Rhetorica
2062 articlesJanuary 2022
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Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992—2016 by Tammy R. Vigil ↗
Abstract
Reviewed by: Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992—2016 by Tammy R. Vigil Sara Hillin Tammy R. Vigil, Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992—2016. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019. 272 pp. ISBN: 9780700627486 In a thoroughly researched and timely study of women’s participation in American political life, Tammy R. Vigil explores how partners of presidential nominees have navigated the thorny territory of public and private spaces, often battling the media’s representation of their roles as wives, mothers, and public political figures in their own right. The text concerns itself in part with how presidential nominees’ partners offer insights into “the expectations of presidential partners” despite the fact that, as Vigil acknowledges, there are no established guidelines for evaluating the work of [End Page 100] the (almost always) women who fulfill that role (2). Though the book gives special emphasis to the years between 1992 (hailed as the Year of the Woman) and 2016, Vigil begins with a rich historical discussion of presidential wives’ involvement in their husbands’ campaigns, mentioning, for example, how Louisa Adams “used open house receptions to court potential supporters for her husband’s bid for the presidency” (5). Such examples, which involve women facilitating a salon type of discourse, echo suggestions from rhetoricians such as Christine de Pizan, who championed women’s ability to use influence as a rhetorical tool. Vigil’s ethos in this historical and rhetorical analysis is firmly established in the introductory chapter, where she takes readers as far back as 1808, noting that evidence of smear campaigns against presidential candidates’ wives may have begun with women such as Dolley Madison, who was in 1808 “accused of having had an affair with incumbent president Thomas Jefferson” (3). Vigil’s sharp attention to the fact that some sort of media presence has, almost from the beginning, either helped or hampered presidential nominees’ spouses, provides a corrective to any notion that such interference is a more recent phenomenon. Vigil spends much of the introductory and first chapters exploring the evolution of women’s involvement in political life, noting how, although women “were initially conceived of as apolitical beings” (34), they were actively involved in all facets of decision making in certain “public roles customarily closed to them” during men’s absence through the American Revolution (22). Noting the restrictive view of women’s ability to “function outside the home” (17) promulgated by influential writers such as David Hume, Vigil illustrates how women were indeed more than capable of rising to the challenge of political participation as more opportunities became available to them. Vigil also notes how nineteenth-century ideologies about women began to shift and how changing beliefs regarding the necessity of women’s public participation—as evidenced by texts such as John Stuart Mill’s 1869 On the Subjection of Women (23)—allowed women to go to work outside the home and, therefore, move more fluidly between the public and private sphere (24). The first chapter also introduces a concept that anchors much of the discussion of political wives/mothers in the rest of the text: republican motherhood, which Vigil notes was a “rhetorical strategy” (28) to push the notion of an “ideal female patriot” (27). The republican mother, Vigil notes, was a concept that left women “duty-bound to protect and cultivate the home” but also encouraged debates concerning “women’s appropriate concerns and actions outside the home” (28). The essential historical groundwork laid in the introductory and first chapters allows readers to much more fully appreciate both the political opportunities that have opened up for women since and the challenges that those opportunities have presented. The subsequent chapters of Moms in Chief explore more specifically how various presidential nominees’ partners have been seen to either adhere to or deviate from the republican motherhood framework. The second chapter concerns itself with Barbara Bush and Hillary Rodham Clinton, two seemingly [End Page 101] diametrically opposed figures when discussed from the terministic screen of republican motherhood. If the ideal republican mother was, as Vigil notes, “other-centric, self-sacrificing, primarily concerned with domesticity, and...
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This essay traces a line of connection among various historical uses of apostrophe—oratorical, poetic, and narratological. Despite appearances, these uses of apostrophe enclose a history of the knowing subject and a template for its attenuation that is relevant to twentieth- and twenty-first century thought, critiques of subjectivity, and critical theory. In this way I examine what residue of the history of subjectivity calls out to us from the figure of the apostrophe. The apostrophe, and perhaps many other figures besides, thus truly are as G. O. Hutchison describes: “like boxes waiting to be opened, full of [underinterpreted] significance.”
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Reviewed by: Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics by Michele Kennerly David L. Marshall Michele Kennerly, Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2018. 242 pp. ISBN: 9781108426237 There exists a set of topoi still alive—undead—within ancient, medieval, and early modem historiographies of rhetoric that circles “the loss of politics” as the crucial fact when it comes to narrating the coming into being and passing away of rhetoric. Politics itself as an object of such attachment may take several forms, but it is the beginning and sine qua non of rhetorical [End Page 91] application. In her disciplined yet frequently humorous Editorial Bodies, Michele Kennerly boils the politics-as-lost-object topoi down to the bone: “oratory flourishes in democracies only, the Hellenistic age [for example] was undemocratic, ergo there were no speeches worth preserving” (56). Kennerly tilts at the politics-as-lost-object topoi (and contests this characterization of the Hellenic) from a refreshing and subtle angle—that of editing, revision, what she terms “ corpus-care” (15). For her, turning to the curation of texts with rhetorical attention is not the reluctant decision of a culture that has lost its opportunities to speak and decide together in public. As Kennerly puts it, “rather than being indicators of political decline or decadence, polished and published prose and verse point to contestation over what sort of words best sustain communal life,” and, in this way, “writing is no less democratic or republican than speaking: the two verbal forms live parallel lives” (209). Hers is also a re-reading of the early histories of both Greek and Roman rhetoric showing how concern for the written record was always at issue alongside concern for the oral performance. Kennerly’s approach yields instructive angles on a series of authors. We encounter what she calls “Horace’s meticulous file,” his editorial metaphor of choice for smoothing stylistic burrs. But Kennerly pushes against “a prevailing view on Horace’s strictures on the stilus-, that he ‘made a virtue out of a political necessity’”—“the ‘necessity’ being the need to watch one’s words as the imperial period gained force” (109). In her reading, Ovid is someone who “displays his editorial body” cultivating thereby “the image of a man trying to correct his mistakes” (134), and this leads to “the (cultivated) shabbiness of his corpora,” which for Kennerly “accords with their tristis situation” (139). Political exile means disheveled self-consuming textual performance. In reference to Quintilian, editing implies compilation and overview stemming from care, and “the enmbased lexical family is the progenitor of ‘curative’ and ‘curation,’ both of which apply to Quintilian’s labors: he sees what ails various oratorical corpora and means to cure them through his curation of rhetoric’s traditions and orations” (164). Editing, reworking, compiling, creating a summative edition—all these should be understood in terms of established rhetorical topoi. Just so, in Quintilian, compiling is also a form of ethopoetic exercise, and such processes become “habituation hexis (Greek, lit. ‘having’)” rendered sometimes, as we know, “in Latin as facilitas (ease)” (162). Always, Kennerly is attentive to the embodiments of writing and editing. In Latin, she relays, the “edowords”—at the root of “edit” and its variants—were themselves richly enmeshed in a slew of metaphors “from giving birth, to uttering words, to presenting something for inspection, to displaying it publicly, to publishing it” and did not denote “prepublic textual activities” (2). And the terms ancient Romans did use for textual revision drew on a range of artisan prototypes: “they dragged away, cut out, pressed, smoothed, polished, hammered, filed, and shaved” (2). On the Greek side, “gluing” was an important metaphor domain because it had pertinent literal applications too: “writers would glue papyrus patches atop errors to hide them or to insert emendations on top of them” (29). Again, [End Page 92] Kennerly is quick to note that “turning the stilus” was “idiomatic for rubbing out with the flat end of the stilus something written into a wax tablet with the pointed end” (79). It should thus come as no surprise that, although this work is ancient in...
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Christ’s Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics by Olga V. Solovieva ↗
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Reviewed by: Christ’s Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics by Olga V. Solovieva Mark Clavier Olga V. Solovieva, Christ’s Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018. 328 pp. ISBN: 9780810136007 Few images have carried as much rhetorical power as corpus Christi, the Body of Christ. Originating in Jesus’ performative presentation of his own Body at the Last Supper and interpreted through the lens of the crucifixion, it quickly became one of the primary theological metaphors for the church. For example, Paul draws on the imagery of Christ’s Body in 1 Corinthians to demonstrate the mutual dependence and deep communion that should characterize the Corinthian church. Paul’s own use points to an integrative understanding of the image that not only promotes Christian unity but also establishes that unity as integral to Christian identity. In this way, the Body of Christ has been used to persuade would-be schismatics and heretics to “submit themselves one to another.” In short, Christ’s Body is more than simply an object of veneration—it contains rhetorical potency. In Christ’s Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics, Olga Solovieva demonstrates how this rhetorical power has also been regularly and paradoxically deployed subversively, even iconoclastically. She does this by rooting her study of the rhetorical power of Christ’s Body in Paul’s highly rhetorical argument in 1 Corinthians 1.18-31 that Christ’s crucified Body profoundly challenges the powers of the world. Drawing on Dale Martin, Alam Badiou, and J. L. Austin, she proposes that Christ’s Body serves here a performative function—what she terms “an ideological operator” (10)—that both inaugurates and persuades: “It means not the destruction but the substitution of one system of meaning by another within a shared cultural horizon” (11). But because these rhetorical practices invariably result in the weakening of power, she interprets them as subversive rather than substitutionary. In Chapters 1–6, Solovieva carefully studies and explains how Christ’s Body is employed in this way in six completely disconnected historical situations: the iconoclasm of Epiphanius of Salamis, the 15th-century alchemical Book of the Holy Trinity, in the aesthetics of Johann Caspar Lavater, Dostoevsky’s Genealogy of Ethical Consciousness, the cinematography of Pier Paolo Pasolini, and by the Right in contemporary American politics. The span of genres covered here speaks not only to the breadth of Solovieva’s [End Page 88] expertise but also her particular perspective as a scholar of comparative literature. While some who may be interested in the underlying theology or ideological power of corpus Christi may find the basis for her broad comparative approach problematic, it would be hard to deny her ability to draw key insights from each of her case studies. Collectively, they also highlight how Christ’s Body has transcended confessional boundaries to shape the rhetoric and practices of people and groups even on the margins of Christian orthodoxy. For example, in her chapter on Epiphanius, Solovieva persuasively argues that one of the foundations for Epiphanius’s iconoclasm was his concern about the rhetorical impact of venerating the image of Christ on the Christian’s self-awareness of being part of the Body of Christ—in effect, seeing Christ’s Body compromised the worshiper’s sense of being Christ’s Body. Articulating this in the context of contemporary arguments (as in Eusebius) of church buildings functioning symbolically as Christ’s Body in zvhich Christians worship is enormously helpful. It allows the iconoclastic argument to move beyond mere aversion to idolatry (though that remains) and stand out more starkly as a challenge to Roman imperial power, the rhetoric of which was based in part on the worship of imperial images. Similar striking analyses abound in this volume. Solvovieva’s overall argument, however, is weakened by the disparity of her examples. While she does fine work in each chapter of demonstrating the cultural subversiveness of Christ’s Body, her lack of a conclusion that draws her argument together is striking in light of the expanse of time and genres she covers. Although each chapter is masterly in its grasp of...
