked upon. This curious approach is exemplified in the lead-off essay by Stephen Toulmin, the title of which, "Science and the Many Faces of Reviews 345 Rhetoric, would seem to promise to furnish the necessary background. In an attempt to bridge the gap envisioned by philosophers between the polar extremes of rhetoric and rationality, Toulmin turns to the Organon of Aristotle to illustrate the varied and overlapping types of reasoning prac ticed by human beings. But his account disappoints by its brevity. In his survey of the Organon, although he makes brief initial reference to the Analytics and the use of dialectical or topical reasoning in science, he then moves on to rhetoric, failing to treat Aristotle's conception of rhetoric or to remark on its relation to dialectic, a point that would seem to illuminate both science and a rhetoric of science. He intends, he says at the end of his seven-page essay, only a "'clearing away [of] the underbrush,"' making no attempt to discuss "questions about the rhetoric of science, or about scien tists as rhetors." J. E. McGuire and Trevor Melia, whose responses to Alan Gross's The Rhetoric of Science (1990) have appeared twice in Rhetorica, again reply neg atively to Gross's view that science is merely rhetorical invention and rep resentation, always relative to time and place (p. 77). Neither foundationalists nor nonfoundationalists, they position themselves as minimal real ists, seeing the actual practice of science as constitutive of science. They argue for a "proportionalizing rhetoric" (one that presumes a balance between representation and investigative practice) which would reflect "the proportionalizing strategies of scientific fallibilism" (p. 86). Several studies attend to sociological aspects of rhetoric. Trevor Pinch, in his analysis of the presentation of the Cold Fusion Process, demonstrates the importance of analyzing spoken rhetoric within its con text as a means to understanding both the presentation and reception of science by different audiences. Steve Fuller calls for...