This essay brings to light a previously untranslated Latin medieval rhetorical treatise from Castile and León—Juan Gil de Zamora’s letter writing manual <i>Dictaminis Epithalamium</i>, or <i>The Marriaga Song of Letter-Writing</i> (c. 1277). Juan Gil (c. 1240-c. 1318) was among the first writers in Castile and León to compose a rhetorical treatise on the technical elements of composition. I outline the theoretical and technical elements of Juan Gil s <i>ars dictaminis</i>. Following an explication of his theory, I historicize the <i>Dictaminis Epithalamium</i> within the western European rhetorical tradition and within the established dictaminal genre. I argue that Juan Gil develops a new rhetoric for letter writing—one incorporating innovations as well as compilations of ideas from the Italian and French schools of letter-writing.

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

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

In their Traité de l’argumentation Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca declare themselves to be inspired by Aristotle’s dialectics and, contextually, to exclude Hegel’s dialectics from the horizon of Nouvelle Rhétorique. Yet, while some passages in the Traité account for their choice of Aristotle, the same cannot be said for their attitude towards Hegel, whose dialectics our two authors reject without criticism. Such rejection is actually in contrast with Nouvelle Rhétorique’s methodology, which is open to the examination of new meanings and usages in the philosophical field. In fact, when applied consistently, this methodology can discover similarities between Hegel’s dialectics and New Rhetoric, and remodel Perelman’s questions concerning tautology, analogy, philosophical pluralism, and the sense of audience.

Abstract: This essay brings to light a previously untranslated Latin medieval rhetorical treatise from Castile and León—Juan Gil de Zamora's letter writing manual Dictaminis Epithalamium, or The Marriage Song of Letter-Writing (c. 1277). Juan Gil (c. 1240–c. 1318) was among the first writers in Castile and León to compose a rhetorical treatise on the technical elements of composition. I outline the theoretical and technical elements of Juan Gil's ars dictaminis. Following an explication of his theory, I historicize the Dictaminis Epithalamium within the western European rhetorical tradition and within the established dictaminal genre. I argue that Juan Gil develops a new rhetoric for letter writing—one incorporating innovations as well as compilations of ideas from the Italian and French schools of letter-writing.

314 RHETORICA Jean Nienkamp, Internal Rhetorics: Toward a History and Theory of SelfPersuasion (Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), xiv + 170 pp. In her deceptively slim volume, Internal Rhetorics, Jean Nienkamp pro­ vides historical precedents and theoretical arguments for opening up the self as a site for rhetorical study. She examines several key texts from the Classical, Enlightenment, and Modern periods to develop a theory of inter­ nal rhetoric, the concept of thinking as verbal interaction and the self as a socially constituted collection of internalized discourses. Since neither traditional nor expansive understandings of rhetoric theo­ retically preclude the extension of their studies to the self, Nienkamp sur­ mises that this aspect of rhetoric has been "eclipsed by various political, educational, and philosophical factors that have shaped thinking about lan­ guage use" (p. x). Traditional rhetoric's historical emphasis as an intentional practice for public address and the postmodern ban of vocabulary sugges­ tive of a unitary subject are two powerful predispositions against thinking of rhetoric as internal. Another, as Nienkamp emphasizes, is the Platonic division of philosophical and rhetorical reason and the long historical reign of thought over language. Nienkamp's history and theory of internal rhetoric clearly favors the epistemic rhetorics of Isocrates and the twentieth-century rhetoricians and psychologists she examines. Internal rhetoric, Nienkamp argues, unites the divisive disciplinary con­ cerns of traditional and expansive (interpretive) rhetorics by pointing to both the effects and intents of language and its use; it also reestablishes rhetoric's relations with psychology and philosophy by providing a complex rhetorical reading of the self and offering a model of moral agency in an antifoundationalist age. Central to these proposals is Nienkamp's distinction between cultivated and primary internal rhetoric. A deliberately cultivated moral rea­ soning is the form internal rhetoric takes in the Classical and Enlightenment texts examined in Part One. Associated with the intentionally crafted dis­ course of traditional rhetoric, cultivated internal rhetoric is the conscious use of a learned language to effect desired change in the self. Primary internal rhetoric is the form self-persuasion assumes in the post-Freudian Modern texts examined in Part Two. Associated with expansive rhetoric, primary internal rhetoric understands the powerful unconscious imperatives of mul­ tiple, often conflicting social discourses influencing internal rhetoric and constituting the rhetorical self. Because his representation of logos is both epistemic and ethical, Isocrates is Nienkamp's classical standard for internal rhetoric. The Socratic-PlatonicAristotelian treatments of self-persuasion, although identifying and address­ ing the divided psyche, depict the coercion of reason over the appetites rather than the linguistically interactive negotiation Nienkamp identifies as rhetor­ ical. Francis Bacon, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury and Richard Whately, Nienkamp's Enlightenment figures, emphasize the highly rhetorical nature of moral reasoning, the intense, concerted interactions with reason to move Reviews 315 the will away from the passions; but they use a faculty psychology whose discrete, innate parts are more acted upon than acting. Nienkamp wants an epistemic rhetoric to underwrite her theory of thought and the self, but she returns in her conclusion to the cultivated ethical reasoning associated with traditional rhetoric to propose a theory of moral agency. Nienkamp's historical depictions of rhetorical thought and the self should prove fascinating to anyone wondering or worrying about the fate of the self in rhetoric. Rhetorical representations of thought from Homer to Ken­ neth Burke portray a psyche whose constituent parts are innate. Along with Burke, Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca use the Freudian un­ conscious to unseat "the rationalist and theological ethics of earlier periods" (p. 81), but the Freudian psyche is also comprised of innate parts. Not until Nienkamp examines the psychologies of George Mead and Lev Vygotsky does her theory of internal rhetoric reflect the historicized nature of thought processes, consciousness, and the mind. Her social-constructionist rhetorical view of thought and the self is based on knowledge gained from the social sciences, an epistemological stance epistemic rhetoric refutes. The rhetori­ cal self as depicted by Nienkamp's rhetorics and philosophies is clearly a cultivated, not experiential, self. Although she proposes collaboration with psychology to redress this problem, rhetoric is incorrigibly aligned with phi­ losophy and never more so...

Reviews 311 Rita Copeland, Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages: Lollardy and Ideas of Learning, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 2001), xii + 243 pp. Rita Copeland's subjects—the pedagogical strategies of the Lollard heresy and the rhetoric of dissent and repression in late medieval England— might seem remote from the concerns of contemporary rhetoric and peda­ gogy That apparent gap between past and present is one Copeland labors to close. "What this book offers," she announces, "is a study of issues that were of profound importance for the Middle Ages and that will disappear from our historiographical map if we do not recognize them as being im­ portant to ourselves" (p. 1). In a fifty-page general introduction, "Pedagogy and Intellectuals," Copeland views late medieval struggles over lay access to religious knowledge through the lenses of postmodern pedagogical theory, postcolonial studies, and liberationist pedagogy. That "pedagogy is the most political and politicized of discourses" (p. 18) is for her as true of the Middle Ages as it is today; understanding the relation of pedagogy and dissent in medieval England helps illuminate "what most insistently links past with present" (p. 20). Later chapters connect the prison narratives of the Lollard intellectuals Richard Wyche and William Thorpe to the writings of Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Ken Saro Wiwa, and Nelson Mandela (p. 151) and find the blur­ ring of pedagogical and inquisitorial methods in Thorpe's 1407 interrogation "poignantly resonant with modern literatures of political detention" (p. 210). Readers may find some of Copeland's parallels forced; however, few medievalists will dispute the value of her contribution to the burgeoning study of Lollardy, which has transformed our understanding of medieval English culture and has provoked radical reinterpretations of authors from Geoffrey Chaucer to Margery Kempe. Beginning in the 1380s, Copeland argues, a university-trained elite, eventually to be hereticized as Lollards, developed and implemented a sys­ tematic pedagogy that sought to disestablish hierarchies separating aca­ demics and laypeople, teachers and students, leaders and followers. Cen­ tral to that pedagogy was the promotion of "literal" reading to instate "an independent and conscientious knowledge of Scripture among the laity" (p. 123-124). (Copeland is careful to distinguish the Scriptural literalism of present-day fundamentalism from that of Lollardy, which retained "the interpretive flexibilities of traditional multi-layered exegesis [p. 127].) In advancing this pedagogy, Lollard intellectuals repudiated a long-standing association of the literal sense with childishness, an association whose history Copeland painstakingly traces to a split in late Antiquity between pedagogy and hermeneutics. The English Church hierarchy responded with a counter-pedagogy that, among other things, reasserted the association of the literal with the childish and deployed a rhetoric of infantilization to attempt a broad intellectual disenfranchisement of lay adults. The Church's crackdown on heterodoxy met with limited success, however; although it did staunch the flow of 312 RHETORICA dissident intellectuals from the universities to lay communities through censorship, imprisonment, and capital punishment, it could not undo the damage wrought by dissident academics such as Wyche and Thorpe, for "the products of intellectual labor, the pedagogical apparatuses that are exportable from one milieu to another, once set in motion, can long outlast the power of the individual teacher to teach" (p. 219). Pedagogies, Intellectuals, and Dissent evinces the meticulous scholarship and nuanced treatment of abstruse rhetorical issues that one would expect from the author of Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1991). Copeland's analyses of intellectual labor, pedagogies, the "literal sense," and the politics of childhood illuminate the story of dissent and repression well known to scholars of Lollardy. Her study is a must for specialists in late medieval England. Though non-medievalists may struggle with Copeland's dense analyses of politico-religious issues, I expect that scholars of contemporary pedagogy and rhetoric—particularly oppositional pedagogies and rhetorics of resistance and coercion—will find this book well worth the effort. Karen A. Winstead The Ohio State University Luigi Spina, L'oratore scriteriato. Per una storia letteraria e política di Tersite, Napoli : Loffredo, 2001, pp. 124. Luigi Spina's short essay brilliantly shows how rich (and sometimes contradictory) can be the rhetorical reuse of...

312 RHETORICA dissident intellectuals from the universities to lay communities through censorship, imprisonment, and capital punishment, it could not undo the damage wrought by dissident academics such as Wyche and Thorpe, for "the products of intellectual labor, the pedagogical apparatuses that are exportable from one milieu to another, once set in motion, can long outlast the power of the individual teacher to teach" (p. 219). Pedagogies, Intellectuals, and Dissent evinces the meticulous scholarship and nuanced treatment of abstruse rhetorical issues that one would expect from the author of Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1991). Copeland's analyses of intellectual labor, pedagogies, the "literal sense," and the politics of childhood illuminate the story of dissent and repression well known to scholars of Lollardy. Her study is a must for specialists in late medieval England. Though non-medievalists may struggle with Copeland's dense analyses of politico-religious issues, I expect that scholars of contemporary pedagogy and rhetoric—particularly oppositional pedagogies and rhetorics of resistance and coercion—will find this book well worth the effort. Karen A. Winstead The Ohio State University Luigi Spina, L'oratore scriteriato. Per una storia letteraria e política di Tersite, Napoli : Loffredo, 2001, pp. 124. Luigi Spina's short essay brilliantly shows how rich (and sometimes contradictory) can be the rhetorical reuse of a mythical character. He starts, in fact, from a recent episode in Italian political debate about liberalism, in which the category of "tersitismo" appeared as a clearly negative label, as a synonym of populism. With an interesting ambivalence this topical image is sometimes reverted, so that the ugly and misshapen Thersites becomes the symbol of an alternative vision, of a true popular polemic against war and power. The rehabilitation of a scapegoat is in fact a widespread operation. In the longue durée of Thersites it leads to some stimulating parallels with various characters of myth and history: Hephaistos, Aesopus, Socrates, Demosthenes ... Till to the most paradoxical issue: the latent identification of Thersites with his most powerful enemy, Odysseus, which starts from a significant passage of Sophocles' Philoctetes, and comes from Thersites' effective rhetorical strategy (the paradigm of cynical rhetoric). Spina's critical path follows Thersites' ambivalence through some an­ cient and modern significant versions. First of all, of course, Homer's 67 verses, and their impressive use of characterization, intentional ellypis, and accurate mixture of mimesis and dieghesis. Secondly, Quintus of Smyrne's epic continuation, that for the first time puts Thersithes in connection with a fe­ male figure, Penthesilea. A very important moment in the modem reception Reviews 313 is certainly the Elisabethan stage: first of all William Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (1602), "an Iliad retold by Thersites" according to Gérard Genette. In this extremely polyphonic play the hero embodies in fact the radical demys­ tification of the epic tradition. From a stylistic point of view it is remarkable the anthrozoomorphic imagery frequently connected with Thersites. The Iron Age (1612) concludes Thomas Heywood's complex mythological fresco; its first part ends with Thersites' metaliterary monologue. He plays the role of the "rayling rogue", who came to Troy "to laugh at mad men" and finds a "meeting soul" in the famous Trojan spy, responsible of the fall of Troy: Sinon. Finally, Dryden's classicistic rewriting of Shakespeare's drama is focussed on Thersites' anticlericalism, and on his skeptical neutrality. Even in this important moment of modern reception Thersites' image wavers between the negative Homeric topic and the positive liberating force of comicality. The XXth century presents the culminating point of Thersites' rehabil­ itation. Moreover, its tendency to experimentation enlarges the spectrum of rewritings. The Italian latinist Concetto Marchiesi adopts a very specific mix­ ture of autobiography and fiction. In his II libro di Tersite (1920) the hero stands for the isolation of the protesting intellectual, full of Horatian irony and completely lacking Homeric aggressivity. Stefan Zweig's drama Tersites (sic) (1907) offers a completely new tragic version, that shows the Freudian hidden side of the Homeric text. We face here a common feature of XXth century poet­ ics: the exaltation of defeat as a productive force and the consequent devalua­ tion of victory as a sterile...