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Reviewed by: Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention by Steele Nowlin Denise Stodola Steele Nowlin, Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention. Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016. 274 pp. ISBN: 9780814213100 It is unusual but incredibly useful when authors challenge their readers to think about familiar terms in unfamiliar ways, which is what Steele Nowlin has done here. Calling upon his readers to view the terms “affect” and “invention” through a different lens, he shows us that these two concepts are intimately linked even though “affect” is often used as a synonym for emotion. For Nowlin, affect and emotion are separate concepts that interact with each other. In fact, in his configuration, affect [End Page 98] is a type of “emergence” that precedes an actual feeling or emotion. Because affect concerns an “emerging” potential, it is thus linked to invention, which is, itself, an emerging potential. More specifically, affect emerges and then “collapses” into emotion, and this is analogous to the way in which invention “collapses” into poetic form. By reshaping our perceptions of how affect precedes emotion and is therefore analogous to invention preceding form, we are then able to view poetic invention differently. Ultimately, invention not only shapes poetic form, but can, in many cases, expose cultural narratives that are themselves in need of revision. Moreover, Nowlin does a fine job of contextualizing his theoretical approach within the introductory chapter. He asserts that his work relies heavily on Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, as well as Eve Sofosky Sedgwick. He also uses the work of scholars like Eric Shouse, Brian Massumi, Gregory J. Seigworth, Melissa Gregg, Lauren Berlant, Mary Carruthers, and Rita Copeland. By showing the relationship of his work to that of other scholars—not only those focused on critical theory, but also those who specialize in “feeling theory,” as well as medieval scholars and rhetoricians— Nowlin provides a solid foundation for his theoretical approach. On the other hand, the order of the subsequent chapters is somewhat strained. In the first two chapters, he focuses on Chaucer, first on House of Fame in Chapter 1, and then on Legend of Good Women in Chapter 2. The placement of these chapters makes sense insofar as they both focus on Chaucer and illustrate not only how Chaucer’s works can been seen to deploy Nowlin’s formulation but also how neither of the works pushes past a potential realization of cultural narratives into any sort of action. In House of Fame, physical movement aligns affect with invention, bringing together the literary with the political and ultimately illustrating how the affective dynamic helps us to understand “patterns of cultural power.” In this case, that power is the power of literary men to find their own fame by using women. Dido, in fact, becomes a symbol for what Nowlin calls the “coemergence” of affect and invention, and the form resulting from invention does not provide any answer to Dido’s plight. Legend of Good Women, however, addresses misogyny and antifeminism more fully. Ultimately, though, it does not move past its own misogyny, but rather leaves the reader understanding how unethical that misogyny is. As such, it reveals the cultural narratives in which the work itself exists. By putting these two chapters next to each other, we are able to see both poems rely on affective invention and how the Legend of Good Women moves closer to an invention that more clearly articulates the misogyny of the culture in which it was produced. Chapters 3 and 4 could be brought together into one chapter as both focus on Gower’s Gonfessio Amantis, and both illustrate Gower’s success with the use of affective invention to effect potential change. Chapter 3 shows that the affective invention in the Confessio reveals masculinist cultural discourses and how they shape cultural reality, suggesting a potential need to transform the culture in which it was produced. Similarly, Chapter 4 argues that the chronicle form as a means of codifying significant cultural events and providing an authoritative version of those events has fundamentally opposite [End Page 99] impulses from what Gower’s poem ultimately achieves: invention of not only a...
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The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire: The Rhetorical Schoolroom and the Creation of a Cultural Legend by T. J. Keeline ↗
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Reviewed by: The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire: The Rhetorical Schoolroom and the Creation of a Cultural Legend by T. J. Keeline Martin T. Dinter T. J. Keeline, The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire: The Rhetorical Schoolroom and the Creation of a Cultural Legend. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 388 pp. ISBN: 9781108426237 Cultural memory is a strange beast indeed. While there is no doubt that Cicero sculpted his own image during his lifetime, he could hardly have foreseen that as soon as the first century AD he would be defined by his style—i.e., that the style would become the man. The incorporation of Cicero into Roman cultural memory is thus highly selective. Without explicitly buying into the framework of cultural memory studies, Keeline, in the revised version of his 2014 Harvard dissertation, illuminates this process in seven chapters by focusing on Cicero’s early reception. The first four chapters on the reception of Cicero in Roman education are followed by three more specialized sections on Cicero in the works of Seneca the Younger, Tacitus, and Pliny the Younger. Reception indeed serves as the overarching framework for this monograph, even though Keeline shies away from deconstructing its tenets. We cannot fathom whether or not Roman schoolboys “enjoyed” reading Cicero as much as today’s students, but Keeline employs Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, the commentaries of Asconius, and the Scholia Bobiensia to illustrate how young Romans would have encountered Cicero’s speech Pro Milone in the classroom. The rhetorically focused pedagogical approach—namely, the narrowing of Cicero’s persona and personality in a pedagogical context to a model of eloquence (which strips him of his historical and psychological complexity)—that emerges from this analysis usefully exemplifies the process Keeline expounds in the second chapter. The third chapter highlights the prominence of Cicero’s death in Roman declamation. It proposes that the narrative that Cicero was murdered by Popilius, a former client whom he had previously defended against the charge of parricide, is but an added color of the rhetorician schools. This nevertheless fits neatly with Octavian’s desire to downplay his own role in the proscriptions and shift the blame onto Mark Anthony. Cicero thus does not serve as advocate of Republican freedom but rather as advocate of freedom from Mark Anthony. In addition, the style and content of these declamations left behind traces in the accounts of Cicero’s death by Valerius Maximus and many of the historiographers such as Florus, Velleius Paterculus, and later authors such as Cassius Dio and Appian. In contrast, the chronologically fairly early accounts by Livy and Asinius Pollio still offer a morally more complicated image of both Cicero and the events surrounding his death. In the fourth chapter, Keeline ingeniously examines a group of pseudepigraphic texts that have distilled Cicero to the essence consumed in declamation schools: the Invective against Cicero (Ps.-Sallust) contrasts neatly with the Invective against Sallust (Ps.-Cicero), the Speech delivered the day before Cicero went into exile and the Letter to Octavian (Ps.-Cicero), and a pair of Ps.-Brutus’ letters to Cicero and Atticus (transmitted as Cic. Ad Brut. 1.16 and 1.17). Stylistically faithful, these texts concentrate on major life events such as Cicero’s consulship, his exile, and his speeches against Mark Anthony. [End Page 90] In addition, they provide an inventory of the tropes that formed around Cicero s life and character and subsequently found their way into the historiographical tradition. The book’s second part delves into the oeuvres, of Seneca the Younger (chapter 5), Tacitus (chapter 6), and Pliny the Younger (chapter 7) and analyses how each of them comes to terms with the über-father Cicero. Seneca the Younger adopts neither Cicero’s style nor his philosophy or educational theories. Even in his edifying letters to Lucilius, he only utilises Cicero’s correspondence with Atticus as a foil against which he constructs his own philosophical achievements. While Seneca the Elder engages frequently and substantially with Cicero, in his son’s works Cicero is conspicuous by absence. Tacitus’ Dialogus de Oratoribus is steeped in Cicero as Keeline demonstrates by analysing the speeches by Aper...
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How do we date the intellectual revival of rhetoric that has unfolded over the last century-plus? What were its early theoretical contours? This essay answers those questions by turning to the contemporaneous reinventions of rhetoric undertaken by Charles Sanders Peirce and Friedrich Nietzsche that began in the mid-1860s. I discuss their work comparatively, throwing new light on each by historicizing them in relation to dual strands of modernism linked with scientific knowing and artistic making. In the process, I bring out physiological and naturalistic dimensions of their expansive theories of rhetoric, showing how they were anchored by sensing bodies interacting with evolving worlds.
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As professor of Greek and theology at the University of Wittenberg, Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560) authored three of the most important rhetorical textbooks of his era. Melanchthon’s addition of a new genre of rhetoric, the didactic, to the classical genres of demonstrative, judicial, and deliberative oratory illuminates his view of rhetoric as an instrument for the renaissance and reformation of traditions and institutions. Cultivating faculties of judgment and understanding was Melanchthon’s prescription for survival amid theological and political chaos—a prescription that continues to hold value for rhetors in the current historical moment.
November 2021
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Philostratus' Lives of the Sophists (VS) is not usually understood as a text with much relevance for rhetorical theory. But this omission cedes theory to the handbooks and reinforces the dichotomy between theory and practice. I argue that Philostratus' theory of efficacious performance—implicit as it may be—has much to offer scholars of rhetoric and classical studies. I demonstrate that Philostratus prizes improvisation not only because it reveals the paideia of the orator, who becomes a cultural ideal, but also because it affords processes of mutual constitution between orator and audience. This occurs when the sophist becomes a physical manifestation of what the moment calls for, which compels recognition from the audience. In the second part of the paper, I focus on Polemo, the most improvisatory of sophists. In the scenes in which he features, Polemo repeatedly emerges as a man and, in recognizing him, spectators come to embody their own masculinity, in turn.
