Rhetorica
218 articlesSeptember 1998
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Reviews 443 historians than for those studying the impact of rhetorical tradition, practice, or survival. Its lack of focus renders it uninviting, but its very specialized, well-documented articles have much to offer. Victor Skretkowicz University ofDundee Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle, Loyola's Acts: The Rhetoric of the Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) xv+274pp. In Loyola's Acts, Marjory O'Rourke Boyle demonstrates that Ignacio Loyola's account of his life is deeply influenced by the traditions and techniques of classical rhetoric. In doing so, she challenges "the premise of modern interpretation, which regards Loyola's life as "an autobiographical narrative" which is "a factually historical document" (p. 2). In Boyle's view, Loyola's Acts {Acta patris Ignatii) is far from an autobiography in the twentiethcentury sense of that term. The work is, rather, is an example of what Boyle calls "the rhetoric of the self", a variation of the classical genre of epideictic oratory. The epideictic character of the Acts determines the text: "Although epideictic rhetoric assumed the matters for praise or blame to be true, it could by the rules exploit the techniques of fiction, so that every detail was not necessarily factual" (p. 3). So it is with Loyola's life, a narrative that is morally true, but not necessarily empirically accurate. As epideictic rhetoric, rather than autobiography, the Acts is an exercise in praise and blame: praise of God's glory and condemnation of Loyola's vainglory. Although the title suggests that Loyola's Acts is about Loyola's life, Boyle's book is more properly about Renaissance rhetoric broadly conceived. Boyle shows how Loyola's narrative is dependent upon the writings of Cicero, Quintilian, Augustine, Petrarch, Erasmus, and the many other authorities of the rhetorical culture of early-modern Europe. So great is this dependence that Boyle maintains "Loyola's piety is established in the renaissance revival of that rhetorical culture" (p. 9). To support this contention she advances an impressive display of evidence from Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance theological, 444 RHETORICA philosophical, and literary sources together with contemporary scholarship from the corresponding disciplines. This display of erudition is all the more remarkable because it is presented with concision and clarity. These are two qualities often absent from current humanistic prose but, as Boyle reminds us, both explicitly and by example, clarity is a virtue of classical rhetoric (p. 5). One result of Boyle's broad intellectual and cultural approach to the Acts is that Loyola himself seems removed from his own narrative. This is a necessary consequence of analyzing the Acts as rhetoric rather than autobiography. Boyle contends that Loyola refuses a "prominent authorial role" and is therefore quintessentially a type rather than an individual (pp. 148-49). This preference for the archetypal over the individual facilitates Loyola's presentation of the broad epideictic themes of praise and blame. Thus in each of the four chapters ("The Knight Errant," "The Ascetic," "The Flying Serpent," and "The Pilgrim"), Boyle considers the qualities and circumstances of Loyola's character that offer edification for readers of the Acts. As instances of epideictic rhetoric the episodes depicted do not so much represent a literal account of events in Loyola's life as they present opportunities for demonstrative oratory. A good deal of recent scholarship has illuminated the ways in which rhetoric has exercised a formative influence on Renaissance literature. Although much has been done in this area, we probably still do not fully appreciate just how pervasive was rhetoric's role in the Renaissance. Boyle has certainly advanced this appreciation by offering a rhetorical reading of a work presumed to be autobiographical, a reading informed by the work's cultural and intellectual context, rather than by critical standards derived from other genres and other eras. Moreover, Boyle demonstrates the value of recognizing epideictic rhetoric for what it is, a moral voice which spoke forcefully to antiquity and the Renaissance and, if we attempt to understand it, continues to speak to us today. Thus in Loyola's Acts, Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle presents an impressive addition to our understanding of rhetoric and literature in the Renaissance. Don Paul Abbott University of California, Davis ...
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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...