Reviews 301 tions, and its clear articulation of the antifoundationalist position, will make this book a valuable resource for scholars and students alike. Bruce McComiskey The University ofAlabama at Birmingham Bruce McComiskey, Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric, (Carbon­ dale:, Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), xiii + 156 pp. Contributing to the conversation about rereading/rewriting the his­ tory of rhetoric, Bruce McComiskey's Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric clearly summarizes the raging and wide-ranging debates regarding the use value of revisiting the Sophists; compellingly argues for a historiographical methodology, which he terms "neosophistic appropriation"; re-reads Gor­ gias on his own terms, rather than Plato's; and, finally, attempts to realize his own methodology by rethinking Gorgias's (potential) contribution to "contemporary pedagogical and political ends" (p. 1). Recapping the seminal arguments of the past several decades regarding scholarly attempts to redeem the Sophists from their Platonic condemna­ tion and to reclaim their practices and theories, McComiskey's summary will surely find an appropriate home in graduate seminars on the history of rhetoric. Working with and against Edward Schiappa's criticism of particu­ lar neosophistic research (but curiously neglecting John Poulakos's response to same), McComiskey offers "neosophistic appropriation" as a corrective to Schiappa's (via Richard Rorty) methodological taxonomy of "histori­ cal reconstruction" and "rational reconstruction." Although McComiskey agrees with Schiappa that we "must maintain a clear distinction between the goals and methods of historical scholarship that interprets ancient doc­ trines and 'neo'historical scholarship that appropriates ancient doctrines for contemporary purposes" (p. 8), he argues, in contrast, that "neosophistic appropriation" is methodologically distinct from rational reconstructive ap­ proaches insofar as "neosophistic appropriation" writers "search the past for contributions to modern theoretical problems and problematics" (p. 10). "Although," McComiskey further argues, "all neosophists engage in the critical act of appropriation, not all neosophists appropriate ancient doctrines in the same way" (p. 11). Identifying three different approaches, McComiskey ultimately values and identifies with the third. The first approach "appropriate [s] Plato's characterization...either valuing Plato's misrepresentations or disparaging them" (p. 11). The second approach "put[s] aside Plato's mis­ representations of sophistic doctrines, appropriating doctrines instead from actual sophistic texts and historical interpretations of them in order to find common threads among the 'older sophists' and contemporary composition and rhetorical theorists" (p. 11). And the third approach, although similar to the second in purpose, attempts to "understand the unique contributions 302 RHETORICA of individual sophists...to contemporary rhetorical theory and composition, (p. 11, emphasis added). Claiming that the "more specific the appropria­ tion, the stronger the resulting neosophistic rhetoric," McComiskey turns his attention to a reappropriation of the Sophist Gorgias. Part One of Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric provides a provoca­ tive rereading of Gorgias's On Non-Existence, the Encomium ofHelen, and the Defense of Palamedes, arguing that, read together, they constitute a "holis­ tic statement about communal and ethical uses of logos, a statement that runs counter to Plato's (mis)representation of it in his dialogue the Gor­ gias" (p. 12). Chapter 1, then, argues compellingly that Plato misrepresents Gorgias's theory of rhetoric as foundational, specifically as based on a foun­ dational epistemology. For example, as McComiskey points out, Gorgias, in the Palemedes, uses a form of the Greek eido to express the concept of knowl­ edge, which "implies an understanding that is derived empirically from a situation"; whereas Plato's use of episteme "implies an understanding that exists prior to any given situation in which it might be applied" (pp. 24-5). Hence, McComiskey's rereading of the specific Sophist, Gorgias, and the specific sophistic text, exemplifies a "strong," neosophistic approach. This rereading allows us to see how Plato's misappropriation of Gorgias serves to make "Gorgias's rhetorical method based on kairos, or the right moment, seem absurd" (p. 12). McComiskey's similar approaches to the Helen and the Palemedes "provide the epistemological, rather than foundational, grounding for a nascent theory of rhetoric, complete with its negative and positive uses" (p. 12). That is, we, appropriating Gorgias, do not need an epistemological foundation to practice rhetoric. We can read/reappropriate, he argues, the Helen to see where rhetoric...

During the last thirty years, a growing scholarly attention has been paid to Spanish rhetoric. This paper gives an overview of the main studies on the subject and, with detailed bibliographical reference, draws a picture which presents the main features of Spanish rhetorical theory in the sixteenth century. Thus, references are made to the Council of Trent and its encouraging of sacred rhetoric, to the weight of Ciceronianism among Spanish rhetoricians -albeit some exceptions-, to the rigid detachment between rhetoric and poetics, to the relatively high production on the subject and to the limited influence of rhetoric and classical learning in the teaching of the time.

344 RHETORICA in which he worked out his dramatistic poetics" (p. 105). As a set, the four chapters of Part One are the strongest of the collection in their consistent presentation and elaboration of Burke's later concept of aesthetics. Part Two collects three essays that consider Burke's work in the context of reader-response criticism, critical theory, and philosophy. Greig Hender­ son's "A Rhetoric of Form: The Early Burke and Reader-Response Criticism" considers Burke's concept of the formal relation between texts and audi­ ence expectations in the light of Wolfgang Iser's and Stanley Fish's readerresponse theories. Thomas Carmichael's "Screening Symbolicity: Kenneth Burke and Contemporary Theory" similarly examines Burke's theories in comparison with contemporary critical theory, suggesting ways in which Burke prefigured theorists like deMan and Lyotard vis a vis dramatism's antifoundationalist principles. Finally, Robert Wess's essay "Pentadic Terms and Master Tropes" examines A Grammar ofMotives's concluding chapter, "Four Master Tropes", in terms of its philosophical implications for dramatism. Part Three returns to more biographical material, but with the added emphasis of Burke's relation to religion. Wayne C. Booth's retrospective ac­ count of his correspondence with Burke emphasizes prominent religious undertones in the numerous "voices" Burke's letters often assumed. Burke's essay "Sensation, Memory, Imitation/and Story" represents Burke's strug­ gles towards the completion of the dramatistic model and, furthermore, is indicative of the religious undertones in Burke's theories. The final essay is Michael Feehan's discussion of Mary Baker Eddy, a prominent Christian Scientist, and her influence on Burke's Permanence and Change. Like Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village, the editors of Unending Con­ versations see their collection as invoking and pluralizing "Burke's topos of the conversation" in contexts previously unvisited by Burke scholarship. As early attempts at expanding the range of application of dramatism, both texts offer useful and engaging starting points for further research. Paulo Campos The Ohio State University Peter L. Oesterreich and Thomas O. Sloane eds, Rhetorica Movet. Studies in Historical and Modern Rhetoric in Honour of Heinrich F. Plett (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 545. After yielding so many scholars the chance to discuss rhetoric, Prof. Plett s dedication to the subject is gracefully acknowledged in this collection of essays, published on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. In institutional terms his work has benefited all readers of Rhetorica: he was one of the founders of the ISHR in 1977 and served as its first Secretary General; he established the Centre for Rhetoric and Renaissance Studies at the Universitv Reviews 345 of Essen in 1989, and is an associate editor of this journal. In his own writing, such as the much-cited Rhetorik der Affekte, in the words of Thomas O. Sloane he "has welded a strong link between literary criticism and insights from the history of rhetoric". Written in English and German, Rhetorica Movet engages with the sub­ jects of three international conferences Prof. Plett organized at Essen: twothirds of it studies early modern rhetoric and poetics, with a subsidiary section on modern oratory. Some of the former contributions guide a rhetor­ ical technique smartly through an exercise programme, readying it at its classical antecedents then watching it bend and twist in a period's usage. Bernhard F. Scholz distinguishes Quintilian's view of ekphrasis as a report on the effect that a scene (not a work of art) has on the speaker's inner eye, such that the listener seems to see it too. Andrea and Peter Oesterreich examine Luther's comments on the relationship between rhetoric and dialectic. For Luther, dialectic produced faith while hope was aroused by rhetoric. Two authors take up Shakespeare's rhetoric: Wolfgang G. Muller, on the comic and persuasive uses of the enthymeme, and Peter Mack, on variants of antithesis which connect opposites structuring the last scene of The Winter's Tale. Two stylistic essays use frequency analysis on Dryden's versification (Hermann Bluhme) and mirroring structures in Spanish golden age verse (Jose Antonio Mayoral). Heiner Peters describes Sterne's explo­ ration of analogies between rhetoric and the art of fortification in Tristram Shandy. Other essays defend rhetoric. Judith Rice...

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

This paper examines the links between Classical (Ciceronian) rhetorical theory and the teaching of medieval Latin prose composition and epistolography between the eleventh century and the renaissance, mainly in Italy Classical rhetorical theory was not replaced by dictamen, nor was it the “research dimension” of everyday dictaminal activity. Rather Classical rhetorical theory, prose composition and epistolography responded to distinct market niches which appeared from time to time in different places as a consequence of social and political changes. Boncompagno’s apparent setting aside of Ciceronian rhetorical theory in favour of stricter notarial and dictaminal procedures was in turn superseded by his successors who chose to enrich their notarial theory with studies of classical rhetoric. Classical rhetorical theory proved influential on dictaminal theory and practice. Dictamen was not ousted by classical rhetoric. It only really declined when growing lay literacy and the use of the vernacular combined with the autonomous professionalism of the legal training institutions to erode the privileged position occupied in medieval times by the dictatores.

Recent histories of early American rhetoric have not contextualized the rhetorics studied sufficiently, resulting particularly in an ahistorical portrait of Timothy Dwight as a “civic rhetor”. This essay situates Dwight’s rhetorical theory in the political, social, and economic environment of early America. Particularly, it argues that Dwight’s ideas about rhetoric, morality, politics, and theology were all tied together by his conception of “taste”, and in his career as a public minister, as a teacher at Yale, and as an active political figure in eighteenth-century Connecticut, Dwight pushed an ideology of taste that supported early American Federalism.

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

Reviews 467 Gilbert Collard, L'art de s'exprimer en toutes circonstances. Les secrets dévoilés des orateurs (Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 1999), 204 pp. Maître Gilbert Collard, du barreau de Marseille, est un des plus grands avocats français, bien connu du public pour sa participation à des causes célèbres impliquant des personnalités du monde politique, artistique ou sportif. Auteur déjà de nombreux ouvrages, il publie ici un livre qui se définit comme "recueil de vingt-six ans de pratique oratoire" et somme de conseils, tant pour les futurs avocats que pour d'autres utilisateurs qui auront à s'exprimer en public. Or, sur la couverture de ce livre, l'auteur a tenu à faire figurer sa qualité de membre de l'International Society for the History of Rhetoric: démarche intéressante pour les lecteurs de Rhetorica. La première partie de l'ouvrage consiste dans un bref historique, qui commence par les œuvres d'Homère, qualifiées à juste titre de "poésie oratoire". G. Collard note que la rhétorique doit beaucoup aux sophistes, qui "méritaient mieux que la mauvaise réputation que Socrate leur fit". Se référant aux travaux de Marc Fumaroli, qui l'ont inspiré, il cite Aristote, Cicéron, Quintilien, et souligne l’importance de la tradition et des enseignements quelle dispense pour qui veut apprendre à parler aujourd'hui. La deuxième partie prolonge ce plaidoyer en faveur de la parole, en montrant, avec des raisonnements efficaces, comment l'art de parler a partie liée avec la formation de l'intelligence et du sens critique, avec la démocratie, avec l'humanité. L'auteur pose le problème moral de la rhétorique (comment distinguer persuasion et manipulation), présente les notions d'éthos et de pathos, puis énumère un certain nombre de défauts à éviter. Chemin faisant, des anecdotes illustrent l'actualité toujours renouvelée des problématiques rhétoriques, et l'avocat livre le fruit de ses expériences. Par exemple, Maître Collard estime que "ïe meilleur discours du monde ne devrait jamais dépasser une heure, l'idéal 468 RHETORICA étant le discours de quarante minutes" -au-delà, l'endormissement guette... La troisième partie brosse un panorama des principales notions techniques : les figures (notamment l'hyperbole, définie comme "la Marseillaise du répertoire"), les procédés d'argumentation (ici l'auteur s'appuie sur les travaux de Chaim Perelman), les principaux types de plan. Des conseils d'entraînement pratique sont donnés, et le livre se termine, dans une quatrième partie, par des analyses de discours fameux prononcés par des hommes politiques et des avocats, depuis Mirabeau jusqu'à Henri René Garaud. Comme l'auteur l'indique lui-même, son but n'est pas universitaire. Il n'entend pas proposer une recherche savante sur l'histoire de la rhétorique, mais offrir le témoignage d’un grand praticien de la parole. Le livre de G. Collard témoigne de l’intérêt de l'auteur pour la rhétorique et pour l'histoire de celle-ci, vue comme une source d'inspiration pour le présent. Il manifeste une approche du sujet, qui, sans être érudite, est profonde, parce qu'elle s'étend à l'histoire, à la morale, à la littérature. G. Collard est un orateur qui pense que la pratique oratoire doit être fondée sur le travail, la méthode, la culture, qui a des exordes prêts d'avance (comme Démosthène!), qui lit Montaigne et les poètes et qui veut réhabiliter la rhétorique dans des milieux (il y en a) où elle n'a pas bonne presse. Son témoignage est important. Laurent Pernot Université de Strasbourg II ...