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Review: <i>Nostalgic Design: Rhetoric, Memory, and Democratizing Technology</i>, by William C. Kirlinkus ↗
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Book Review| November 01 2021 Review: Nostalgic Design: Rhetoric, Memory, and Democratizing Technology, by William C. Kirlinkus William C. Kirlinkus, Nostalgic Design: Rhetoric, Memory, and Democratizing Technology. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. 262 pp. ISBN: 9780822965527 Logan Blizzard Logan Blizzard University of Pittsburgh Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (4): 464–466. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.4.464 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Logan Blizzard; Review: Nostalgic Design: Rhetoric, Memory, and Democratizing Technology, by William C. Kirlinkus. Rhetorica 1 November 2021; 39 (4): 464–466. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.4.464 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Dal ragionamento alla persuasione: retorica dell'esempio e modelli argomentativi nel <i>Filippo</i> di Isocrate ↗
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L'articolo indaga i procedimenti argomentativi su cui Isocrate fonda la propria efficacia persuasiva, ponendo particolare attenzione all'uso degli exempla storici. A questo scopo, il Filippo offre un caso di studio interessante per individuare le indicazioni di tipo metaletterario con cui l'autore introduce e descrive il proprio ragionamento. L'analisi permette così di osservare le tracce di una consapevolezza teorica antecedente alla Retorica ad Alessandro e alla trattatistica aristotelica. Il confronto con Aristotele soprattutto consente di misurare la distanza tra i due autori nella concettualizzazione dei processi argomentativi e di definire in termini più appropriati la collocazione di Isocrate nella storia della retorica antica.
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Review: <i>Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes</i>, edited by Tom F. Wright ↗
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Book Review| November 01 2021 Review: Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes, edited by Tom F. Wright Tom F. Wright, ed. Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. 312 pp. ISBN: 9781474426268 Gero Guttzeit Gero Guttzeit Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (4): 470–472. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.4.470 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Gero Guttzeit; Review: Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes, edited by Tom F. Wright. Rhetorica 1 November 2021; 39 (4): 470–472. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.4.470 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Review: <i>Architectural Rhetoric and the Iconography of Authority in Colonial Mexico: The Casa de Montejo</i>, by C. Cody Barteet ↗
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Book Review| November 01 2021 Review: Architectural Rhetoric and the Iconography of Authority in Colonial Mexico: The Casa de Montejo, by C. Cody Barteet C. Cody Barteet, Architectural Rhetoric and the Iconography of Authority in Colonial Mexico: The Casa de Montejo. New York: Routledge, 2019. 180 pp. ISBN: 9781138585652 Sarah J. Constant Sarah J. Constant University of Pittsburgh Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (4): 466–468. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.4.466 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Sarah J. Constant; Review: Architectural Rhetoric and the Iconography of Authority in Colonial Mexico: The Casa de Montejo, by C. Cody Barteet. Rhetorica 1 November 2021; 39 (4): 466–468. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.4.466 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Book Review| November 01 2021 Review: The Rhetorical Arts of Women in Aviation, 1911–1970, by Sara Hillin Sara Hillin, The Rhetorical Arts of Women in Aviation, 1911–1970. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020. 181 pp. ISBN: 9781498551038 Jennifer Keohane Jennifer Keohane University of Baltimore Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (4): 472–474. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.4.472 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jennifer Keohane; Review: The Rhetorical Arts of Women in Aviation, 1911–1970, by Sara Hillin. Rhetorica 1 November 2021; 39 (4): 472–474. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.4.472 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Review: <i>A Liberal Education in Late Emerson: Readings in the Rhetoric of Mind</i>, by Sean Ross Meehan ↗
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Book Review| November 01 2021 Review: A Liberal Education in Late Emerson: Readings in the Rhetoric of Mind, by Sean Ross Meehan Sean Ross Meehan, A Liberal Education in Late Emerson: Readings in the Rhetoric of Mind. Rochester: Camden House, 2019. 176 pp. ISBN: 9781640140233 Nathan Crick Nathan Crick Texas A&M University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (4): 468–470. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.4.468 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Nathan Crick; Review: A Liberal Education in Late Emerson: Readings in the Rhetoric of Mind, by Sean Ross Meehan. Rhetorica 1 November 2021; 39 (4): 468–470. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.4.468 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Abstract
Le Contre Timarque d'Eschine marque la première étape du conflit qui oppose l'orateur à son grand adversaire Démosthène devant les tribunaux d'Athènes. Ce plaidoyer, qui aboutit à la victoire d'Eschine, permet de mesurer toute l'habileté rhétorique de l'orateur et d'admirer, dans la pratique, l'argumentation qu'il développe, les preuves qu'il avance et les figures dont il use. Mais il contient également nombre d'indications théoriques sur la manière dont il convient, selon Eschine, d'élaborer un discours, qu'il s'agisse du contenu de ce discours en fonction du sujet abordé, du style dans lequel ce contenu doit être développé ou encore de l'action oratoire dans ses deux dimensions, la voix et le geste. Le Contre Timarque peut ainsi apparaître, dans une certaine mesure, comme l'ébauche d'un Art rhétorique.
September 2021
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Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes ed. by Tom F. Wright ↗
Abstract
Reviewed by: Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes ed. by Tom F. Wright Gero Guttzeit Tom F. Wright, ed. Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. 312 pp. ISBN: 9781474426268 For the study of oratory, the long nineteenth century from the American Revolution to World War I is a particularly fruitful period, in which the expansion of democratic rights transformed the public sphere and emerging [End Page 470] print capitalism functioned as a catalyst for the distribution of the spoken word. Building on such collections as Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory, 1787–1900 1998 and Women at the Podium: Memorable Speeches in History 2000, Tom F. Wright’s anthology Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes presents a novel, multifaceted canon of speechmaking that enables its readers to construct a history of the momentous political, social, and cultural changes of the period. It stands out especially because of its methodological integration of transnational perspectives. Wright is well-known to scholars of the period because of two publications closely related to Transatlantic Rhetoric: his edited collection The Cosmopolitan Lyceum: Lecture Culture and the Globe in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013) and his monograph Lecturing the Atlantic: Speech, Print, and an Anglo-American Commons 1830- 1870 (Oxford University Press, 2017). The anthology continues this approach of the nineteenth-century practice of eloquence in its production, performance, and reception from a transatlantic viewpoint. Like its predecessors, the collection reframes comparisons between British and American eloquence and also extends to such issues as “the varying tone of Irish, Haitian and American nationalisms” and “the shared metaphors of abolition and the women’s movement” (10). For instance, it illustrates how the struggle for Irish Home Rule provoked a backlash in American nativist discourses against the Irish diaspora (219–228), and how the reception in Britain and France of Alexander Stephens’ white supremacist arguments for the Secession of the American South in his so-called “Cornerstone Speech” (1861) influenced Europe’s refusal to recognize the Confederacy as an independent state (260–263). Putting together a revisionist anthology such as this comes with particular challenges with regard to the length of the book and the necessity for selection. Wright’s departure from the ‘great speeches’ model is certainly commendable. In contrast to the latter, the chapter structure for his selection of seventy-three speeches in total is based on the “great ‘questions’ of the century” (2); for him, these are Nationalisms and Independence (ch. 1); Gender, Suffrage and Sexuality (ch. 2); Slavery and Race (ch. 3); Faith, Culture and Society (ch. 4); Empire and Manifest Destiny (ch. 5); and War and Peace (ch. 6). Speeches on what French and German call the ‘social question’ (question sociale, soziale Frage)—that is, issuer relating to class, poverty, and the proletariat—appear as a subsection of chapter four, called “Society and Class” (178–195). The selection includes what have become mainstays of speechmaking in the period, such as the two printed versions of Sojourner Truth’s “Speech to the Women’s Rights Convention” (1851), Frederick Douglass’s “What to the slave is July 4th?” (1852), and Emmeline Pankhurst’s “Freedom or Death” (1913). But it also ranges from Jean-Jacques Dessalineo “Haitian Declaration of Independence” (1804) and Nanye’hi and others’ “Cherokee Women Address Their Nation” (1817) to Swami Vivekananda’s “Address at the World’s Parliament of Religions (1893). Overall, the focus is quite clearly on political speech, although the collection also touches on other [End Page 471] issues popular on the nineteenth-century lecture circuits, such as education and literature. What makes Wright’s anthology stand out from among its peers is the detailed editorial matter, which proposes an argument of its own about the period in question. Each of the six chapters features an introduction, contextualizing headnotes for the speeches or excerpts, and explanatory annotations. Taken together with the introduction to the volume, the illustrations, the suggestions for further reading, and the index, these elements make Wright’s book an important contribution to research on public speaking in the long nineteenth century. Wright argues that “the antique...
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Abstract
International audience
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Dal ragionamento alla persuasione: retorica dell’esempio e modelli argomentativi nel Filippo di Isocrate ↗
Abstract
L’articolo indaga i procedimenti argomentativi su cui Isocrate fonda la propria efficacia persuasiva, ponendo particolare attenzione all’uso degli exempla storici. A questo scopo, il Filippo offre un caso di studio interessante per individuare le indicazioni di tipo metaletterario con cui l’autore introduce e descrive il proprio ragionamento. L’analisi permette così di osservare le tracce di una consapevolezza teorica antecedente alla Retorica ad Alessandro e alla trattatistica aristotelica. II confronto con Aristotele soprattutto consente di misurare la distanza tra i due autori nella concettualiz-zazione dei processi argomentativi e di definire in termini più appropriati la collocazione di Isocrate nella storia della retorica antica.