Review Article| August 01 2000 Short Reviews: The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece, by Edward Schiappa, Political Allegory in Late Medieval England, by Anne W. Astell, The Changing Tradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric, by Christine Mason Sutherland and Rebecca Sutcliffe and Rhetorical Figures in Science, by Jeanne Fahnestock Edward Schiappa,The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), x + 230 pp.Anne W. Astell,Political Allegory in Late Medieval England (Ithaca: Comell University Press, 1999), xii + 218 pp.Christine Mason Sutherland and Rebecca Sutcliffe eds. The Changing Tradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1999), vii + 279 pp.Jeanne Fahnestock,Rhetorical Figures in Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), xiv + 234 pp. Janet M. Atwill, Janet M. Atwill The University of Tennessee Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Sybil M. Jack, Sybil M. Jack University of Sydney Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Wendy Dasler Johnson, Wendy Dasler Johnson Washington State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Jean Dietz Moss Jean Dietz Moss The Catholic University of America Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2000) 18 (3): 343–354. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2000.18.3.343 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Janet M. Atwill, Sybil M. Jack, Wendy Dasler Johnson, Jean Dietz Moss; Short Reviews: The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece, by Edward Schiappa, Political Allegory in Late Medieval England, by Anne W. Astell, The Changing Tradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric, by Christine Mason Sutherland and Rebecca Sutcliffe and Rhetorical Figures in Science, by Jeanne Fahnestock. Rhetorica 1 August 2000; 18 (3): 343–354. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2000.18.3.343 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 2000, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric2000 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Short Reviews Edward Schiappa, The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), x + 230 pp. In The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece, Edward Schiappa continues his questioning of the disciplinary status of rhetoric in the Classical period. The book is divided into three sections: Reconstructing the Origins of Rhetorical Theory, Gorgias and the Disciplining of Discourse, and Fourth-Century Disciplinary Efforts. In Part I, Schiappa challenges what he characterizes as a 17point , "standard account" of the history of rhetoric—with points ranging from the status of the Corax and Tisias story to the origins and uses of ρητορική. For the most part, George Kennedy is the author of the account Schiappa challenges, and these first chapters interrogate Kennedy's timeline as well as his categories of "traditional," "technical," and "philosophical" rhetorics. This section recapitulates Schiappa's well-known argument that Plato was responsible for coining the term ρητορική —most likely in the early fourth century BCE. By Schiappa's account, this "coining" was "a watershed event in the history of conceptualized Rhetoric in ancient Greece" (p. 23). Specifically, Schiappa maintains that before ρητορική was coined the "verbal arts" were "understood as less differentiated and more holistic in scope", and they did "not draw a sharp line between the goals of seeking success and seeking truth" (p. 23). Part I includes Schiappa's direct response to critics of his ρητορική argument. In Chapter Two, he draws on theorists from Kenneth Burke and Ferdinand de Saussure to Benjamin Lee Whorf and Michel Foucault to defend the significance of the act of naming that Schiappa maintains is embodied in the coining of ρητορική (pp. 23-28). Chapter Four includes a sharp critique of the ideological uses of the term "Sophistic rhetoric", in which Schiappa challenges the "wishful thinking" of those who "over-romanticize the relationship between 'the Sophists' and Athenian democracy" .343 344 RHETORICA (p. 55). He is particularly hard on those whom he accuses of sacrificing historiographical method to ideological theory construction—a practice that he argues leads to the problem of anachronism (p. 61). Part II consists of "three studies". The first study, large portions of which were previously published in Pre/Text, examines Gorgias's style. The second study, "Rereading Gorgias's Helen", picks up more explicitly the disciplinary concerns of Part I, as Schiappa argues that "certain persistent questions about Gorgias's Helen obtain different answers once the speech is repositioned as a predisciplinary text" (p. 115). More specifically, Schiappa maintains that "Gorgias significantly influenced the early theoretical articulation of the discipline of Rhetoric by theorizing about the workings of persuasive discourse" (p. 131). In the last study, Schiappa focuses on Gorgias's "On Not Being", examining the ways in which disciplinary senses of philosophy and rhetoric have influenced interpretations and evaluations of this muchdebated text. Like Part II, Part III consists of "three studies". The first chapter of this section examines early uses of the terms ρητορεία ("oratory") and ρητορεύειν ("to orate"). Schiappa's general argument is that the terms "were not used often or consistently enough" to justify the sense of disciplinarity stability conveyed when they are translated as "rhetoric" (p. 160). The next chapter, "Isocrates's Philosophia", attempts to define Isocrates's sense of the art of discourse, particularly as it contrasts with Plato's concept of "philosophy". This chapter has—somewhat surprisingly—a second function: "to provide a reading of Isocrates that attempts to locate him as one of the first philosophers in Western history to address the concerns that we now identify with Pragmatism" (p. 162). Part III concludes with a chapter co-authored with David Timmerman that addresses the motivations for and implications of the diverse forms of discourse Aristotle classified as "epideictic". Schiappa's arguments have yielded invaluable insights into some of the most recalcitrant debates in the history of rhetoric—in particular, the ancient contest between rhetoric and philosophy. I found that the structure of The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece sometimes obscured rather than foregrounded the significance of these insights. As Schiappa acknowledges in the Reviews 345 Preface, portions of the book have appeared in books and journal articles. The result is sometimes redundant as opposed to...

Modern rhetorical theory suggests that epideictic creates and sustains values by addressing issues of legitimacy, inclusion, exclusion, and virtue. By focusing on the epideictic dimension in Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, this paper explores Paul’s efforts to form an emerging Christian community that at once identified with its Judaic roots and yet dissociated itself from a conservative sect of Jewish Christians, who were attempting to colonize the young Galatian churches.

Abstract: George Campbell's rhetorical theory is based upon a philosophical tradition that has ancient roots—common sense philosophy. Campbell's interest in common sense emerged through his association with Scottish Enlightenment philosophers such as Thomas Reid. However, Campbell's beliefs about the relationship between individual perception and social knowledge at the same time reveal a philosophical affinity with Aristotie and the Stoics. For Campbell, as for the ancients, common sense represents both the intuitive ability that individuals use in apprehending the reality of the external world and the shared human capacity to make necessary collective judgments. Although Campbell believes that there is objective truth that is apprehended through coinmon sense, he at the same time perceives common sense as providing a foundation for making decisions about the contingent circumstances that people face from day to day. Campbell's rhetoric has frequentiy been described as managerial, but his interest in common sense creates an epistemic function for rhetoric, as it provides the means for negotiating the principles of moral evidence in order to resolve the specific questions that arise in the life of the community.

George Campbell’s rhetorical theory is based upon a philosophical tradition that has ancient roots—common sense philosophy. Campbell’s interest in common sense emerged through his association with Scottish Enlightenment philosophers such as Thomas Reid. However, Campbell’s beliefs about the relationship between individual perception and social knowledge at the same time reveal a philosophical affinity with Aristotle and the Stoics. For Campbell, as for the ancients, common sense represents both the intuitive ability that individuals use in apprehending the reality of the external world and the shared human capacity to make necessary collective judgments. Although Campbell believes that there is objective truth that is apprehended through common sense, he at the same time perceives common sense as providing a foundation for making decisions about the contingent circumstances that people face from day to day. Campbell’s rhetoric has frequently been described as managerial, but his interest in common sense creates an epistemic function for rhetoric, as it provides the means for negotiating the principles of moral evidence in order to resolve the specific questions that arise in the life of the community.

Reviews 111 Shirley Wilson Logan, "We Are Coming": The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 255 pp. Shirley Wilson Logan introduces "We Are Coming": The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women by stating, "This book examines the public persuasive discourse of nineteenth-century black women intellectuals" (p. xi). She continues in the Preface to talk more specifically about the nature of the historical era of the analysis, constraints on the availability of texts, the nature of both public discourse and persuasive discourse, and the rhetorical theories and strategies that shape her analysis. Near the end of the Preface she says, "My hope is that these discussions might also add to a clearer understanding of nineteenth-century culture and of the ways in which the persuasive discourse of nineteenth-century black women adapted itself to its multiple audiences and multilayered exigences" (p. xvi). By this process, Logan makes the reader immediately aware of the extent to which the participation of African American women in public discourse during the nineteenth century signals complexity, rather than simplicity, and a need for contemporary researchers to account for patterns in rhetorical practices at the same time that we resist reducing those patterns to simplistic and monolithic notions of a "Black women's rhetoric". First of all, in focusing attention on specific rhetors, Logan re­ inscribes the historical record with the names of women who actively charted new pathways for rhetorical engagement during an era of remarkable social, political, and economic change. She brings texture to what we have come to know about the rhetorical performances of Maria Miller Stewart, Frances Watkins Harper, Ida Wells Barnett, Fannie Barrier Williams, Anna Julia Cooper, Victoria Earle Matthews, Mary Shadd Cary, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and others who in recent years have been brought to the attention particularly of teachers and scholars in women's studies, ethnic studies, and literary studies. To this list, however, she adds the names of women whose accomplishments are much less familiar: Rosetta Douglass-Sprague, Alice Woodby McKane, Lucy 112 RHETORICA Wilmot Smith, Mary Cook, Edmonia Highgate, Georgia Swift King and others. She reminds us that to date we have only scratched the surface of the history of African American women's intellectual work as she places the subjects of her study more visibly onto the rhetorical landscape. Using five themes that are symbolized by quotations from the texts of die rhetors, Logan explains in systematic ways how the rhetorical actions of this group were shaped and performed amid various systems and forces of the social environment. She raises for critical viewing points of inquiry that help us to envision these women both individually and collectively, interrogating, for example: the importance of allusions to an African past in the gamering of rhetorical power; their commitment to forging alliances across various communities of interest; the directing of their energies toward critical issues within the African American community; the use of specific strategies in the art of persuasion; their creation of their own arenas for rhetorical engagement; and the ways and means of rhetorical action in the particular arena of the Black Clubwomen's Movement, that is, their shaping of the discourse of racial uplift. Logan suggests that individually these women illustrate a breadth of rhetorical responses to a continuity of exigencies and that collectively they were quite astute at finding ways to invoke lively connections between themselves and their audiences; to invent themselves anew within their performative arenas; and to respond provocatively to the exigencies of multiply constrained rhetorical situations. The effect of Logan's approach is to underscore a critical point that she makes in her statement of purpose, that is, her assertion that these women are intellectuals. In attending to individual practices, common exigencies, and thematic points of inquiry, Logan makes visible that the case to be made ultimately with this analysis is not simply that African American women engaged persuasively in rhetorical practices in public arenas during this era, but that their doing so demonstrates the liveliness of their intellectual engagement and their ethical commitments. Logan's choice in making this case is to lead us analytically through a textual display, making conditions...

RHETORICA 108 General Prologue and three serious tales. Much of the comedic and fantastic is left unexplored; indeed, he writes, "I hope others will extend the discussion...I have only initiated" (p. 212). Although Russell, at times, claims rather brashly to know what Chaucer thought or didn't think, what he read or didn't read without much qualification, the edginess of his prose provokes response. His work confidently negotiates contemporary Chaucerian scholarship, solidly convincing readers that the trivium can serve as an important lens through which we can read medieval literary texts. ANNE LASKAYA University of Oregon Lynne Magnusson, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), x + 221 pp. In Shakespeare and Social Dialogue, Lynne Magnusson accepts poststructural questioning of the unity and autonomy of the literary text and the independence of its "author" and characters but argues that this critique of formalism has unnecessarily dismissed close reading of language. She seeks to restore it by applying concepts from discourse analysis to a comparison of Renaissance correspondence and Shakespeare's dialogue. Her assumption that letters and plays come close to recording actual conversation seems a little naive, and I am not always sure whether her goal is to recover Elizabethan speech or to illuminate Shakespeare, but she largely achieves both. In place of the Aristotelian categories applied to Elizabethan letters by Frank Whigham, she builds on theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and Pierre Bourdieu, and especially the empirical research of cultural anthropologists Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson. Their model describes attempts to manage risk and save face in conversation through strategies of positive politeness (identifying participants) and negative politeness (dissociating them) that take into account their social Reviews 109 distance, their relative power, and the culture-specific ranking of impositions. As an historian of rhetoric skeptical of imposing our own theories on Renaissance texts, I am startled by how well this approach explains Elizabethan language. Magnusson's study has three parts. Part One demonstrates that gender as well as class influences social dialogue. In Henry VIII, Norfolk employs positive strategies to advise Buckingham; Katherine and Wolsey address King Henry with negative strategies of deference and indirection. The correspondence of Edmund Molyneux, Sidney family secretary, reveals the complexities of Elizabethan relationships. Philip and Robert Sidney command him, while he responds to Philip's criticisms primarily with negative strategies. Lady Mary Sidney tempers her authority over Edmund with positive strategies. Shakespeare's Sonnet 58 and others deferring to his patron are best understood in the context of these conventions. Part Two focuses on letter-writing manuals and administrative correspondence, applying its examples to Shakespeare's plays. Magnusson contrasts Desiderius Erasmus' reform of the horizontal, homosocial relations of scholars in De conscribendis epistolis with Angel Day's reproduction of Elizabethan social hierarchies in The English Secretary, which nevertheless facilitates upward mobility. William Fulwood's The Enimie of Idlenesse, a translation of a French treatise, could have unwittingly supplied hints for the linguistic pretensions of Love's Labour's Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream. In the former play, the lords' linguistic excesses respond to imitation of their style by upstarts, while in the latter, Theseus appreciates his subjects' incompetence because bumbling shows deference. Elizabethan business depends on personal relationship: thus recommendations ignore job qualifications and requests for favors cement friendship. The Marchants Avizo of Bristol merchant John Browne advises the apprentice to seek aid from fellow merchants, adapting the courtly "pleasuring style" to the commerce. The Merchant of Venice shows the same patterns in the Christian community, but Shylock's speech challenges them, and in Timon of Athens they break down. In the personal letters by which Sir Henry Sidney, Sir William Cecil, and other courtiers administer 110 RHETORICA the Elizabethan regime, negative politeness to equals hints that the intended audience is the Queen, while expressions of "trouble­ taking" and regrets for "trouble-making" to superiors may excuse independent decisions. Positive strategies of identification present weighty requests as trivial. 1 Henry IV contrasts Hal's mastery of this social language and Hotspur's impatience with it. Part Three explores language as theme in three plays. Greenblatt's concept of self-fashioning cannot adequately explain...

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

Abstract: The later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries in Italy saw a marked new interest in the study of Ciceronian rhetorical theory, in both Latin and vernacular contexts. This reflects the increasing prominence within the civic culture of the Italian communes of practices of oral and adversarial rhetoric which the dominant instrument of rhetorical instruction in this period, the ars dictaminis, was ill-equipped to teach. While the utility of the strategies of argument taught by Roman rhetorical theory was widely recognised in this period, the ethical attitudes implicit in that theory represented a challenge to prevailing Christian constructions of the moral decorum of speech. Classical rhetorical theory may thus be seen to have constituted a destabilising presence within late medieval ethical discourse: a situation which presisted, to some extent, even after the political and cultural changes of the later Trecento had displaced rhetoric in Italy from a primary to a secondary, literary and educational, role.

Short Reviews Harvey Yunis, Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Democratic Athens (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996) xv + 316pp. In methodological reflections written near the end of his career (and published in English translation as On Interpretation), the German classicist August Boeckh articulated a number of hermeneutic principles, including two very simple dicta. First, a good interpretation will explain as much of the text as possible. And, second, a good interpretation will make the text compelling on the terms of its own time. Judged on these two criteria, Taming Democracy by Harvey Yunis offers a very good interpretation of Plato on political rhetoric. Though Plato is not the only subject of Taming Democracy, he is at the center of this study of models of political rhetoric in democratic Athens: a study that runs from the theatrical responses to the Peloponnesian War of Aristophanes and Euripides, to Thucydides' self-conscious history, to Plato's evolving views, to Demosthenes' oratorical resistance to Philip of Macedon's imperial encroachments. As an interpreter of Plato on rhetoric, Yunis immediately stands out for his willingness to move beyond the two-piece puzzle posed by the Gorgias and the Phaedrus. To his interpretations of these essential dialogues Yunis adds some reflections on the Apology and the Republic and, in a nearly unprecedented move, a detailed assessment of the rhetorical theory implied by the "persuasive preambles" Plato introduces in his Laws. Looking at this larger set enables Yunis to conclude, "The philosophical distance that Plato has traveled from the bitter rejection of rhetoric in the Gorgias to the creation of a new rhetorical genre of legal-political discourse in the Laws is immense" (p. 235). Yunis then makes this philosophical journey historically compelling by setting it against the rise and fall and rise of the 331 332 RHETORICA Athenian empire. Yunis suggests that Athens' democracy depended in subtle ways on its imperial ambitions. The navy that gave the masses, the poorer classes, an important civic role to play also built for Athens an empire. And that empire brought revenues to Athens, revenues that provided the livelihoods for many of these poorer citizens. Thus, domestic harmony in Athens depended on foreign hegemony, even tyranny. Taming Democracy is an analysis of late fifth and early-mid fourth century thinkers who, like Plato, felt compelled to address the political questions raised by Athens' imperial history. "Athens' miserable defeat in the Peloponnesian War invited a réévaluation of its democracy in general and democratic rhetoric in particular" (p. 32). Their answers, according to Yunis, hinged on whether they believed that rhetoric could be instructive, whether they thought the rhetores—the most accomplished speakers in the assembly—could tame the demos, the public, by teaching it to deliberate wisely through mass political discourse. In Thucydides' work Pericles is presented as the exemplary rhetor because he had the ability and the moral will to teach the Athenians as he led them. The rhetores who arose after Pericles lacked his abilities and his character. They pandered to the Athenians' worst impulses and thus, Thucydides implies, led Athens to its ruin. The Gorgias, Yunis argues, is Plato's response to Thucydides' portrayal of Pericles. Unlike Thucydides who gloried in Athens' power, Plato regarded Athens' imperial ambitions as inherently corrupting. The Gorgias is set in Athens at its zenith; but the characters and historical references of this dialogue about rhetoric and power serve to remind the alert reader that the city will soon be led, by a speech, into the disastrous folly of the Sicilian expedition and, thereby, to the collapse of its empire. This is an extraordinarily provocative book. It is not without its weaknesses, however. First, though other scholars have acknowledged the echoes and parallels between the two authors, they have stopped short of the suggestion that Plato "read" Thucydides. Yunis needs to provide additional warrants for his more assertive position. Second, Yunis actually overlooks one supporting line of evidence in this regard: the paradoxical place of shame in Thucydides and its prominence in the Gorgias. Third, Reviews 333 Yunis distorts the Phaedrus by bending it too harshly to his thesis. The setting of the dialogue and the focal relationship of the...

Reviews 343 within this conventional context. "What this means in practice", Skinner explains, "is that I treat Hobbes's claims about scientia civilis not simply as propositions but as moves in an argument. I try to indicate what traditions he reacts against, what lines of argument he takes up, what changes he introduces into existing debates" (p. 8). While Skinner's method has occasioned much debate, culminating in a collection of essays entitled Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (1988), historians of rhetoric, who themselves attempt to understand texts within larger contexts, should welcome the attention paid to questions of intention, meaning, and language. Meticulously researched, Skinner's study of Hobbes and the rhetorical culture of Tudor England is a welcome contribution to histories such as Victoria Kahn's Machiavellian Rhetoric and Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment. Together, these studies clarify the complex interplay between rhetorical and political traditions in early modem Europe. WADE WILLIAMS The University ofPuget Sound Alan G Gross and William M. Keith eds, Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997) 371 pp. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar writes "The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science", the lead essay in this volume—its "Provocations"—and the rest of Rhetorical Hermeneutics is a collection of "Dissensions", "Extensions" and "reflections", the last including a response to respondents by Gaonkar. So the book is the perfect rhetorical study. It is utterly dialogic; Gaonkar's claims are all tested on an audience of distinguished rhetorical theorists and rhetoricians of science: John Angus Campbell, Thomas Farrell, Steve Fuller, Alan Gross, James Jasinski, David Kaufer, William Keith, Andrew King, Michael Leff, Deirdre McCloskey, Carolyn Miller and Charles Willard. The book has an 344 RHETORICA excellent cast—and a sometimes argumentative one (McCloskey writes that the philosophical warrants for Gaonkar's case against a ubiquitous rhetoric themselves warrant the question, "So what?", p. 107); it also has a very worthy project. The central question of Rhetorical Hermeneutics is this: can a theory of production be usefully, and without distortion, transformed into a theory of interpretation? This question sponsors others—for example, does the "thinness" of rhetorical theory (the paucity of constraints on its terms of use) make it so easy to spread, as it were (rhetoric is the universal hermeneutic) as to weaken the plausibility of rhetoric altogether (what distinguishes rhetoric as an interpretive program?)? Gaonkar answers his own questions in part by evoking the work in rhetoric of science of John Angus Campbell, Alan Gross, and Lawrence Prelli. Campbell and Gross respond. Campbell, Gaonkar finds, is mired in a problem of agency ("refuses to let go of an image of Darwin as the rhetorical superstar", p. 49); Gross is only successful as a rhetorical critic to the extent that he does not practice the neoAristotelianism he proposes; Prelli, among other questionable practices, seems to be "probing into the 'rhetorical unconscious'" of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (p. 73). So Gaonkar describes problems in the house of rhetoric of science; he also draws attention not only to the problematic relation of rhetorical criticism to other criticisms, but also to the "embattled" relation of Rhetoric of Science—as a discipline—to both rhetorical studies and science studies. Gross and Keith's design and authoritative editing shape a volume which deserves consideration at a number of levels: What are possible answers to questions raised? What can be said about the questions qua questions? Why does rhetoric ask so many questions about itself anyway? The book not only deserves consideration at these levels; it also enables it. Fuller writes, for example, "The more that rhetoric of science looks like classical rhetoric, the less exciting its interpretations seem...[T]he more that rhetoric of science strays from classical sources, and the more provocative its readings become, the more interchangeable its methods seem with those used by sociologists and critical theorists" (p. 279). Gross writes, "The current attitude of Reviews 345 historians and philosophers oscillates between increased need to take a rhetorical point of view into consideration and an occasional hostility to the possibility of rhetorical analysis" (p. 146). With such comment, the authors invite readers to participate...

The later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries in Italy saw a marked new interest in the study of Ciceronian rhetorical theory, in both Latin and vernacular contexts. This reflects the increasing prominence within the civic culture of the Italian communes of practices of oral and adversarial rhetoric which the dominant instrument of rhetorical instruction in this period, the ars dictaminis, was ill-equipped to teach. While the utility of the strategies of argument taught by Roman rhetorical theory was widely recognised in this period, the ethical attitudes implicit in that theory represented a challenge to prevailing Christian constructions of the moral decorum of speech. Classical rhetorical theory may thus be seen to have constituted a destabilising presence within late medieval ethical discourse: a situation which presisted, to some extent, even after the political and cultural changes of the later Trecento had displaced rhetoric in Italy from a primary to a secondary, literary and educational, role.

222 RHETORICA substitute aux mots orator ou poeta celui de pictor et applique à la peinture des analyses rhétorico-poétiques" (pp. 19-20). The result amounts to a digest of everything in classical rhetoric relevant to the visual arts. The full extent of Junius's re-elaboration of rhetorical theory can be partly gauged by the subjects treated in the editor's invaluable commentary section, reduced to key terms: imitatio, ars, phantasia, ratio imitandi ("une problématique cicéronienne"), ut pictura poesis (including the roles of inspiration, enthusiasm, imitation, illusion, emotion), and contemplatio (the function of the spectator, aesthetic and moral). Every self-respecting historian of rhetoric should make sure his departmental library buys this remarkable edition. And we keenly look forward to its completion. Brian Vickers ETH Zurich James Robert Goetsch Jr, Vico's Axioms: The Geometry of the Human World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) xiv + 173pp. Goetsch undertakes a defense of Vico against his "friends", such as Isaiah Berlin, who are mainstream historians of philosophy; he is concerned to give Vico credit for a solid, systemic mode of inquiry, rather than the wildly eclectic mass of detail, chaotically presented, attributed to Vico by Berlin, (p. xi). His defense of Vico becomes a defense of rhetoric, for Goetsch insists on the significance of fundamental rhetorical assumptions and strategies of analysis of language structure and process as they frame an investigation. Vico's hermeneutics are, for Goetsch, a rhetorical hermeneutics. The defense of rhetoric is also an abandonment of the hegemonous strategies of definition and the standard issues of history of philosophy. To give a perspicuous, inclusive account of Vico's project, it is necessary to focus on the axioms, the key structuring principles, Vico lists in his New Science (p. 106); Axioms 1-22, 106 are common (koinoi), Axioms 33-144 particular Reviews 223 topics (p. 128). But, in Goetsch's rhetorical reading, the Vichian axioms, or elementi, or degnita (things worth thinking), are peculiarly rhetorical uses of the topoi,of the topical connections of the general and the particular (p. 108). The commonplace tradition illumines Vichian method (p. 104), because "topical storehouses" provide the arguments, enthymemes, motivating the most basic civil operations. The topoi, as both bins, spaces, organising argument and the contents of the bins represent a mode of connection in which both source and goal are in the domain of the communis. "Common sense", as a body of beliefs and dispositions held by a historical community, is a primary interest for Vico (p. 96), as the origin of the principles which illumine human history; Vico reads the axioms as "causes of customs" (p. 108). The description of common sense, as the summary of the common practices and values of the communities, is the goal of all historical initiatives and arguments. Moreover, when Vico claims that Providence, "like the queen she is", works only through civil institutions and practices, he selects irony as primary trope; history is not simply the product of self-conscious personal impulses; rather, particular institutional effects and strategies are often the unintended consequences of radically different, earlier dispositions and practices. Goetsch claims Vico's strategy represents a "recovery of an authentic Aristotelian rhetoric" (p. 106), a more "dynamic" Aristotle (pp. 54, 114). Goetsch reads the opening statement in the Rhetoric, that rhetoric is the antistrophe of dialectic, as pointing to the peculiarly heavy engagement with civic consciousness and civil effect of rhetoric (p. 108). Goetsch thus claims to recontextualise Vico in an Aristotelian tradition which is not that of a purely abstract, logical systematicity, the dominant reading of Aristotle in history of philosophy, but of a rhetorical, topical systematicity; a "rhetorical" reading of Aristotle, he claims, "corrects" the "scholastic" tendencies of Aristotle's logical interests (p. 77). Thus Goetsch asserts he may place Vico in a history of ideas aligned with the peculiar interests in philosophy of language and the philosophy of psychology represented in such twentieth-century figures as Ernst Cassirer, Ernesto Grassi, and Owen Barfield, to name three of the mentors frequently invoked by Goetsch.. At all times, Goetsch privileges, and claims Vico 224 RHETORICA privileges, "organic" wholeness (p. 116), valuing the image, imagination, ingenium, temporicity, historicity—a...