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Abstract
Reviewed by: The Rhetorical Arts of Women in Aviation, 1911–1970 by Sara Hillin Jennifer Keohane Sara Hillin, The Rhetorical Arts of Women in Aviation, 1911–1970. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020. 181 pp. ISBN: 9781498551038 It is easy to see why Amelia Earhart has soared over the public memory of women in aviation. She was charismatic, committed to promoting women in flight, and left behind a trove of speeches, articles, and books to analyze. Yet, this valorization of Earhart’s accomplishments as the main story of women in aviation is exactly what Sara Hillin writes against in her new book. Instead, Hillin argues, there are a number of female aviators who were not [End Page 472] only taking to the skies against stacked odds, but writing and speaking about it too. Hillin’s project is primarily based in recovery. She seeks to add the words of the rhetors covered here to fill gaps in feminist rhetorical historiography (1). Earhart does not feature prominently in the analysis; although the 99s—a vocal and organized group of female aviators—are covered, and Earhart was their first president. Instead, Hillin focuses on lesser-known writers and flyers including Harriet Quimby, the first women licensed as a pilot in the United States and a transportation columnist for Frank Leslie’s Weekly. Other important aviators include Bessie Coleman and Willa Beatrice Brown, African American stunt pilots covered extensively in the Chicago Defender; Mary Alexander, a flying mother who threw birthday parties for her children in the air; and Jerrie Cobb, a pilot who passed all the tests to join the Mercury program but was never allowed to go to space. The book follows a loosely chronological structure, moving from the 1910s to the 1970s, and features eight analytical chapters, each of which focus on a different woman or group of women. While these women confronted a variety of obstacles in taking to the air, the driving similarity is their rhetorical acumen. As Hillin writes, “Rather than simply describing their experiences, they harnessed their rhetorical intuition to get others to act—to accept women as aviators, to train them as equals with men, and to influence the overall development of aviation and space exploration” (10). The narrative Hillin tells is not one of slow but steady progress throughout the twentieth century. In fact, in its infancy, flight had not yet been gendered masculine. As per Hillin’s telling, “there was something uniquely magic, even divine” in the fact that Harriet Quimby was taken so seriously as an expert on flying in her columns for Leslie’s (22). Indeed, like many of the women examined here, Quimby relied on her personal experience as an aviator to build her ethos, which Hillin defines as an embodied rhetoric in which “her physical self and its connection with the tool (airplane)” granted credibility (35). The world wars of the twentieth century also provide an important backdrop. Many women wrote against using the airplane as a tool for war, while others took advantage of the need for trained aviators to expand their place in the field (49). Other aviators had to negotiate the unique demands of race politics in addition to gender. African American flyer Bessie Coleman engaged in barnstorming tours and stunt flying, visual rhetorics that proved her skill, while white female aviators could skip these dangerous venues for flight because they had access to other forms of funding, training, and media outlets (62). Likewise, by the time Jerrie Cobb sought access to space, the Cold War competitive mentality had hardened space travel as solely a masculine achievement (137). To study the first few decades of women’s involvement in aviation is to see women doing painstaking and effective rhetorical work to grab and maintain a place in a field in which they have consistently excelled since its inception,” Hillin concludes (165). [End Page 473] Hillin has undertaken an impressive amount of archival research, and the sources she uses to recover the rhetorical actions of these female aviators are wide-ranging. She analyzes personal letters, news coverage, books, speeches, and press releases (6). The theoretical through-line for Hillin’s rhetorical analysis is Kenneth Burke’s pentad (11). This orients...
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Abstract
Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists (VS) is not usually understood as a text with much relevance for rhetorical theory. But this omission cedes theory to the handbooks and reinforces the dichotomy between theory and practice. I argue that Philostratus’ theory of efficacious performance—implicit as it may be—has much to offer scholars of rhetoric and classical studies. I demonstrate that Philostratus prizes improvisation not only because it reveals the paideia of the orator, who becomes a cultural ideal, but also because it affords processes of mutual constitution between orator and audience. This occurs when the sophist becomes a physical manifestation of what the moment calls for, which compels recognition from the audience. In the second part of the paper, I focus on Polemo, the most improvisatory of sophists. In the scenes in which he features, Polemo repeatedly emerges as a man and, in recognizing him, spectators come to embody their own masculinity, in turn.
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Abstract
Reviewed by: Nostalgic Design: Rhetoric, Memory, and Democratizing Technology by William C. Kirlinkus Logan Blizzard William C. Kirlinkus, Nostalgic Design: Rhetoric, Memory, and Democratizing Technology. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. 262 pp. ISBN: 9780822965527 William Kirlinkus’ Nostalgic Design poses a central question: “What are you nostalgic for, why, and to which ends?” (4, 21). Nostalgia has a bad reputation in contemporary discourse, central as it has been to recent conservative movements, like the propagandistic, restorative nostalgia of “Make America Great Again.” This conflation has allowed progressives and critics to dismiss nostalgia as purely regressive and/or nationalistic, which “simply relieves critics of the responsibility of understanding an ‘illogical’ group . . . [and] blinds [them] to their own nostalgic impulses” (29). But the truth is that we are all nostalgic for something, insofar as the futures we imagine are necessarily shaped by what we value from the past. What is needed, and what Kirlinkus offers throughout the book, is a means to negotiate multiple, conflicting nostalgias, and put their affective force to constructive, democratic, and inclusive ends. By reframing nostalgia, Kirlinkus articulates nostalgic design, “a perspective and method” for engaging with competing nostalgias and incorporating these into the design of technology. The inherent rhetoricity of design—defined broadly as “the methods by which expert makers create some technology to be operated by a specific user, in a specific context, in order to ‘change existing situations into preferred ones’”—has long been acknowledged by theorists like Richard Buchanan and Donald Norman, and often aligns with the future- orientation of the dominant technological paradigm (or “techno-logic”). Nostalgia, here defined as “pride and longing for lost or threatened personally or culturally experienced pasts” (6), would seem more closely aligned with another rhetorical process: memory. By recognizing that technology is far more historically-oriented than designers tend to admit (given that users tend to understand the new only through the old), nostalgic design posits nostalgia as powerful, largely-untapped resource for designers of all types, from graphic designers to medical professionals. As Kirlinkus argues, to overcome the tendency of tech design to neglect entire social groups, we must take seriously the memories, experiences, and concerns of a wide spectrum of users, and incorporate these into the very process of design. Much of the book is devoted to putting nostalgic design into practice, as a method. Kirlinkus frames the approach as a three-step process: identifying [End Page 464] exclusionary designs, mediating technological conflicts, and, ultimately, designing meaningful products (24). Perhaps due to the readily-apparent nature of exclusions in technology, the only real consideration of this first step comes in Chapter 2, which examines several cases of “critical nostos” (51), of amateurism functioning as resistance. Instead, the primary concern of Nostalgic Design is navigating the wildly divergent visions and values held by users and designers. In this way, the project runs into one of the defining questions for deliberative democracy: how to incorporate a plurality of opinions, needs, and values in a manner that is at once equitable and agonistic. The third chapter, one of the book’s strongest, engages with these concerns directly; setting four prominent theories of deliberative rhetoric—Aristotelian audience analysis, Burkean identification, Ratcliffe’s rhetorical listening, and Mouffe’s agonism—alongside corresponding models of deliberative design. This juxtaposition highlights the shortcomings of previous, well-meaning attempts at inclusive design, such as the patronizing efforts of “user-centered design,” or the tendency of “empathic design” to sideline designer expertise. Chapters 5 and 6 turn to the final step in the process, explicating meaningful design. Returning to the pseudo-oral history method from the second chapter, Kirlinkus focuses squarely on design praxis, bringing in accounts of real designers who have developed productive relationships with user nostalgia. This approach is of particular use in Chapter 5, which poses the interactions between designers and clients as a potential conflict between the designer’s expert knowledge (techne) and the client’s experience (metis). The correlation between rhetorical communication and design professions truly shines in this discussion, as the process of adapting, adopting, or refusing feedback requires careful attention to knowledge boundaries and productive opposition—in short, the skills of the rhetorician. The project culminates with a...
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Abstract
Reviewed by: A Liberal Education in Late Emerson: Readings in the Rhetoric of Mind by Sean Ross Meehan Nathan Crick Sean Ross Meehan, A Liberal Education in Late Emerson: Readings in the Rhetoric of Mind. Rochester: Camden House, 2019. 176 pp. ISBN: 9781640140233 Ralph Waldo Emerson is not a hero of metaphor but a metonymic poet. This is the central, provocative, and novel insight offered by Sean [End Page 468] Ross Meehan. One might miss this contribution looking only at the title or the outline of the book. A Liberal Education in Late Emerson: Readings in the Rhetoric of Mind seems to promise a broad treatment of Emerson’s late writings, while the tripartite structure of the book describes three purposes: 1) a reconsideration of Emerson’s interest in rhetoric as “a broader, organizing principle of mind,” 2) a reconsideration of his engagement “with the ideas and pedagogy of the classical liberal arts college and curriculum,” and 3) a reconsideration of “Emerson’s influence on other writers and thinkers in the same period of transformation” (5). Meehan’s book delivers on these promises. We find extended treatments of Emerson’s influence on William James, Walt Whitman, and W. E. B. Dubois, as well as a case study in his differences with the reform agenda of Harvard president Charles W. Elliott as he redesigned the University in the model of disciplinary specialization. Each of these chapters correct what Meehan sees as an injustice done to Emerson, who “as a theorist of rhetoric’s older pedagogy of relation, is marginalized in the isolated departments of the university” (66). Through his book, Meehan seeks to enshrine Emerson as one of the founding figures of the American liberal arts tradition in order to make real a vision of the well-rounded student with training in rhetorical deliberation and eloquence. He pursues this goal with passion and thoroughness. It is his treatment of Emerson’s conception of metonymy, though, that I believe makes this book unique and groundbreaking. Yet Meehan does not make this discovery easy on the reader. The book promises a study of the “rhetoric of mind,” but it addresses the meaning of this phrase on one page with these two sentences: “There is a ‘rhetoric of mind’—so Emerson describes what he also called a ‘philosophy of mind’ in his essay ‘Intellect’—that serves as an organizing principle of this writer’s style of fluid thinking . . . This ‘rhetoric of mind’ informs and organizes the poetics that transgresses the conventional definitions of philosophic logic” (22). The actual substance of this “rhetoric of mind” remains elusive, but the following paragraph gives a clue: “Emerson argues that metonymy, the rhetorical figure of association by way of context and contiguity, provides the analogical foundation and purpose for all rhetoric, indeed for all writing and thinking” (22). For Meehan, metonymy “is not just a particular figure of speech or even a figure of thought, but a name for the very figuring of thought” (22). These assertions are bold enough to arouse interest but ambiguous enough to keep one reading. It takes Meehan almost half of the book to return to this subject in earnest. Although interim treatments of James and Whitman and Elliott are historically and philosophically relevant and insightful, their purpose is less to describe this metonymic rhetoric of mind and more to establish relationships of influence and to define ethical and pedagogical principles. By the time we reach Whitman in the third chapter, metonymy reappears in full. For Meehan as for Emerson, metonymy represents more than just a trope; even the phrase a “rhetoric of mind does not really do it justice. Metonymy has almost an existential connotation. For instance, when interpreting a passage in which Emerson discusses the relationship between [End Page 469] nature, the parts of the body, memory, and mind, Meehan writes: “Emerson uses ‘this metonomy’ in the passage to illustrate the way that thought, as an active part of nature, moves through the condensations (nebulae becoming blood) and contingencies of the mind’s relation to matter in the various forms of becoming in which it shares . . . The world is a rock, loam, chyle; it is body, blood, mind, action; it is...