Reviews 233 plutôt: parce que rhéteur) en musicien: les idées sont des thèmes, les sujets sont des instruments. Pierre-Louis Malosse Stephen D. O'Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, ix + 314 pp. Endings, like beginnings, have always fascinated us; thus, speculative accounts of the world's beginning (etiologies) and its ending (eschatologies) have engendered controversial philosophies and gripping narratives. As we approach the end of a millenium, eschatological speculation can only be expected to increase; and thus, Arguing the Apocalypse is a timely contribution to rhetorical history and rhetorical theory. It is also broadly interdisciplinary, carefully researched, and intelligently written. The book's author, Stephen O'Leary, studied comparative religion at Harvard before going on to graduate work in Communication Studies at Northwestern; this book is a revision of his dissertation, and it is marked by the influence of both its director (argumentation theorist Tom Goodnight) and one of its readers (Bernard McGinn, a historian of medieval theology). With a few exceptions, the author has purged his book of the stylistic residues of the much despised "dissertation" genre. Nevertheless, as in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, the first ninety pages will test the readers' mettle; only if they are able to wade through the complexities of the theory will they earn their just reward: two rhetorical histories that are fascinating (and at times, even "page-turners"). Yet there are those first ninety pages. Chapter 1 begins by defining apocalypse—a subset of eschatological discourse that "makes manifest a vision of ultimate destiny, rendering immediate to human audiences the ultimate End of the cosmos in the Last Judgment" (pp. 5-6). Given the powerful appeal of such discourse through the ages, the author suspects that rhetorical theory will be useful in showing how it has shaped human 234 RHETORICA thought and action within particular cultural milieux. Chapter 2 sets out three important topoi of apocalyptic discourse: time, evil, and authority. These topoi are ripe for rhetorical analysis, since they involve not only the intellect but the whole person. O'Leary provides thumbnail sketches of the typical accounts of these three topoi, suggesting that apocalyptic discourse attempts to address certain aporiae that have been left by such accounts. In chapter 3, O'Leary develops the dramatic frames of comedy and tragedy, through which he will view various apocalyptic movements. Traditional Christian eschatology, he argues, accented the comic frame by emphasizing God's complete sovereignty in bringing about the end of time; the divine plan is inscrutible, and we can neither predict the end nor bring it about. But this view still acknowledged an identifiable end, in which evil and time would be no more; and this created the rhetorical space for a "tragic" apocalyptic eschatology, in which God brings the world to a catastrophic close (an event that will be survived only by those who know what to look for, and when to look). "Once an audience has accepted the eschatological argument that evil will be both eliminated and justified in the Last Judgment...their experience of evil will create a hope and expectation for this Judgment that still requires satisfaction" (p. 81). Thus, in apocalyptic rhetoric, "the evils of the present day are pyramided into a structure of cosmic significance" (p. 83). This arouses ever more eager anticipation of the consummation of history. Apocalyptic rhetoric thus tends to be enormously persuasive in the short term. While often blithely dismissed as the ranting of fanatics, it has mobilized thousands, indeed millions, of adherents—a claim that O'Leary will demonstrate in the historical sketches that fill most of the remainder of the book. The next four chapters examine two of the most important apocalyptic movements in the United States. Chapter 4 chronicles William Miller's rise from obscure farmer, to sought-after lecturer, to religious figurehead, to discredited prophet; the chapter also shows why Millerism should be analyzed as a rhetorical movement. In chapter 5, O'Leary examines the particular forms of Millerite argument, showing why they were found persuasive by certain auditors. Chapter 6 jumps ahead some more than a century, examining the more...

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

RHETORICA 102 While several of the articles in the volume do address the extended influence of the Scottish tradition in countries formerly dominated by Britain, conspicuously absent from the collection is any discussion of English Studies on the Indian subcontinent. Taken as a whole, however, the volume presents an expanded account of the historical origins of English Studies and illustrates the degree to which we owe the institutionalization of university English to Scottish culture. DANA HARRINGTON Syracuse University Richard Morris, Sinners, Lovers and Heroes: An Essay on Memorializing in Three American Cultures (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997) xxi + 237 pp. A modest but noteworthy contribution to research by rhetoric scholars on public memorials, this book focuses on symbolic responses to Abraham Lincoln's death during the nineteenth century in the United States. Morris asserts, "I know of no other event that so exactly marks the dramatic rupture of the social structure of a nation and that so clearly lays cultural transformation open to observation than the death of Abraham Lincoln" (p. 2). Written in a clear and accessible style, Sinners, Lovers and Heroes argues "the thesis that memorials are fundamentally rhetorical and cultural forms of expression, that a careful examination of American memorializing discloses the contours of at least three distinct American cultures, and that shifting visual and discursive memorial patterns across time reveal the ascendancy and subordination of these three cultures and their cultural memories" (p. xii). The organization of Sinners, Lovers and Heroes is straightforward. An introductory chapter articulates an orientation to the rhetoric and culture of public memorials. In the three following chapters, each of the "three cultures" is the central focus of one chapter, corresponding to the three key terms in the Reviews 103 title, Sinners, Lovers and Heroes. Specifically, Morris considers patterns of response to Lincoln's death, as it was represented by members of cultures that Morris names "religionists", "romanticists", and "heroists" (p. 42). The conclusion synthesizes Morris's claims that "Different people memorialize, embrace, and seek to codify through public memory their different images of the memorable not merely because of temporal or spatial or physiological divergences, but because different cultures with different worldviews and ethoi require different images of and from their members" (p. 153). One strength of Sinners, Lovers and Heroes is the extensive use of published primary materials from various nineteenth century figures who commented on Abraham Lincoln's death. Morris claims, "what we see in the transformation of Lincoln's image, then, is not a single people creating and later transforming an element of the symbolic code of collective memory, but the rise and fall of different cultures, each of which positions Lincoln within a different world view and ethos" (p. 27). Another strength of this book is the attention to accumulating details that Morris synthesizes into an encompassing perspective in his conclusion. Unfortunately, however, the book makes little explicit use of contemporary rhetoric scholars' research on public memorials, public memory, or visual rhetoric, even though the book seems to be arguing, at times, with some key figures in these areas of research. Although the introduction and the conclusion stress "differences" among the U.S. people, there is little explicit attention to either race or economic class in the body of the volume (for his comments on race, pp. x, 111; on economic class, pp. 127, 142-43, 147-49). The discussion of the "religionists" depends heavily upon a Christian conception of spirituality. As one consequence, perhaps, the speech by a Jewish leader, Max Lilienthal, is discussed under the "heroists" (pp. 125-35). In the chapter on "heroists," one abiding oxymoron is the manifestation of leveling styles reflecting an egalitarian politics, because placing some people above most others is ordinarily a requirement for having "heroes". Morris writes, "True to the mandates of the first Heroist gravescape, however, cemeterial rules and regulations in lawn cemeteries require markers to be small and, in the vast majority of instances...flush with the ground" (p. 149). 104 RHETORICA Some key concepts would perhaps have benefited from explicit, technical explanation. For example, the use of "hegemony" in Morris's book is disconnected from Antonio Gramsci's use of the same term...

RHETORICA 96 Don Paul Abbot, Rhetoric in the New World: Rhetorical Theory and Practice in Colonial Spanish America, (Columbia, University of South Carolina Press, 1997) xiii + 135pp. The study and practice of rhetoric were at the center of all representations, interpretations and debates in colonial Spanish America. Readings and criticisms of the cultural production of the colonial period, since just before the Quintencenary celebration in 1992 and after, have shed light on diverse aspects of history, culture and society. However, these critical assessments have only superficially confronted the use and transformation of the precepts of the European rhetorical tradition across the Atlantic. In colonial Spanish America, rhetoric offered the theories behind the evangelization project and the rules to follow in the most important political debates of the period. Don Paul Abbot's contribution to colonial studies and the history of rhetoric in America, Rhetoric in the New World, looks at how Spanish, Amerindian and Mestizo rhetoricians challenged the classical tradition and offer a new perspective on secular and religious historical writing, the theory behind it, and culture. Spanish and Mestizo scholars gave continuity and provided a new perspective in theory and practice to Renaissance humanism and the rhetorical tradition. Abbot addresses this important problem, successfully demonstrating the important role of and adjustments made to ancient concepts in the practice of writing theory, considering the different addressees, and more important, the project of representation, translation and interpretation of the Amerindian culture. The texts under review in Abbot's book provide a crosssection of some important writers and intellectuals during the early colonial period. He discusses the works of Fray Luis de Granada, Bernardino de Sahagún, Diego Valadés, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, José de Acosta, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and José de Arriaga. The context to the transmission of the precepts of rhetoric from Spain to the New World is provided in an insightful manner with a study of the lesser known Breve tratado, by Fray Luis de Granada, one of the most important ascetic writers, Reviews 97 mystics and celebrated preachers in Spain during the sixteenth century. This is the first rhetorical treatise intended for missionaries converting people from the East and West Indies. Studies of other rhetorical guides are found in the chapters on Fray Diego Valadés (ch.3), Bartolomé de las Casas and José de Acosta (ch.4) and José de Arriaga (ch.6). The study of Bernardino de Sahagún's General History of New Spain is one of the most important chapters of this book. Sahagún's text inserts a considerable range of reflections of the spiritual conquest of New Spain, and also reveals to the western world a survey of all aspects of Mexican religion, society and natural philosophy. The Amerindian contribution to the rhetorical tradition in Latin America is found in the huehuehlahtolli. These were the speeches delivered by the learned men, "the speeches of the elders". Abbot also studies the use and influence of the European rhetorical tradition in the readings and interpretations by this historian of the huehuehlahtolli. Abbot provides a much needed comprehensive and detailed examination of the theories and practice of rhetoric during the sixteenth and seventeenth century in Spanish America. He is successful in two important tasks: finding the points of contact and rupture between the European rhetorical tradition and the new emerging ideas about writing, oratory, and theory in the New World, and linking rhetorical theory to experiential knowledge and cultural understanding provided in colonial texts. SANTA ARIAS Florida State University Robert Crawford ed., The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 259 pp. This collection of articles presents a counter-narrative to previous histories of English Studies that have ignored the crucial role of Scotland in the institutionalization of English as a modem discipline. As the title suggests, the twelve articles in the volume use a variety of approaches to develop the thesis that "English Literature as a university subject is a Scottish invention" and to ...

104 RHETORICA Some key concepts would perhaps have benefited from explicit, technical explanation. For example, the use of "hegemony" in Morris's book is disconnected from Antonio Gramsci's use of the same term. Another instance is "culture", which resonates with Lionel Trilling's meanings for this term, but, at times, seems like a synonym for ideology. In addition to references to "collective memory", Morris distinguishes "cultural memory" from "public memory", by remarking, "whereas cultural memory reflects the particularized world view and ethos of the members of a particular culture, public memory is perhaps best conceived as an amalgam of the current hegemonic bloc's cultural memory and bits and pieces of cultural memory that members of other cultures are able to preserve and protect" (p. 26). Sinners, Lovers and Heroes will be useful to scholars interested in the rhetoric, public argument, public memory, American studies, and, especially, the legacy of Abraham Lincoln's public image. LESTER C. OLSON University of Pittsburgh Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde, eds., Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time: A Reader (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) xxiii + 406 pp. Like the recent Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition by Kathy Eden, Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time marks another attempt at a rhetorical Anschluss, annexing rhetoric . to hermeneutics in an apparent attempt to make rhetoric look more philosophical, for instance, by pointing to Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. In fact, two of Gadamer's own essays on rhetoric appear in the Jost and Hyde collection. While the writers within the collection draw many analogies between rhetoric and hermeneutics, hardly anyone obtains any definitional precision about the pairing. Reviews 105 On the other hand, the Jost and Hyde volume seeks to be what Eden's book avoids—concerned with the present, as conveyed by the prepositional phrase in the title, "in our time", and explicitly with politics: "Our very being-in-the-world is inseparably hermeneutical and rhetorical in complex ways and...a multi-faceted speaking as well as listening constitutes our situation. Our own time is an epoch of corporate capitalism and technologism, of vulgarization and breakdown. But it is also a time of deep reflection on linguistic interpretation: on persuasion, 'conversion' across paradigms or worldviews, propaganda, and more invidious forms of deception and power, as well as on forms of the electronic word and the new multimedia. It is, accordingly, a time in which we need both to listen to and to discuss what Gadamer calls the 'deep inner convergence' between rhetoric and hermeneutics" (p. xvi). First, "our" turns out to be some amorphous, underdetermined "everyone", and despite the implicit "critique" of "corporate capitalism" in the passage above, Jost and Hyde never get near the topic again, except to get away from it. The slide happens but a page later: "The task at hand now includes identifying hermeneutics (in its modern forms) as a further counterpart to rhetoric and rhetoric to hermeneutics and seeing both as features or dimensions of all thought and language, not only as the special methods or abilities of political praxis" (p. xvii). Before dealing with any concrete issues of political praxis, they widen the aperture of their project to "all thought and language", and thus sidestep the part of the "all" that might have brought them in contact with any logical definition of "politics", or with concrete historical events in North American party politics, for instance. The rhetoric that goes on in the streets, the deception—what the Greeks called the pseudos—the advertising, the propaganda, the double-talk, the exercises of political esotericism, the kind of interpretive practice that produces The Bible Code, all the "ugly" manifestations of rhetoric that are its life blood, hold almost no interest in the context of the book under review. (For the importance, even primacy, of the "ugly", see Slavo Zizek, in Slavo Zizek / F. W. J. von Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom / Ages of the World [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997] pp. 21-25). Jost and Hyde promote the lemony fresh side of rhetoric, the side most often seen in contemporary RHETORICA 106 accounts of what rhetoric accomplishes or can accomplish: "Rhetoric...helps promote civic engagement and...

Short Reviews Cheryl Glenn, Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997) xii + 235pp. Glenn's purpose in Rhetoric Retold is feminist and cartographic: to remap the history of rhetoric by putting female rhetoricians and rhetorical practices solidly on the map. She challenges patriarchal rhetorical history at the center by including the voices of women who practiced rhetoric from the margins. Her hope is to revitalize "rhetorical theory by shaking the conceptual foundations of rhetorical study itself" (p. 10). Glenn's method derives from historiography, feminism, and gender studies. She uses "resistant readings...of the paternal narrative" and "female-authored rhetorical works" as well as "broad definitions of rhetoric" (p. 4). Her rationale for subject selection appears in Chapter One. Thereafter, she develops each historical chapter by overviewing cultural conditions of the period, describing women's place in those worlds, sketching the nature of patriarchal rhetoric at the time, then presenting the rhetorical activities of some exceptional women who were able to speak and write from the margins. Whenever she can, she highlights significant "points of contact" across all of the subjects she considers. Chapter Two examines pretheoretical sources of rhetorical consciousness in ancient Greece. Her reading of Sappho and female Phythagorians (Theano, Phintys, Perictyone) present rhetorical avenues that mainstream tradition never explored. She details public (argumentative) rhetoric (Corax, Gorgias, and Isocrates), then treats Aspasia as a silent heartbeat at the center of Pericles's intellectual circle. Aspasia was as likely a source of inspiration to Socrates and Plato as was Diotima. Glenn examines© The International Society for the History of Rhetoric, Rhetorica, Volume XVII, Number 1 (Winter 1999) 89 RHETORICA 90 tradition (Cicero and Quintilian), challenging this tradition with voices from the margins. Here we meet Vergima, Cornelia, Hortensia, Amasia Senta, Gaia Afrania, Sempronia, Fulvia, and Octavia. In Chapter Three Glenn details Christian cultural dynamics, calling the Bible the "ur-text of history, wisdom, and doctrine" (p. 75). She discusses inheritance laws, conceptions of women's bodies, the theoretical equality of men and women in the eyes of Christ, yet the practical inequality of doctrine and of Christian institutional piety. Examining representations of women in medieval literature (imaginative, Marian, inspirational), Glenn contends that women never received "the full range of human feelings or characteristics" (p. 86). Women appear as inferior to rational men, some of whose (Augustine, Jerome) rhetorical practices (ars poetica, ars dictaminis, ars praedicandi) Glenn treats next in some detail. She shows how a small group of religious women achieved some release from the cultural hold, such as Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, whose unusual rhetorical practices Glenn tells in illuminating detail. In Chapter Four Glenn overviews the general nature of Renaissance culture, tracing the patriarchal bias of laws, the nature of women's work both outside and inside the home, the inferiority of women's bodies when compared to men's, and more. She situates classical and Christian humanism, showing the usefulness of humanistic education in society and religious life. Some special English women, according to Glenn, received humanistic training, and she traces their (modest) literary accomplishments. She contrasts these women to the fake representations of women in literature; some women appear overly assertive (Edmund Spenser's Britomart, Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth), while others appear willfully disobedient (Juliet, Desdemona, the Duchess of Malfi). Such images reinforced women's exclusion from the public world of traditional Ciceronian rhetorical practice, though the entry of educated women became more probable as rhetoric and poetics converged in early English rhetorics that focused on style and eloquence. Glenn shows how three exceptional woman each used their own versions of rhetorical eloquence to make an impact on the public Reviews 91 from the margins—Margaret More, Anne Askew, and Queen Elizabeth I. In Chapter Five Glenn stresses the performative value of her project: the "promise that rhetorical histories and theories will eventually (and naturally) include women" (p. 174). She presents "four ways...[to] work together to realize...[these] performative...goals": we must recognize our common ground, "explore various means of collaboration", reevaluate the notion of "silence", and recognize the unlimited opportunities for research in this area (p. 174-78). This was a difficult...

RHETORICA 108 from "the people", the tabloids, the dirty political infighting. Rhetoric awaits its Disraeli who can persuade the appropriate personages to bring rhetoric back to the life that damaged it in the first place, the life that is its life, for better or worse or otherwise. BRUCE KRAJEWSKI Laurentian University Craig Waddell, ed., Landmark Essays on Rhetoric and the Environment, Landmark Essays 12 (Mahwah, NJ: Hermagoras Press-Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998) xix + 239 pp. The eleven essays reprinted in this collection map the ecotone where rhetoric and environmental politics meet. Though individual essays resist easy classification, the collection reveals important focuses of work in this sub-field. Several essays trace and evaluate characteristic lines of argument in environmental policy debates. In the lead essay, for instance, Robert Cox glosses Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's account of the locus of the irreparable in The New Rhetoric, drawing out the strategic and ethical implications of, among other deployments of this locus, "forewarnings" of irreparable damage to the environment. Jonathan Lange analyzes five characteristics of the "logic of interaction" between the timber industry and environmentalists engaged in the debate over protecting Northern spotted owl habitat in old growth forests. Other essays study (mis)constructions of audience. Craig Waddell argues that Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb failed to "reconstitute" its audience because it did not articulate "a more comprehensive [ecocentric] framework" to replace egocentric and anthropocentric ethical frameworks (p. 68), while Tarla Rai Peterson and Cristi Choat Horton study ranchers' sense of stewardship for the land "to show how communication that responds attentively to an audience's perspective can assist in retrieving potential points of affiliation among diverse groups" (p 168). Reviews 109 Still other essays focus on the ethos of environmental advocates. M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer consider the charge of hysteria lodged against Rachel Carson and other environmentalists, arguing that the "environmentalist and the nature writer, in becoming 'voices for the earth'...represent the return of the repressed, the coming into consciousness of that which, having been avoided for far too long, has created an illness within the mind-body system of earthly existence" (p. 37). However, they note that "like any political position, environmentalism seeks to restrict access to certain subject positions just as surely as it opens access to others" (p. 50), and like Peterson and Horton, they warn against this exclusionary tendency. Finally, some essays view environmental debates through wide cultural lenses. For instance, Christine Oravec argues that the debate over damming Hetch Hetchy valley in Yosemite National Park was settled not so much by the explicit arguments of the conservationists and preservationists engaged in the debate as by the alignment of conservationists' arguments with "prevailing presumptions concerning the nature of the 'public' and its relationship to the natural environment", presumptions characteristic of early twentieth-century Progressive politics (p. 17). All of these essays conceive of environmental rhetoric in deliberative terms, focusing on conflicts over public policy (individual essay titles bristle with terms such as "controversy", "confrontation", "conflict", "dispute", and "opposition" or evoke contentious deliberative situations). Accordingly, this collection provides an excellent introduction to rhetorical studies of environmental policy debates. But readers should keep in mind that there are more discourses on earth than can be studied from any one perspective. The disciplinary rhetoric of environmental sciences and the epideictic rhetoric of much American nature writing are just two of the landscapes that lie for the most part beyond the bounds of this particular map. H. Lewis Ulman The Ohio State University ...

Reviews 433 the starting points for quite some time for those interested in other rhetorical traditions. Although Kennedy validates these traditions by placing them under the aegis of Greco-Roman rhetoric, this still constitutes a step forward in our study of world rhetorics, and we can be grateful to him for taking this first, hardest step. Mary Garrett Ohio State University Andrea A. Lunsford ed., Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995). Inscribing women into canons of writing from which they had long been excluded by a male-dominated canon-forging orthodoxy, telling (as a consequence of these inscriptions) new stories, "her" stories as distinct from his-stories, about past traditions of writing and speaking, pointing out what Carol Gilligan (1982) calls the "different voice" of women, those distinctive formal characteristics that distinguish "feminine" from "masculine" uses of language, all those have been standard goals of feminist criticism of the past two decades. In pursuing those goals, Reclaiming Rhetorica positions itself in relation to significant feminist critical projects such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's path-breaking The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) or Elaine Showalter's The New Feminist Criticism (1985) Most of the essays in the volume do, indeed, engage in reclamations of female voices and in the inscriptions of those voices in canons of writing and speech. Susan Jarratt and Rory Ong reconstruct the figure of Aspasia, who had been a teacher of rhetoric in classical Greece, from the fragmentary references to her in male-authored texts, and in the course of doing so, offer a compelling reading of the way in which Aspasia, as represented in Plato's Menexenus, both "exceeds the gender boundaries of Greek citizenship" that excluded women from oratory and is used to 434 RHETORICA "ventriloquize the very principles of exclusion that she challenges" by insisting on the myth of autochtonous birth of the Athenian citizen, which divests women of their reproductive role in the polis (pp. 19-20). Cheryl Glenn argues for redefining the English canon to include The Book of Margery Kempe on the basis not of the gender of its author but of her innovative contribution to narrative technique: the invention of a form in which "female spirituality, selfhood and authorship" converge (p. 59). Some of the essays in the volume underscore the formal and political contributions made by women whose place in the canon has already been recognized such as Marie de France, the author of a manual of ethical instruction for medieval women, Mary Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller, pioneers of women's rights, and twentieth-century intellectuals such as Suzanne Langer and Julia Kristeva. Others carve out a space for the discursive and social achievements of African American public women whose voices had largely been silenced, such as Ida B. Wells, a liberated slave who became a journalist and mounted a verbal anti-lynching campaign (p. 177) and Soujoumer Truth, who "commanded large crowds in an effort to arouse public action on the two most crucial political and social issues of her day -slavery and suffrage" (p. 227). Other essays in the volume address another common concern of feminist criticism: the existence of a distinctive feminine or female mode of language or vision of language. Thus C. Jan Swearingen rereads Plato's Symposium to reconstruct and reclaim Diotima's view of language as animated by "feeling, desire, love, and pity", a view that she identifies with recent insights into "women's ways of knowing" that stand in stark contrast to univocal, masculinist visions of language that have dominated Western thought since Plato (pp. 48-49). Christine Mason Sutherland shows how the rhetorical theory of the seventeenthcentury rhetorician Mary Astell diverges from that of her sources (Lamy and Descartes) in its emphasis on "caring", which is said to be "typical to women's approach to ethics", and its insistence on conversation rather than agonistic confrontation which recent research has associated with a "masculine epistemology" (pp. 113-15). In a similar vein, in her discussion of Mary Wollstonecraft, Jamie Barlowe underscores the latter's belief in Reviews 435 "dialogue" as a discursive form that is appropriate for achieving "feminist aims of effecting changes...