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Abstract
Als Schüler der Sophisten möchte Isokrates mit seiner παδεία λόγων/paideia logon einen Beitrag zur Bildung leisten. Hegel hat diesen sophistischen Anspruch angemessen hervorgeho-ben. Die Bildungsdebatte fällt indes in eine Zeit des Umbruchs, ähnlich dem am Ende der römischen Republik. Der Redner schafft eine neue dimissive Form der politischen Kommunikation, indem er politische Leitartikel verfasst, mit denen er auf bestimmte Kreise einwirken will. Im Panegyrikos formuliert er ein Narrativ von der großen Vergangenheit Athens, deren symbolische Macht immer noch ungebrochen sei. Das dient ihm als Argument für den Führungsanspruch Athens in Hellas. Soziologisch betrachtet ist dieser von Hegel herausgehobene Bildungsgedanke auch von politischer Wirkung. Die niemals gehaltenen Reden des Isokrates beweisen dies.
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Architectural Rhetoric and the Iconography of Authority in Colonial Mexico: The Casa de Montejo by C. Cody Barteet ↗
Abstract
Reviewed by: Architectural Rhetoric and the Iconography of Authority in Colonial Mexico: The Casa de Montejo by C. Cody Barteet Sarah J. Constant C. Cody Barteet, Architectural Rhetoric and the Iconography of Authority in Colonial Mexico: The Casa de Montejo. New York: Routledge, 2019. 180 pp. ISBN: 9781138585652 Architectural Rhetoric and the Iconography of Authority in Colonial Mexico: The Casa de Montejo is a tale of two cities—the Xui Maya city of Tihó and the Spanish colony of Mérida—ultimately united through a series of cultural campaigns that sought to exert Spanish authority in colonial Mexico. In this book, Barteet expands upon his previous dissertation research on Early Modern Latin American visual culture as well as past historical studies of the Casa de Montejo that “have mainly considered the façade as a reflection of European aesthetics with limited analysis of its iconography” (11). Lucid descriptions, original photographs, and dozens of archival artifacts evidence colonial anxieties in sixteenth-century Yucatán. Architectural Rhetoric strives to provide a bridge between two cognate disciplines: architectural history and rhetorical studies. Notably, Barteet understands the construction of the Casa de Montejo through Henri Lefebvre’s [End Page 466] “spatial triad” and describes how it may be used to explain the tensions that arose between the center and periphery of Mérida (18). Barteet explains how spatial practices (e.g., architectural styles), representations of space (e.g., the grid-planned city), and spaces of representation (e.g., real and imagined spaces) function as part of a causal loop. In this way, Barteet positions the Casa de Montejo as a social space for reading and understanding conflicts between Indigenous peoples, Spanish colonizers, and the Spanish monarchy. Architectural Rhetoric is divided into two main sections: the first “considers the significance of the building to a Hispanic audience,” and the second considers “how the façade and its urban location resonated among the Xiu Maya of Yucatán” (22). Barteet argues that Spanish conqueror Francisco de Montejo intentionally built the Casa de Montejo on the sacrosanct plaza mayor to symbolically diminish the influence of the Spanish monarchy in the New World and to exert his individual authority as governor over the Indigenous peoples. Barteet illustrates how the construction of the Casa de Montejo may be placed within Lefebvre’s imagination of the spatial triad in order to identify exactly how this building defied Spanish monarchical traditions and initiated a struggle for authority in the Yucatanean province. Barteet extends his analysis of the Casa de Montejo beyond the realm of architectural history and into the field of architectural rhetoric, revealing what different examples of iconography in the Casa de Montejo uncover about colonial tensions within and between Yucatán and the transatlantic world. For example, Barteet argues that Herculean imagery in the Plateresque façade exalts Montejo as the protagonist in the ongoing Yucatanean colonization narrative. Later, Barteet examines both the political and social contexts in which Montejo operated as Yucatán’s adelantado, or governor, through an analysis of “multivocal” iconography in the Plateresque façade (93). Barteet introduces a rhetorical text—the requerimiento—an official policy document concerned with the proper treatment of Indigenous peoples that encouraged the colonizers to “establish alliances through peace accords and gift-giving practices in order to foster a climate capable of hosting a successful colony” (92). Here, connections between the virtuous iconography discussed in earlier chapters and the requerimiento arise, strengthening Barteet’s case for an architectural rhetoric, or a connection between what is written in policy texts and what is therefore “declare[d] in stone” (93). In the second half of Architectural Rhetoric, Barteet examines Maya perceptions of the Plateresque façade and its place in the oft-contested city center. Barteet recalls that Mérida’s identity was “neither solely Spanish nor solely Maya” but existed somewhere in between, occupying a sort of “dual identity” (116). Barteet discusses the social and political importance of mapping practices, which may include the mapping of metaphorical or conceptual spaces such as books, art objects, and geographical locations where “two or more cultures engage one another” (116). In the penultimate chapter, a story of a power struggle often defined by dichotomous...
August 2021
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El “entimema” del Περὶ εὑρέσεως del corpus hermogénico como un antecedente de la teorización sobre la agudeza del siglo XVII ↗
Abstract
Aunque se ha investigado sobre los posibles antecedentes de las teorizaciones sobre la agudeza en el siglo XVII (Sarbiewski, Gracián, Peregrini, Tesauro, etc.), subrayando la impronta aristotélica o la hermogénica (especialmente, la del Περὶ ἰδεῶν), prácticamente no se le ha prestado atención al tratado Περὶ εὑρέσεως del corpus hermogénico como un antecedente notable que permite comprender el elemento común a aquellas teorizaciones. Lo que se plantea en este artículo es que el eslabón que podría unir el Περὶ εὑρέσεως con tales teorizaciones son los tratados renacentistas de retórica en latín, para lo cual se emplea aquí la obra de Jorge de Trebisonda y la de Antonio Llull.
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Review: <i>Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work</i>, edited by Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey ↗
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Book Review| August 01 2021 Review: Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work, edited by Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey, eds. Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2019. 274 + xviii pp. ISBN: 9781611177978 Jennifer Keohane Jennifer Keohane The University of Baltimore Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (3): 342–344. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.3.342 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jennifer Keohane; Review: Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work, edited by Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey. Rhetorica 1 August 2021; 39 (3): 342–344. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.3.342 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Review: <i>Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric: Sophistic Education and Oratory in the Talmud and Midrash</i>, edited by Richard Hidary ↗
Abstract
Book Review| August 01 2021 Review: Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric: Sophistic Education and Oratory in the Talmud and Midrash, edited by Richard Hidary Richard Hidary, Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric: Sophistic Education and Oratory in the Talmud and Midrash. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 344 pp. ISBN: 9781107177406 Brandon Katzir Brandon Katzir Oklahoma City University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (3): 340–342. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.3.340 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Brandon Katzir; Review: Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric: Sophistic Education and Oratory in the Talmud and Midrash, edited by Richard Hidary. Rhetorica 1 August 2021; 39 (3): 340–342. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.3.340 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Review: <i>Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions</i>, edited by Christa Gray, Andrea Balbo, Richard M. A. Marshall, and Catherine E. W. Steel ↗
Abstract
Book Review| August 01 2021 Review: Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions, edited by Christa Gray, Andrea Balbo, Richard M. A. Marshall, and Catherine E. W. Steel Christa Gray, Andrea Balbo, Richard M. A. Marshall, and Catherine E. W. Steel, eds., Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. xiv + 366 pp. ISBN: 9780198788201 Christoph Pieper Christoph Pieper Leiden University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (3): 346–349. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.3.346 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Christoph Pieper; Review: Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions, edited by Christa Gray, Andrea Balbo, Richard M. A. Marshall, and Catherine E. W. Steel. Rhetorica 1 August 2021; 39 (3): 346–349. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.3.346 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Abstract
In this article, I would like to provide a reappraisal of sophistic activities during the Hellenistic period. An analysis of passages in Philodemus, Posidonius, and several more fragmentary sources can show that there is a continuous and lively tradition of sophistic teaching and rhetoric from the Classical period until Imperial times. The texts give the impression that characteristic features of Hellenistic sophists point towards the generation of Gorgias and his colleagues as well as towards the star speakers of the Second Sophistic. The traditional but outworn negative image of the Hellenistic sophists and Hellenistic rhetoric in general can be explained as a result of the source situation, the decentralisation of schools and performance spaces, and a Classicistic bias of ancient and modern authors. In the end, the testimonies allow for more conclusions than generally thought. A selection of related sources is provided in an appendix.
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Review: <i>Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom</i>, edited by Marjorie Curry Woods ↗
Abstract
Book Review| August 01 2021 Review: Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom, edited by Marjorie Curry Woods Marjorie Curry Woods, Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. 200 pp. ISBN: 9780691170800 Jordan Loveridge Jordan Loveridge Mount St. Mary's University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (3): 344–346. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.3.344 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jordan Loveridge; Review: Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom, edited by Marjorie Curry Woods. Rhetorica 1 August 2021; 39 (3): 344–346. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.3.344 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Review: <i>Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics</i>, edited by Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld ↗
Abstract
Book Review| August 01 2021 Review: Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics, edited by Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld, Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. 312 pp. ISBN: 9780823277926 William P. Weaver William P. Weaver Baylor University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (3): 350–353. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.3.350 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation William P. Weaver; Review: Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics, edited by Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld. Rhetorica 1 August 2021; 39 (3): 350–353. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.3.350 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Abstract
This essay reads Joseph Addison’ views on imagination and on a set of interrelated tropes—wit, metaphor, personification—from the perspective afforded by the interaction view of metaphor. By adopting this analytical standpoint, the essay documents how Addison relies, often unwittingly, on a propositional model of signification in order to put forward his strongest claims on literary language, imagination, and aesthetic judgment. Such a model constitutes a significant departure from Addison's starting point, the referential model of signification that premises and circumscribes John Locke's account of rhetorical language. This reading offers not only a synthesizing account of Addison's views across a range of texts, but it also enables a new and more nuanced placement of Addison in eighteenth-century aesthetics.