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

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

Reviews 339 preachers' macaronic compositions, recently well-documented by Siegfried Wenzel. All ingeniously augment the means of sharing Christian wisdom among the laity. Georgiana Donavin Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, The Empty Garden: the Subject of Late Milton (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992) xvii + 515 pp. Sharon Achinstein Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994) xv + 272 pp. Hardly any student of modem American politics would fail to agree that the mass media—specifically television—play a key role in structuring political discourse. Whether or not individual politicians and their media representatives actually formally study mass communication, all know the forms, demands, and constraints of television. Failure to master the medium usually results in failure to win an election or carry the day in a discussion of public policy. Further, the medium creates a series of expectations in viewers, expectations that must be met or consciously manipulated and subverted by any political writer or speaker. Now, imagine reading a scholarly book on modem political discourse that may mention television but does not examine its characteristics as a medium or the viewing habits or demographics of the audience, and yet claims to study "media". Such is frequently the situation in current studies of the literature, politics, and political discourse of seventeenth-century England. The word "rhetoric" often appears in titles, and indeed in authors' arguments, but, on inspection, a reader hoping to find discussion of the ars bene dicendi as an epistemic approach to structuring political language will be disappointed. Too often "rhetoric" simply becomes a synonym for "language" or "trope", rather than a means of inquiry into the workings of argument. 340 RHETORICA The reasons for scholarly attention to political language in the period are manifest. The century claims what for many historians is the first modern revolution, complete with a nascent public sphere, people beginning to perceive themselves as public actors, and, most importantly, a free press that empowered both. It claims many writers engaged in pamphleteering who at any time would rank with the best in the language, from William Prynne and John Lilbume to Thomas Hobbes and John Milton. Milton's stature as a poet guarantees attention to his political prose and to the politics of his great poems. Moreover, without question, the educational practice of the century, beginning in the grammar school, was relentlessly rhetorical. Rhetoric thus saturated seventeenth-century writers and readers as much as television does the modern political nation. The period is thus ripe for rhetorical analysis. I examine here two recent exemplars of Milton studies that illustrate the gulf between "rhetorical study" and knowledge of rhetoric that pervades current seventeenth-century scholarship. Both books have been extensively, and largely favorably, reviewed in reputable journals. One received the James Holly Hanford Award from the Milton Society of America as the best book on Milton published in 1994. Both are learned and engaging, and both offer valuable insights into Milton's work. But the arguments of both are compromised by the writers' apparent unfamiliarity with the entire field of the history of rhetoric. In one case, the author's knowledge of rhetoric is limited; in the other, the author lacks any comprehension of rhetorical theory, principle, or practice. My purpose here is to highlight the ways in which this blind spot affects the theses of these two otherwise powerful books, and to call attention to two recent studies of other periods that admirably achieve, through their grasp of rhetoric, what the Miltonists attempt. In The Empty Garden, Ashraf H. A. Rushdy offers a study of the Jesus of Paradise Regained as founder of a religious culture that offers a "new way of knowing and a new way of being" (xi) through self-knowledge gained by "reading", broadly defined as interpreting both the written word and the "text" of the world. Through his creation of Jesus, and his contrast of that Jesus to the Samson of the companion work Samson Agonistes, Milton becomes Reviews 341 a powerful cultural critic, ultimately arguing that the relationship between self-knowledge and self-representation may best be negotiated through politics. As Rushdy makes abundantly clear in his first chapter, "'Confronting the Subject: The Art of...

Reviews 329 communicating what he had to say to his various audiences. For this reason Anderson is also right in insisting on the use of ancient rhetorical theory and practice in the original languages. I would add that further help may be gained from the commentaries of the fathers of the Church and those later writers who were more familiar with rhetoric than most of use are, e.g. Melanchthon or the Jesuits, and also from modem rhetoric. In addition to a select bibliography and full indices, there is a useful, select glossary of Greek rhetorical terms (pp. 259-302 and 303-14). This is a most welcome contribution to the debate which has suffered a great deal from various kinds of confusion, a book itself well-planned and clearly argued, offering a good deal of help to those who are interested in this controversial subject. It is important because it also raises some general questions as regards the possibilities and limits of rhetorical criticism, and while I disagree with the author on a number of points, I do not hesitate to recommend it to the critical reader. C. Joachim Classen Kristoffel Demoen, Pagan and Biblical Exempla in Gregory Nazianzen. A Study in Rhetoric and Hermeneutics, coll. Corpus Christianorum, Lingua Patrum, 2 (Tumhout: Brepols, 1996) 498 PP· Cet ouvrage a parfaitement sa place dans la collection prestigieuse du Corpus Christianorum, non seulement parce qu'il y côtoie l'admirable Corpus Nazianzenum, mais parce qu'il fait progresser de façon décisive la connaissance des oeuvres de Grégoire de Nazianze et de sa manière de composer. Il comporte deux grands ensembles, un exposé constitué de deux parties, et un répertoire (p. 325-458). Il s'agit d'une analyse rhétorique de Vexemplum, qui va donc au delà du procédé stylistique, pour l'étudier comme moyen de persuasion. Cela implique une enquête sur la tradition rhétorique dont Grégoire est tributaire, ainsi que l'examen des jugements explicites et sous-jacents portés sur les 330 RHETORICA vecteurs des deux courants culturels que fait se rencontrer "le Théologien", l'hellénisme et ses (xûôoi, le christianisme et la Bible. Le livre est issu d'une Dissertation doctorale présentée à l'Université de Gent (Gand) en février 1993. L'introduction part de l'attitude ambiguë de Grégoire à l'égard de la tradition classique, pour esquisser une idée qui prendra toute sa force au terme de l'ouvrage: voulant rivaliser avec les écrivains non chrétiens, Grégoire sépare l'hellénisme de la religion; cette conception restrictive lui donne le moyen de reconquérir l'hellénisme (après la tentative anti-chrétienne de l'empereur Julien); K. Demoen illustre cette reconquête par l'usage rhétorique d'exemples pris dans la mythologie, dans l'histoire et dans la Bible. Les éléments de l'étude sont de nature narrative. Les sources, du côté grec, sont la mythologie, les légendes, l'histoire, les fables et, par ailleurs, les récits bibliques (épisodes historiques de l'Ancien Testament, paraboles du Nouveau Testament). Ne sont retenues que les "histoires" qui ont une fonction exemplaire. Dès le début est proposée une définition du παράδειγμα, distingué de μεταφορά, παραβολή, γνώμη, σύγκρισις, définition élaborée à l'aide des théories antiques analysées dans le premier chapitre (p. 33-50): "l'évocation d'une histoire (de la Bible ou de la tradition païenne) qui s'est réellement produite ou qui n'est pas arrivée, dont la matière ressemble ou est liée au sujet traité, qui est associée implicitement ou explicitement à ce sujet comme argument (preuve ou modèle) ou comme ornement, et qui prend la forme d'une narration, de la mention d'un nom, ou d'une allusion" (p. 25). Le corpus est fait principalement des poèmes de Grégoire, très hétérogènes, les oeuvres en prose intervenant surtout à titre d'illustration ou de confirmation. L'entreprise se situe (p. 26) dans la perspective érudite de la Συναγωγή; kai; έξήγησις de Cosmas de Jérusalem, scholiaste du VIIIe si...

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

RHETORICA 336 Mark D. Johnston, The Evangelical Rhetoric of Ramon Hull: Lay Learning and Piety in the Christian West Around 1300 (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) xii + 274 pp. This book continues the author's already distinguished investigations into Ramon Llull's theories on language. While Johnston's previous work The Spiritual Logic of Ramon Llull (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) focuses on Llull's argumentative methods for justifying medieval Catholicism, his recent book articulates lullian principles of eloquence. The Evangelical Rhetoric of Ramon Llull demonstrates Llull's significant contribution to the field of rhetoric: the innovative use of his Great Art as an inventional tool. With fine organization, Johnston evokes a wide variety of lullian texts coalescing in a theory of rhetoric. The first three chapters outline Llull's premises for effective speech. Chapter 1 summarizes the heuristic method of the Great Universal Art of Find Truth, from which discourse proceeds. The Great Art employs an elaborate system of comparison, relying on nine letters of the alphabet—B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I and K—to symbolize absolute and relative principles, concepts and questions for discovery. When combined, these letters yield knowledge of divine truth which can illuminate a variety of arts, in this case, Christian wisdom for rhetoric. Like Augustine, who declares charity the ultimate end of reading and preaching, Llull calls theological understanding the end of speech whose material derives from the Great Art. Chapter 2 depicts Llull's vision of divine truth, a picture of interconnected creation, described in a representational language which correlates words and things. Chapter 3 discusses Llull's epistemology of resemblances in which humans, participating in God's universe, observe, think and finally speak according to the likenesses of creation. The middle section of the book, chapters 4 through 9, specifies how Llull's premises apply to particular offices of rhetoric and highlight Llull's emphasis on beauty, order and propriety. Finally, chapter 10 takes up Llull's sermons and brings the organization of the book full-circle by demonstrating Reviews 337 how the Great Art provides the heuristic for preaching material. The Liber de praedicatione reviews the Great Art; the Liber de virtutibus et peccatis employs the combinatory process in the Great Art to produce sermons. The concluding chapter introduces a polemic, so eloquent and compelling on the pertinence of Johnston's study, that this reader wished the argument had been dispersed throughout. Here, Johnston differentiates his own view of Llull from those who imagine him as either an inspired saint or a cutting-edge academic. While emphasizing Llull's contributions, Johnston repudiates claims to holy uniqueness in lullian rhetorical theory because of the preponderance of allusions to both classical and medieval lore. Moreover, exposing the narcissism in certain scholars' perceptions of Llull as an avant garde professor, Johnston reminds his readers of Llull's antipathy to the schools. Since Johnston's readers include those "unfamiliar with [Llull's] work, but interested generally in medieval intellectual or cultural history, and especially in the arts of eloquence" (10), it would have been helpful to describe, test and eschew pervading scholarly attitudes toward Llull throughout. Johnston, on the other hand, presents evidence that Llull was a Majorcan courtier, "born again" into the religious life and propelled into contemplation and study by his desire to convert. Having little background in language studies, Llull probably sought local tutoring and lectures in Paris in order to read divine writings and develop preaching skills. This exposure to learning allowed Llull to invoke well-known rhetorical authorities such as Cicero. However, Llull departed Paris with a distrust for scholasticism, which in his view, obscurely analyzes and thus fragments the picture of an integrated, unified creation. Throughout, Johnston observes Llull's differences with scholastic thought and practice. For instance, he notes Llull's failure to question the efficacy of language, an enduring issue for medieval schoolmen, but not for Llull, who relied on speech for evangelizing. Johnston concludes that "[Llull's] general regard for rhetoric as a means of fostering community in human society is one of the features that most distinguishes his accounts of eloquence from conventional Scholastic doctrines" (27). RHETORICA 338 Johnston establishes his...

SHORT REVIEWS Christopher Lyle Johnstone, Theory, Text, Context: Issues in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996) 196 pp. In many ways, this collection of articles on Ancient Greek rhetoric in English offers the best of what contemporary historiography and rhetorical theory have to offer. Rather than reading texts in isolation, or presuming interpretive clarity, these articles interpret their objects in relationship to the social, political, and even physical circumstances that influenced their production. Taken together, they summarize much of what is new in ancient rhetoric. Christopher Lyle Johnstone introduces the collection by rehearsing current rhetorical historiography, attributing the term rhetorike to Plato but acknowledging the creative significance of a set of prototypical rhetorical conditions such as the rise of democratic institutions, the spread of literacy, and the concomitant transformation of mythos into logos which made abstract categorization possible. These social, political, and intellectual conditions nurtured rhetoric as a distinct discipline. Johnstone's perspective clearly differentiates this work from earlier creation narratives that attributed rhetoric to the spontaneous genius of specific individuals. Continuing this line of reasoning, the first article, one of Father Grimaldi's last, "How Do We Get from CoraxTisias to Plato-Aristotle in Greek Rhetorical Theory?" is an excellent overview of the sophists' contribution to the development of rhetoric, and thus a contribution to their ongoing rehabilitation. While Grimaldi acknowledges that his task is synthetic and therefore not highly original, the article is nevertheless thorough and cogent. The second article dedicated to sophistic origins, John Poulakos's "Extending and Correcting the Rhetorical Tradition: Aristotle's Perception of the Sophists" argues that Aristotle acknowledged the 227 RHETORICA 228 sophists for inaugurating the study of rhetoric but went to great lengths to correct the logical and linguistic inadequacies that were the inevitable result of their imperfect epistemology. Thus he concludes that Aristotle followed Plato insofar as he critiqued the sophists but "marked out an independent path", for himself by including their efforts as among those founding the rhetorical tradition. In the third piece on the place of sophistry within the tradition, Schiappa argues for what he calls a "predisciplinary approach" to the study of the sophists, by which he means avoiding "vocabulary and assumptions about discursive theories and practice imported from the fourth century when analyzing fifth-century texts" (p. 67). He makes the case for rigorous historiography by rereading Gorgias's Helen in such a way as to prove that it "advanced the art of written prose in general, and of argumentative composition in particular" (p. 78) while in no way succumbing to the tendency to perceive the sophistic piece as somehow indicative of the philosophy/rhetoric split which was an intellectual artifact of later developments. Leaving the sophists but remaining firmly within the realm of current theoretical issues, Michael C. Leff questions the general applicability of Dilip Goankar's assertion that contemporary rhetorical theory differs from ancient theory in that it is hermeneutic rather than performative and dubious about the possibility of human agency fully explaining rhetorical decisions. Leff reads Thucydides's account of the Mytilene disaster as evidence that the ancients were, or at least Thucydides was, aware of how rhetorical discourse could be shaped by circumstances beyond participants' control. Leff ends his argument, however, by asserting that Thucydides' observations were intended to have a therapeutic effect in that "The readers of History...become better equipped to assume the role of agent, for they are better able to interpret that role not just at the moment of action but also from within an understanding of history" (p. 96). Christopher Lyle Johnstone's own noteworthy contribution combines archaeology with acoustics to challenge one of the idols of traditional rhetorical history. Whereas we have always argued that deliberative rhetoric must have played an integral part in Athenian democracy, Johnstone points out that we have never taken into account the physical circumstances of delivery in the open spaces of the ancient agoras. The Pynx, in particular, he argues, was constructed such that even under ideal climatic conditions, perhaps only "half of the 5000 Reviews 229 present could understand what speakers were saying" (p. 126). If this compelling argument is true, then we need to...