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Rhetoric between historical fiction and reality: the <i>controversia</i> in Fronto's correspondence ↗
Abstract
In ancient education, controversia was a form of declamation which engaged students in discussion of a fictional judicial case. As the apex of rhetorical training, it provided a high level of proficiency in composition and delivery techniques, and every young man of the Roman upper-class had to deal with this exercise and its deliberative counterpart (suasoria). This article explores the role of controversia within the didactic programme devised by Cornelius Fronto for Marcus Aurelius’ education. After an account of ‘indirect’ approaches to declamation, I will analyse the themes of controversia assigned by Fronto, outlining their historical and rhetorical background.
June 2021
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Abstract
This essay reads Joseph Addison’ views on imagination and on a set of interrelated tropes—wit, metaphor, personification— from the perspective afforded by the interaction view of metaphor. By adopting this analytical standpoint, the essay documents how Addison relies, often unwittingly, on a propositional model of signification in order to put forward his strongest claims on literary language, imagination, and aesthetic judgment. Such a model constitutes a significant departure from Addison’s starting point, the referential model of signification that premises and circumscribes John Locke’s account of rhetorical language. This reading offers not only a synthesizing account of Addison’s views across a range of texts, but it also enables a new and more nuanced placement of Addison in eighteenth-century aesthetics.
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Abstract
In ancient education, controversia was a form of declamation which engaged students in discussion of a fictional judicial case. As the apex of rhetorical training, it provided a high level of proficiency in composition and delivery techniques, and every young man of the Roman upper-class had to deal with this exercise and its deliberative counterpart (suasoria). This article explores the role of controversia within the didactic programme devised by Cornelius Fronto for Marcus Aurelius’ education. After an account of ‘indirect’ approaches to declamation, I will analyse the themes of controversia assigned by Fronto, outlining their historical and rhetorical background.
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Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work ed. by Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey ↗
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Reviewed by: Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work ed. by Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey Jennifer Keohane Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey, eds. Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2019. 274 + xviii pp. ISBN: 9781611177978 Feminist rhetoricians have pursued recovery projects for many years. Seeking to demonstrate that women had multifaceted impacts on public life, they dove deep into archives to find the forgotten fragments of their public statements. In the engaging introduction to this collection, Letizia Guglielmo labels this practice “recollecting,” which she defines both as an act of bringing to mind but also as an act of “gathering or assembling again what has been scattered” (2). Indeed, this volume serves as such recollection, bringing together fourteen eclectic essays on women’s contributions to many arenas of symbolic and collective life. As with many feminist rhetorical projects, the editors—Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey—insist that recovery of forgotten women is not the end goal of their volume. Instead (and inspired by work by Jessica Enoch and Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa Kirsch), they explore the rhetorical work required to remember women alongside how the memories of women come to be created, used, or erased in various situations (x). The editors segment the book into four different sections: new theoretical frameworks, erased collaborators, overlooked rhetors and texts, and disrupted memories. To the editors’ credit, the afterword recognizes that alternative organizational schemas could also have served to organize these diverse essays into a readable flow. Organization by chronology, methodology, or genre of text would facilitate additional insights into female reputation management and construction. The editors have selected the organizational scheme they use to “provide a structure for thinking about ways to re-collect existing narratives [and] create a heuristic for suggesting new research possibilities and venues” (257–8). As a result, however, each section contains rhetors and projects that are quite different. The collection as a whole features rhetors stretching from Byzantine historian Anna Komnene to Nigerian anticolonial activist Olufunmilayo Ransome-Kuti to oral expression teacher Anna Baright Curry. [End Page 342] The collection’s greatest contribution is in recovery. Indeed, the rhetors and rhetorical practices studied here will likely be unfamiliar to most. And, for more recognizable speakers like Crystal Eastman and Dorothy Day’ authors bring new insights and lenses to examine their rhetoric. Many of the authors in this “re-collection” answer Enoch’s call to examine rhetorical work broadly with great creativity and strength. That is, they interrogate questions of why some of these rhetors have been forgotten or have had their reputations tarnished throughout history. In the first section, “New Theoretical Frameworks,” the editors feature essays that “suggest new methodologies for reexamining the work of women” (xi). Essays by Gesa E. Kirsch and Patricia Fancher, Alice Johnston Myatt, Maria Martin, and Ellen Quandahl foreground new ways of engaging the memory of women. In one particularly interesting contribution, Myatt explores the phases involved in reclaiming women’s reputations. Using Rosalind Franklin, a largely unknown scientist integral to the discovery of DNA’s structure, she shows how and why her reputation passed through erasure, refutation, reclamation, and restoration (41–2). Other contributions look to indigenous theory and social circulation as ways to understand the struggle and successes of women as anticolonial activists, physicians, computer programmers, and historians. The second section, “Erased Collaborators,” explores how women’s work can be expunged when women collaborate with men, who are often subsequently credited for their contributions. Essays from Mariana Grohowski and Alexis Hart, Henrietta Nickels Shirk, and Suzanne Bordelon provide insights into the way these collaborations often disadvantaged women. Shirk, for instance, creatively analyzes the partnership between John James Audubon and painter Maria Martin by reading both their exchanged letters and the images on which they collaborated—he painted the birds and she the backgrounds for the famous Birds of America almanac. Yet, of course, Audubon’s fame and status far outshone Martin’s own, and her artistic skills are forgotten. In the third part, the editors call our attention to “Overlooked Rhetors and Texts” and examine activity that is not included in traditional definitions of...
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Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric: Sophistic Education and Oratory in the Talmud and Midrash by Richard Hidary ↗
Abstract
Reviewed by: Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric: Sophistic Education and Oratory in the Talmud and Midrash by Richard Hidary Brandon Katzir Richard Hidary, Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric: Sophistic Education and Oratory in the Talmud and Midrash. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 344 pp. ISBN: 9781107177406 Recent scholarship on the Second Sophistic has demonstrated the extent to which that period, in the first centuries of the common era, had a profound influence on rhetoric as a cultural practice. In particular, as Timothy Whitmarsh has noted, “[Oratory] was one of the primary means that Greek culture of the period, constrained as it was by Roman rule, had to explore issues of identity, society, family and power” (5). The Second Sophistic lays the groundwork for the Byzantine tradition, which itself had an enormous influence on the European rhetorical tradition. Yet, the literary cultures inspired by Roman Hellenism were not limited to Greek speakers. Classical Jewish texts like the Mishna, the Talmud, and various midrashim were composed or redacted in the same literary culture that gave rise to Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists. Richard Hidary’s Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric argues that the Jewish culture which produced the Mishna was affected by the cultural and literary ferment of the Second Sophistic. Hidary observes that the Second Sophistic bears numerous similarities to its contemporary rabbinic movement. He notes, “the rabbis also pushed to uphold their own distinctive Jewish identity and pride in the face of Roman dominance and they too studied and taught inherited religious traditions from antiquity” (5). Like the Greek orators, the Talmudic sages “studied, codified, and lectured about their own past traditions and in a similar way used this as a strategy for upholding their culture and values” (6). The strength of Hidary’s approach lies in his nuanced examination of a range of rabbinical genres. Each of the chapters proceeds in a similar fashion: they begin by explaining the significance and structure of a particular genre of rabbinical writing followed by an explanation of how that genre intersects with rhetorical genres of the Second Sophistic. Hidary explores some rabbinical writing—such as aggadic midrashim, the Talmud Yerushalmi, the Talmud Bavli—as well as some lesser known genres, like the progymnasmata in rabbinical literature. He compares the role of lawyers in Roman and rabbinical courts, the heavenly court in rabbinical literature, and Plato’s heavenly court. Hidary offers a fresh perspective to each genre. Of particular interest is his analysis of Sabbath sermon, which, according to [End Page 340] Hidary, is the mainstay of rabbinical declamation and has its origins in the Second Temple period, which ended in 70 CE. Hidary argues that there is a formal connection between rabbinic homilies and the aggadic midrash. He observes that while some scholars have suggested that “works of midrash aggadah are transcripts of actual synagogue sermons,” most believe they are literary creations, even if they were perhaps sometimes read aloud. Each chapter of aggadic midrash begins with a proem which expounds upon a Biblical verse. Hidary notes that “the verse usually lacks an obvious connection to the Torah lectionary and thus raises the curiosity of the audience. The audience is kept in this state of suspense until the speaker finally manages to connect the opening verse with the first verse of the Torah lectionary, thus delivering his main point with a memorable punch line” (50). Hidary argues that the exordium is the model for the midrashic proem, pointing out that Aristotle “writes that the prooimion of epideictic speeches should begin with an unrelated subject and then transition into the main topic of the speech” (53). But Hidary emphasizes that while the rabbis’ rhetorical form may look Greek, their arguments are designed to demonstrate the superiority of the Jewish people and the Sinaitic revelation. Hidary draws a connection between the Hellenistic orators of the Second Sophistic who “turned to Attic oratory to revive Greek pride in the face of Western Roman political domination” and the rabbis who “[apply] the rhetorical technique of the Greeks to their teaching of Torah,” an application which was ultimately aimed at demonstrating “the perfection of Scripture” (77). The later chapters of Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric compare classical and rabbinic...
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Abstract
Reviewed by: Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics by Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld William P. Weaver Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld, Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. 312 pp. ISBN: 9780823277926 The figures of speech are the subject of a reevaluation in literary scholarship of the Renaissance era. Their importance has never been entirely out of view—they are hard to ignore. Early printed editions of the classics sometimes note figures in the margins, and this was a practice emulated by one “E.K.,” the annotator of Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender who noted, among other figures, “a pretty epanorthosis” here and “an excellent and lively description” there. Evidently the figures contributed to basic literacy in academic contexts, and it is hard to imagine that all that training was confined to the schools and universities. In recent interpretative scholarship on English poetry, a productive approach has been to place one figure of speech in focus, and compare its uses in order to discover its latent meanings. The effectiveness of this approach is amply illustrated, for example, by essays collected in a 2007 publication entitled The Renaissance Figures of Speech, covering twelve figures.1 Elsewhere, groupings of figures, subject as they were to classifying instincts of humanist writers and teachers, have proven meaningful instruments for literary interpretation. In a 2012 book, Jenny C. Mann considered various unruly figures under the heading of hyperbaton, in order to trace the difficulties of translating classical rhetoric and poetics into English vernacular practices.2 In Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics, Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld takes the latter approach, collecting and examining a group of figures under the heading of the “indecorous,” namely figures that flaunt their artistry, transgress modesty, and eschew generally the gold standard of Renaissance wit: sprezzatura, the dissembling or disguising of effort and study. Three figures—simile, antithesis, and periphrasis—were selected and compared to illustrate Rosenfeld’s thesis that ostentatious figures offered a distinctive means of thinking as well as of embellishing. It is a persuasive and coherent selection. Comparing, contrasting, and “talking about” or renaming something—these are logical as well as rhetorical operations. Together, they represent a promising start on Rosenfeld’s ambitious aim: “to understand how figures of speech established the imaginative domains of early modem poetry” (13). In three chapters of Part One, Rosenfeld describes an intellectual and pedagogical landscape that gave rise to “indecorous thinking,” that is, the practices and patterns of thought afforded by ostentatious figures of speech. It’s a contentious landscape drawn along lines of Ramus’ reforms in rhetoric [End Page 350] and dialectic, as these were filtered into English discourse by means of handbooks of the figures. Rosenfeld relies on the best-known and oft-rehearsed aspect of these reforms, filling out her account with some original scholarship on reading and composition practices. In a nutshell, Ramus’ attempt to simplify rhetoric instruction by reserving inventio and dispositio for dialectic (or logic) instruction resulted in a truncated presentation of rhetoric as consisting of just elocutio and actio, or style and performance. Although it could not have been Ramus’ or his followers’ intent to imply an autonomous field of discourse, some English vernacular handbooks of rhetorical poetics, such as Abraham Fraunce’s The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588), nonetheless give the impression that rhetoric might be studied independently of logic and reduced to the study of elocutio, which itself might be reduced to the study of schemes and tropes. It is in that imagined domain of an autonomous and mutilated rhetoric that Rosenfeld argues a counter-humanist movement in English poetics of the late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-centuries. The argument for indecorum (the weaker argument) sometimes feels ponderous in Part One, but the pace picks up in Part Two. In three chapters, Rosenfeld convincingly shows the figures’ vitality and potential to structure and organize fictional thought, narrative, and speech. These are fine examples of rhetorical criticism and English literary scholarship. In Chapter 4, taking as a starting point Spenser’s portrayal of Braggadochio in The Faerie Queene, book 2, Rosenfeld compares some competing qualities of the figure simile and shows that it...
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Abstract
Reviewed by: Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions ed. by Christa Gray et al Christoph Pieper Christa Gray, Andrea Balbo, Richard M. A. Marshall, and Catherine E. W. Steel, eds., Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. xiv + 366 pp. ISBN: 9780198788201 Studying antiquity means studying fragments, given the highly fragmented nature of our knowledge of its politics, art, and literatvire. Within [End Page 346] this mosaic of bits and pieces, texts that have been transmitted as fragments are a specifically challenging field of research, one that has attracted lots of scholarly attention in recent decades. Fragments of oratory are a specific case within this field: as the editors of the volume stress in their introduction, every speech we read as text is, in a way, already a fragment, as it is the textualized reduction of a complex form of communication that includes words and arguments. Also, the vocal qualities of the speaker, his performance and auctoritas—all these aspects are lost to our immediate perception, even if the full text of a speech is transmitted. And yet, the relevance of fragments for understanding the persuasiveness and impact of oratory in the ancient world is huge. Studying the fragments of Roman Republican oratory therefore means more than simply reading and interpreting the fragments and testimonies in Malcovati’s Oratorum Romanorum fragmenta; in order to reconstruct their rhetorical potential, one needs a thorough understanding of their historical and cultural embeddedness, and a good grasp of the transmitting author’s own agenda. The volume under review, one of the preliminary proceedings that prepare the new edition of the Fragments of the Roman Republican Orators (FRRO) by Catherine Steel and her Glasgow team, has an outspoken interest in the fragments’ context that goes beyond textual representation: it includes reconstructions of performance and sensory surrounding. It reflects on the relevance of the speaker’s authority and on the changing cultural climate in the second and first centuries bce, when the interaction with Greek culture increased in Rome and when rhetoric challenged the traditional political hierarchy based on auctoritas (Alexandra Eckert). The authors of the volume approach the methodological challenges in an admirably undogmatic way that includes traditional philology, historical studies, and modern theoretical approaches. In this short review, I can merely offer some lines that run through the volume (by no means an exhaustive list). The volume is divided into two parts: transmission and reconstructions; but as happens with good conference volumes, important questions return throughout the book. A first important theme is the transmitting author, whose reasons for quoting or summarizing must be taken into account when studying (not only oratorical) fragments. S. J. Lawrence convincingly argues that Valerius Maximus’ collection of dicta should not be understood as neutral; instead Valerius wants to demonstrate the limits of oratory in Republican times (which influences his choice of exempla). Armando Raschieri, in a rather additive overview, analyses the contexts in which Quintilian quotes Republican orators. Generally, one of the aims of studying fragmentary Republican oratory has always been to get beyond Cicero for our knowledge about what speaking in the Republic meant and looked like. But as Cicero’s canonical status and his canon of orators in the Brutus were so powerful after his death, one has to be aware of the Ciceronian intertext that shapes later ancient readers’ perceptions. Alfredo Casamento tackles the problem of how to deal with Cicero’s legacy in his treatment of [End Page 347] Sulpicius Rufus and Cotta in the Brutus, whereas Ian Goh and Elena Torregaray Pagola look for genres not influenced by Cicero in which relevant information on Republican oratory can be found: Republican satire (Goh with a very dense, associative, and inspiring reading of Lucilius’ book 2), and comedy (Torregaray Pagola with a close reading of a section of Plautus’ Amphitruo). John Dugan contributes a methodologically far-reaching chapter for the case of Macrobius’ quotation of the second-century bce orator Gaius Titius. His working method has the potential to offer unexpected results for other fragments as well: based on New Historicism and Clifford Geertz’ concept of thick descriptions, Dugan concludes that “the only Titius we will read will be that which...
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Abstract
Reviewed by: Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom by Marjorie Curry Woods Jordan Loveridge Marjorie Curry Woods, Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. 200 pp. ISBN: 9780691170800 At the small liberal arts school where I teach, all students take a history course in which they read, among other common texts, Virgil’s Aeneid. A popular assignment for many of the professors teaching this course, myself included, is to assign students a speech where they compose in character what Aeneas might have said to Dido upon leaving Carthage, or, alternatively, the words Dido might have said to Aeneas. While each semester some students invariably choose to speak as Aeneas, my observation is that Dido is by far the more popular choice, regardless of students’ gender identity. Upon reading Marjorie Curry Woods’s Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom, I am struck by the parallels between my experience and the account of medieval pedagogy that Woods offers. Weeping for Dido explores the role that emotion, particularly women’s emotions, played within the classical texts that constituted the curriculum of the average medieval classroom. Since the medieval classroom was a space dominated by young male students, the focus of Weeping for Dido invites several [End Page 344] interesting questions about gender, identification, rhetorical delivery, and performance, all of which are taken up by Woods at various points within the text. Working with an impressive array of manuscript evidence, Woods demonstrates that “while women were overwhelming absent from [the] schoolboy classical world except in texts, their [women’s] emotions permeated and sometimes dominated the classroom experience” (10). This argument is advanced not through an analysis of the texts in medieval libraries, or through a comparison of rhetorical treatises by known figures associated with medieval education, but rather through close attention to and comparison among manuscript commentaries, glossing, notation, and other codicological elements. The results of this analysis are impressive and provide an illuminating view of medieval pedagogical practices. For instance, in the first chapter, which focuses on manuscripts of the Aencid, Woods shows how familiar elements of rhetorical terminology from sources such as Cicero De inventione and the anonymous Rhetorica ad herennium were used to help young students understand Virgil’s epic poem. One manuscript identifies Dido’s flattery of Aeneas upon his initial arrival in Carthage as a captatio benevolentiae, “the rhetorical term from letter-writing manuals for capturing the goodwill of the listener” (Woods 17); another identifies Dido’s speech to her sister Anna explaining her feelings for Aeneas as ”Oratio Insinuntiua,” “Insinuative discourse” (Woods 20). These techniques, traceable to traditions such as letter-writing manuals (ars dicta-minis) and Ciceronian commentary respectively, are placed within a classroom context, showing that such theories had pedagogical currency beyond their presumed function. While the Aeneid is central to Weeping for Dido, Woods also engages other “Troy Stories,” notably the Achilleid of Statius, which tells of Achilles’b mother stealing him away and hiding him in women’s clothes to keep him from dying in the Trojan war, and the Ilias latina, a Latin retelling of the Illiad. Both were used in elementary medieval education; “they are on almost every medieval list of what students should read, and they figure prominently in the consensus of what modern medievalists believe medieval students did read” (54). Perhaps unsurprisingly, these elementary texts exhibit completely different habits of glossing than copies of the Aeneid, revealing “what teachers thought would amuse or usefully instruct their pupils” (56). Woods shows that the elements brought to bear on the Achilleid were numerous and varied; many manuscripts, for instance, exhibit speeches that are clearly labeled with the Ciceronian partes orationis (Woods 66); others show how the unique valence of medieval Latin terms sometimes influenced the understanding of literary texts, such as in one manuscript where the Ciceronian Attributes of a Person are used to analyze a scene in which Achilles is disguised in women’s clothing. In this section, the term habitus is understood both in its original sense (as a taught manner of being, a physical disposition), but also as a manner of dress (Woods 67–8). Later...