RHETORICA 232 James L. Kastley, Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodernism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), pp. vi + 293. At a time when so many are trying to "rethink" rhetoric by making up stories about "the sophists" or parroting de Man's version of Nietzsche, Kastley's book is most welcome. In it, we have a thoughtful and illuminating contribution to the conversation that needs to be promoted about the ways in which the past may meaningfully speak to the present. His list of "required reading" is not the standard one. The book begins with readings of the Gorgias and the Meno that present a Plato who was not an enemy of rhetoric but its subtlest theorizer. The two dialogues, Kastley argues, constitute a critique of the rhetoric of private interests. Socrates, by his practice of refutation (elenchos), gets us to see the inevitable entanglements with injustice and injury that ensnare anyone who engages in symbolic action in political concerns. Sophocles' Philoctetes and Euripides' Hecuba are then shown to address problems of the availability of audience, the crisis of trust, and the consequences of marginalization. In the second half of the book, Kastley reads Austen's Persuasion as an allegory confronting the lost public sphere of discourse, offering rhetoric not as a solution, but as a problem. He then presents critiques ("refutations") of Sartre's views in What is Literature? and, in one of the book's most successful chapters, of de Man's views on rhetoric. In his reading of de Man, he offers an adroit demonstration of the ways in which de Man's position is blind to the dangers of collapsing position to truth and of framing rhetoric in terms of cognition rather than action. The final chapter, "Rhetoric and Ideology," takes us to Kenneth Burke—partly by way of Lentricchia's misreading of him—and to an insightful reconsideration of the nature of ideology and of community that yields a vision of a rhetoric that can use the strategies of classical skepticism as critical devices to "expose the exercises and deformations of power operating as a set of structured relationships" (p. 257). Kastley's readings are not without problems. Not everyone will agree, for instance, that Gorgias (in Plato's dialogue) has the best interests of the community at heart (p. 35); and some may feel uncomfortable with Kastely's tendency to shape his expectations of Reviews 233 dramatic characters and explain their actions as though they were real people. The Socrates Kastley portrays seems less like the Socrates of Plato than that of Cameades's Academy. And if Persuasion shows us how, in the wake of social transformations, it became necessary for women to discover how to speak, cannot the same be said of men? On the other hand, Kastley's argument that Sartre quietly allows Kant in by the back door and his detailing of the paradoxical results of de Man's favoring knowledge over action are both persuasive. Even more impressive is the subtlety with which he thinks through the problems posed by post-Enlightenment thinking to reject the temptation to find some place to stand "outside the rhetorical flux" and move, rather, toward a world in which we act, toward a community that is pluralized, temporal, and a provisional form of sharing, where we might begin to wrestle with the injustice and injury that are inevitable, but not insurmountable. Kastley's "refutations" are, in the end, affirmations; and for those he is to be commended. THOMAS M. CONLEY University ofIllinois Gabriele Knappe, Traditionen der klassischen Rhetorik im angelsachsischen England (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 1996), xx + 573 pp. According to Gabriele Knappe, previous efforts to assess the knowledge, use, and function of classical rhetoric in Anglo-Saxon England have failed to distinguish between the tradition of ancient rhetoric proper and elements of rhetorical instruction taken over by grammarians. The goal of the former was the production of prose texts designed to have a specified effect on an audience, while the principal goal of the latter was the proper interpretation of texts and only secondarily their production. Systematic evaluation of all available evidence indicates little or no direct knowledge of...

In the late Renaissance in England and France women appropriated classical rhetorical theory for their own purposes, creating a revised version that presented discourse as modeled on conversation rather than public speaking. In Les Femmes Illustres (1642), Conversations Sur Divers Sujets (1680), and Conversations Nouvelles sur Divers Sujets, Dediées Au Roy (1684), Madeleine de Scudéry adapted classical rhetorical theory from Cicero, Quintilian, Aristotle, and the sophists to a theory of salon conversation and letter writing. In The Worlds Olio (1655), Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, feminizes rhetoric by analogies from women's experience and inserts women into empiricist rhetoric by assuming discourse based on conversation rather than public speaking. In Women's Speaking Justified (1667), Margaret Fell revises sermon rhetorics, claiming preaching for women, but preaching in private spaces, in the Quaker prophetic fashion. In A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1701), Mary Astell adapts Augustine, proposing a women's college to promote a "Holy Conversation", and a rhetoric of written discourse treating writer and reader as conversational partners. These women use categories of the ideal woman to contest the gendering of discourse in their culture, questioning "private" and "public" as defining terms for communication.

RHETORICA 230 unify. As in the past, he continues to argue for the multiple moments of composition theory. George Pullman Georgia State University Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 119 pp. Those interested in the evolution of particular discursive practices that helped shape antiquity, especially the theoretical relationship between reading and interpretation, will benefit from this study in locating classical antecedents that ally rhetoric and hermeneutics. Unlike most studies of hermeneutics that spring from the Germanic tradition of Schleirmacher and Dilthey or the recent perspectives of Gadamer or Riceour, this study prizes the rhetorical precedent of an ancient mode of reading, known as interpretatio scripti, as crucial to the development of the field study of hermeneutics. By tapping into this rhetorical tradition largely overlooked in philological studies, Eden historically discerns and synthesizes a convincing case for the recognition and study of interpretatio scripti as a meaning making agent common to both the rhetorical and hermeneutical enterprises that have gained renewed prominence in humanistic inquiry today. In what may be the most valuable portion of the book, the first chapters construct the significance of interpretatio scripti as a model of reading that Roman rhetoricians inherited—from the Hellenistic rhetorical tradition—as "a loosely organized set of rules for interpreting the written materials pertinent to legal cases" (p. 7). As a point of origin, Eden moves decisively to Cicero, particularly De inventione and De oratore, in contextualizing how transforming character of interpretatio scripti often complicates treatments of proof and style in his rhetorical manuals, and plays a deciding role in appropriating legal arguments between the intention (voluntas) and the letter (scriptum) of an author or text under scrutiny. Interpretation, to Cicero, is understood in terms of controversy; thus interpretation theory (and by later implication Reviews 231 hermeneutics) finds a habitual home in rhetorical theory. Eden notes that while Cicero was not the first one to do this, his work has enjoyed the widest reception and can be seen as a generative point from which to track the influence of interpretatio scripti in her book's subsequent chapters. Such a discursive heredity becomes convincing as Eden links the interpretive principles of interpretatio scripti to the classical arts of poetry and grammar as seen through Plato, Aristotle and Plutarch. The prerequisite study of grammar, in classic times, is seen to develop similar concerns as its rhetorical counterpart in the coordinating and complementary notions of decorum and oeconomia which prove crucial in "underlying the hermeneutical concept of contextualization, historical and textual, respectively" (p. 41). Eden extends her coverage of the influence of interpretatio scripti through the Christian appropriation of classical culture, in Basil, Paul and most notably in Augustine. Amidst this backdrop of Patristic hermeneutics, Eden achieves a fine sense of dialogue between the concepts of Cicero, Quintillian and Augustine, and accommodates both a spiritual and historical order that extends into the rehabilitating humanism of Erasmus. Though less substantial than the first part of the book, the final few chapters bring the selected work of Philip Melanchthon and Flacius's Clavis scripturae sacrae into the interpretive landscape as a whole. In the end, this book serves a vital role in establishing the credibility of classical scholarship in legitimizing what Ricoeur would call the hermeneutics of tradition. As a centerpiece in the debate between the role of equity and spirit in the ancient act of reading, interpretatio scripti emerges as a meaningful landmark in charting the never-ending task of interpretation, and suggests an expansion in the intellectual history of both hermeneutics and rhetoric. As an instalment in the Yale Studies in Hermeneutics, this book works an effective balance between written economy and great scholarly depth. Such a stylistic blend should provide ample access points for both experts and novices interested in theories of interpretation, antiquity and rhetoric. RICHARD A. MILLER Bowling Green State University ...

RHETORICA 236 Thomas P. Miller, The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces, (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1997), x + 345 pp. Thomas Miller's excellent work The Formation of College English examines a strand in the development of English studies—the civic domain of rhetoric—neglected in other important histories of the discipline: Gerald Graff's Professing English Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), Franklin Court's Institutionalizing English Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), and Robert Crawford's Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). In the role of respondent to the 1997 Conference on College Composition and Communication session "Octalog II: The (Continuing) Politics of Historiography", Miller stressed the "civic sense of the work that lies before us" as historiographers of the discipline of composition and rhetoric. In particular, he praised historical research based on a "civic philosophy of teaching that links critical understanding with collaborative action toward social justice" and applauded archival work "that take[s] up the project of reconstituting the experiences of those who have been erased from accounts of the dominant tradition." In The Formation of College English, Miller "takes up" the little examined "provincial traditions that introduced modem history, politics, rhetoric, literature, and science into the college curriculum as case studies of how the teaching of culture functions as a means of social reproduction and transformation" (p. 19). He offers a comprehensive and unique treatment of territory introduced in recent institutional accounts of the development of American classes in rhetoric/composition, including Nan Johnson's Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in American Colleges (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992) and Winifred Bryan Homer's Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric: The American Connection (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993). Miller asks "from a historical perspective, what then are the practical values of rhetoric and composition?" (p. 285). The answer: studying parallels between "historical situations" leads to Henry Giroux's conception of "teachers as transformative intellectuals" who strive for self-awareness and view "education as a public discourse" (p. Reviews 237 288). Beginning with an examination of the "civic domain, where rhetoric concerns itself with popular values in political action," Miller applies key concepts defining Antonio Gramsci's rhetorical theory ("civil society," "cosmopolitanism," "organic and traditional intellectuals") to his exploration of "how the humanities can prepare students to become productively involved in political debates over popular values in practical action" (p. 7). In the first chapter, Miller points to print economy and the resulting expansion of the reading public as the driving force responsible for effacing rhetoric: "Professors...de-emphasized the composition of public discourse and concentrated on teaching taste to adapt higher education to the mission of instilling a common culture in the reading public" (pp. 60-61). In chapter two, Miller examines the role of professors at the elite English universities, the "antiquarians who divorced the learned tradition from the needs of contemporary learners", in an attempt to preserve English culture against change (p. 64). Conversely, the utilitarian approach to education characteristic of the dissenting academies and subsequently the provincial colleges introduced modem culture into higher education. The new pedagogy at these institutions was based on the belief that "free inquiry would advance liberal reform, economic progress, and rational religion" (p. 85). The next three chapters closely examine the development of the "new rhetoric" at: the Dissenting Academies, which encouraged students to assume a critical perspective on received beliefs; the provincial Scottish Universities, which reformed the university curriculum against a critical reexamination of classicism; and the colonial Irish "contact zones", where outsiders had to teach themselves the proprieties of English taste and usage. Miller's investigation of the classical tradition in Ireland, focusing on the elocutionary movement and English studies outside the university, represents a novel and fascinating contribution to rhetorical studies of this period. Miller devotes the following chapters to closely appraising the contributions to rhetorical theory and practice of perhaps the three most influential figures and movements of the period—Adam Smith and the rhetoric of a commercial society, George Campbell and the "science of man", and Hugh Blair and the rhetoric of belles lettres. In the final chapter, Miller examines the expansion of higher...

Abstract: Despite Joseph Priestley's contemporary importance, little has been written on his rhetoric, A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (1762). Most commentators group him with the other new rhetoricians Smith, Campbell, and Blair, ignoring the philosophical foundations as well as the political and educational practices that informed Priestley's rhetorical theory. Located within a larger context of reform and a specific rhetorical situation at Warrington Academy, Priestley's Lectures illustrate his attempt to establish rational argument as the most compelling way for Dissenters to argue for religious and civil liberty, a goal that clearly distinguishes Priestley from his Scottish contemporaries and that marks the source of his most original contributions to eighteenth-century rhetoric.