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Abstract
In this article, I would like to provide a reappraisal of sophistic activities during the Hellenistic period. An analysis of passages in Philodemus, Posidonius, and several more fragmentary sources can show that there is a continuous and lively tradition of sophistic teaching and rhetoric from the Classical period until Imperial times. The texts give the impression that characteristic features of Hellenistic sophists point towards the generation of Gorgias and his colleagues as well as towards the star speakers of the Second Sophistic. The traditional but outworn negative image of the Hellenistic sophists and Hellenistic rhetoric in general can be explained as a result of the source situation, the decentralisation of schools and performance spaces, and a Classicistic bias of ancient and modern authors. In the end, the testimonies allow for more conclusions than generally thought. A selection of related sources is provided in an appendix.
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El “entimema” del Περὶ εὑρέσεως del corpus hermogénico como un antecedente de la teorización sobre la agudeza del siglo XVII ↗
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Aunque se ha investigado sobre los posibles antecedentes de las teorizaciones sobre la agudeza en el siglo XVII (Sarbiewski, Gracián, Peregrini, Tesauro, etc.), subrayando la impronta aristotélica o la hermogénica (especialmente, la del Περὶ ιδεῶν), prácticamente no se le ha prestado atención al tratado Περὶ εὑρέσεως del corpus hermogénico como un antecedente notable que permite comprender el elemento común a aquellas teorizaciones. Lo que se plantea en este artículo es que el eslabón que podría unir el Περὶ εὑρέσεως con tales teorizaciones son los tratados renacentistas de retórica en latín, para lo cual se emplea aquí la obra de Jorge de Trebisonda y la de Antonio Llull.
May 2021
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Abstract
Book Review| May 01 2021 Review: Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work, by Jessica Enoch Jessica Enoch, Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. 260 pp. ISBN: 9780809337163 Kate Rich Kate Rich University of Washington Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (2): 240–242. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.240 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Kate Rich; Review: Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work, by Jessica Enoch. Rhetorica 1 May 2021; 39 (2): 240–242. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.240 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Review: <i>The War of Words</i>, by Kenneth Burke, edited by Anthony Burke, Kyle Jensen, and Jack Selzer ↗
Abstract
Book Review| May 01 2021 Review: The War of Words, by Kenneth Burke, edited by Anthony Burke, Kyle Jensen, and Jack Selzer Burke, Kenneth. The War of Words. Ed. by Anthony Burke, Kyle Jensen, Jack Selzer. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. viii + 285 pp. ISBN: 9780520298125 M. Elizabeth Weiser M. Elizabeth Weiser The Ohio State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (2): 242–244. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.242 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation M. Elizabeth Weiser; Review: The War of Words, by Kenneth Burke, edited by Anthony Burke, Kyle Jensen, and Jack Selzer. Rhetorica 1 May 2021; 39 (2): 242–244. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.242 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Review: <i>The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices</i>, edited by Vershawn Ashanti Young, and Michelle Bachelor Robinson ↗
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Book Review| May 01 2021 Review: The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices, edited by Vershawn Ashanti Young, and Michelle Bachelor Robinson Young, Vershawn Ashanti, and Michelle Bachelor Robinson, eds., The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices, New York: Routledge, 2018. 894 pp. ISBN: 9780415731065 Mudiwa Pettus Mudiwa Pettus City University of New York, Medgar Evers College Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (2): 237–240. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.237 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mudiwa Pettus; Review: The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices, edited by Vershawn Ashanti Young, and Michelle Bachelor Robinson. Rhetorica 1 May 2021; 39 (2): 237–240. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.237 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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There is no Blood Thicker than Ink: Familial and Cultural Metaphors among Late Antique <i>Pepaideumenoi</i>* ↗
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La literatura del periodo tardo-antiguo alberga numerosas referencias a relaciones familiares. Desde el lenguaje paternal empleado por los profesores cuando se dirigían a sus estudiantes, a los ejercicios declamatorios en los que los hijos son desheredados y hay disputas por los testamentos, la familia es la metáfora principal en lo que se refiere a las relaciones escolares. En este contexto, este artículo se ocupará de las estrategias literarias y retóricas empleadas por las élites culturales del movimiento de la Tercera Sofística para construir una “familia alternativa” en la que los lazos entre los pepaideumenoi -así como entre los alumnos y sus profesores- coexistió con los lazos familiares naturales -algo que provocó enfrentamientos ocasionales. Así, las relaciones basadas en la enseñanza y el aprendizaje de la retórica y de la paideia se convirtieron en sustitutos de las relaciones familiares con mecanismos y protocolos de admisión y exclusión que reflejaban las dinámicas propias de la Tercera Sofística.
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Authorizing Authority: Constitutive Rhetoric and the Poetics of Re-enactment in Cicero’s <i>Pro Lege Manilia</i> ↗
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This paper studies the persuasive strategies in Pro Lege Manilia in conversation with contemporary rhetorical theory, drawing especially on the perspective of constitutive discourse and the interaction between what is in the text and what is outside. Prior receptions of Pompey by internal audiences double as sites of panegyric image construction, which was itself then instrumentalized to influence external groups. The speech self-referentially thematizes this production of authority, disclosing its rhetorical mechanisms as both performed and performative text. Cicero himself, in the process of proclaiming Pompey, crucially participates in the manufacture and mediation of the image, and in constituting ideological cohesion.
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Book Review| May 01 2021 Review: Filodemo. Il primo libro della retorica, edited by Federica Nicolardi Filodemo. Il primo libro della retorica. Edizione, traduzione e commento a cura di Federica Nicolardi (Napoli: Bibliopolis, 2018). 464 pp. ISBN 978-88-7088-658-0 Pierre Chiron; Pierre Chiron Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Daniel Delattre Daniel Delattre Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (2): 234–237. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.234 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Pierre Chiron, Daniel Delattre; Review: Filodemo. Il primo libro della retorica, edited by Federica Nicolardi. Rhetorica 1 May 2021; 39 (2): 234–237. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.234 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
March 2021
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Abstract
Reviewed by: Filodemo. Il primo libro della retorica ed. by Federica Nicolardi Pierre Chiron and Daniel Delattre Filodemo. Il primo libro della retorica. Edizione, traduzione e commento a cura di Federica Nicolardi (Napoli: Bibliopolis, 2018). 464 pp. ISBN 978-88-7088-658-0 Le volume est dédié à “qui a vu ce livre grandir de jour en jour.” C’est une entreprise de patience, en effet, dont Federica Nicolardi livre le résultat. Un résultat spectaculaire, puisque, pour la première fois, sur une maquette glissée dans le volume imprimé, on peut appréhender le livre entier en deux coups d’œil, Tun pour les col. 1–147, l’autre au verso pour les col. 148–238. Jadis, en raison de la dispersion des fragments, l’attention se focalisait sur les morceaux présentant une certaine continuité, à savoir les quatre fragments et les sept colonnes de la partie centrale, la mieux conservée, du PHerc. 1427. Les autres bribes étaient éditées à part, en tant que fragments à contenu rhétorique, souvent sans même être rattachées à la Rhétorique. Sur cette large maquette synthétique (à trois plis), chaque fragment est dûment localisé et reproduit soit sous forme de photographie infrarouge, soit sous forme de la transcription réalisée en son temps à Naples ou à Oxford, quand l’original n’est plus disponible. Les lacunes prédominent, on le sait, et certaines pièces sont reproduites à l’écart, avec leur numérotation traditionnelle, faute d’avoir pu trouver leur place et un nouveau numéro dans la reconstitution, mais une telle vue d’ensemble représente un progrès indiscu-table par rapport aux éditions antérieures. La contrepartie est que la fin de la tâche, pour l’ensemble de la Rhétorique, s’éloigne quelque peu dans le temps, puisque le même travail n’a pas encore été fait pour ce qui subsiste des sept autres livres. On rappellera à ce propos que, dans le cadre du Philodemus’ Aesthetics Project initié au début des années 1990 par R. Janko, D. Obbink et D. Blank, le traitement de la Rhétorique a pris, en effet, beaucoup de retard, même si J. Hammerstaedt a fourni (dans les Cronache ercolanesi 22 (1992) : 9–117) une édition exemplaire de la fin (conservée de façon suivie) du livre III, et que D. Blank continue de travailler activement à la reconstruction et à l’édition fort délicates du livre VIII. L’état des papyrus, qui est souvent très problématique, explique évidemment la lenteur (apparente) du travail des érudits, qui disposent désormais – depuis seulement une vingtaine d’années –de moyens nouveaux et efficaces (dont les images infrarouges ne sont pas le moindre) pour entreprendre une reconstruction virtuelle, bibliologiquement fondée, des rouleaux ouverts, et tous aujourd’hui démembrés : cela exige des efforts et un temps considérables ! [End Page 234] Un appareil philologique substantiel accompagne la maquette : après un sommaire (p. 7–9), un avertissement (p. 11) et une liste des abréviations utilisée pour la bibliographie (p. 13–21), figurent une liste des éditions de référence des papyrus d’Herculanum citées dans le volume (p. 23–25) ainsi qu’une liste des abréviations des inventaires et autres catalogues édités depuis la découverte, au XVIIIe siècle, de la bibliothèque de Philodème (p. 27). Suit une précieuse reconstitution du contenu de cette partie de l’ouvrage de Philodème, compte tenu de ce que Ton sait du reste (p. 31–48). Après une table de concordances entre les différents numéros des fragments (p. 167–182), un conspectus siglorum (p. 183–185) et un conspectus signorum (p. 187 : il s’agit des signes critiques utilisés), Federica Nicolardi propose ensuite (p. 189–272) une édition critique, accompagnée d’une traduction – là où le texte l’autorise –, ce qui permet à la fois de lire plus confortablement le texte restitué, et de réfléchir aux variantes ainsi qu’à l’histoire de la reconstitution présentée. Les sources les plus fréquemment utilisées sont bien sûr...