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Reviews 441 discrepancy between ideal simplicity and actual practice, as for instance among the Byzantine iconoclasts who were also patrons of secular art. At the least, this study on the tensions between modes of discourse suggests interesting directions for further study. Jameela Lares University ofSouthern Mississippi Carole Levin and Patricia R. Sullivan eds, Political Rhetoric, Power, and Renaissance Women, (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1995) xiv + 293 pp. This is a collection of essays by different authors on women who either wrote against, or were victimized by, misogynists. It closes where it begins, with Carole Levin and Patricia Sullivan associating Hillary Clinton and four queens: Isabel, Catherine de Médicis, Elizabeth I and Mary II (pp. 7, 275-81). It is a connection made in other papers, but here it is supported by another between the Republican Rev. Pat Robertson and John Knox (pp. 4-5). Where these title essays are destined to be short-lived, the critical essays sandwiched between vary enormously in subject and approach, are learned, and bear re-reading. But as there is no apparent theme to the entire book, and the organization is simply chronological, I try to group the material here into meaningful clusters. Only Jane Donaworth, choosing examples from Madelaine de Scudéry, Margaret Cavendish, Margaret Fell, Bathusa Reginald Makin, and Mary Astell, especially in Part 2 of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1697), deals with the call for a revival of classical rhetorical education for women. Throughout the rest of this book "rhetoric" has other meanings. Daniel Kempton explores how Christine de Pizan teaches women to survive male oppression by 'dissimulation' or hypocrisy in Cité des Dames (1405) and Trésor de la Cité Des Dames. "Rhetoric" means "cant" or "slander" in the demonising of Anne Boleyn that Retha Wamicke describes; in the reiteration of allusions to women as breeding stock that Jo Eldrige Carney identifies in Shakespeare s Henry VIII; and in the representation of women as commodities to 442 RHETORICA be bought, sold, won or lost in the wagers of Puritan Whigs that Arlen Feldwick produces multiple examples of in the royalist Margaret Cavendish's comedies. In balancing the accusations of promiscuousness leveled by Jacobites against Mary II, or eulogies by her supporters, W. M. Spellman urges rejection of conventional seventeenth-century biographical material in order to reassess Mary's active political role in episcopal appointments. There are three essays on Elizabeth I. Ilona Bell contrasts de Feria's and de Quadra's accounts of Elizabeth's "rhetoric of courtship", comparing "Camden's retrospective vision of the virgin queen" (pp. 61, 77). Lena Cowen Orlin collects examples of Elizabeth's "spousal trope", of her "fictional motherhood" of her state and nobles, and her "trope of royal kinship" towards a "figurative family of European sovereigns" (pp. 89-95). Dennis Moore places Henry Howard's unpublished "Dutiful Defence of the Lawful Regiment of Women" (1590) into the context both of other defenses of female rule, and attacks upon it. Elaine Kruse compares propaganda against Hillary Clinton with that used against Catherine de Medicis after the 1572 massacre at Paris, and Marie Antoinette, all vilified on the grounds that they control power. And Elizabeth Mazola sees in Anne Askew's semiautobiographical Examinations her "larger project to educate her accusers about their epistemological faults" (p. 164). In the remaining essays the focus is not on rhetoric so much as on women and politics. Gwynne Kennedy describes Margaret Cavendish's reformist intentions in the History of the Life, Reign and Death of Edward II, where Cavendish repeatedly urges better government in practice rather than rebellion. The fly in the ointment is the Queen's vindictively cruel streak that manifests itself after she gains power: a "rhetorical marginalisation" that ' calls attention to...a disjunction in Isabel's characterization". There is also a separate note on Cavendish's authorship. And finally, Carole Levin describes two case histories of impersonation, the claim by Mary Boynton to be the daughter of Henry VIII and of Anne Burnell to be daughter of Philip II, reviewing the unfortunate consequences waiting those who almost talk their way into power. Although this book is in the SUNY series...
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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 ...
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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...
June 1998
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The Empty Garden: the Subject of Late Milton by Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, and: Milton and the Revolutionary Reader by Sharon Achinstein ↗
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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...
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RHETORICA 308 these six essays demonstrate the breadth, status, and versatility of rhetoric as a field of inquiry, study, and practice. In their introductory essay, Bennett and Leff remark, "Working quietly against the grain of a specialized [academic] culture, Murphy has opened a conduit between historical scholarship and the classroom" (4). A lengthy bibliography of Murphy's publications and work in progress, contributed by Winifred Horner, follows the Preface. Like Murphy's own contributions to the field, the essays collected in Rhetoric and Pedagogy successfully "hold historical scholarship and current pragmatic interests in a useful relationship to one another" (4). By their own interest in bridging historical scholarship and current teaching practice, the contributors to this Festschrift honor Murphy's legacy and continue his work. Cynthia Miecznikowski Sheard Ian Worthington ed. Persuasion: Greek Rhetoric in Action (London: Routledge, 1994) xi+277pp. This collection of twelve essays is interesting for three reasons. First, it constitutes one more sign that rhetoric is undergoing a veritable renaissance. Second, it shows that classics, a discipline once indifferent or hostile to the rhetorical enterprise, is now willing to join other disciplines in recognizing rhetoric as a major force in the shaping of western culture (nine of the contributors to this collection are classicists). Third, and most important, this volume does not concern itself with rhetoric in isolation. Rather, it examines its many intersections with such genres as politics, history, law, epic, tragedy, comedy and philosophy. The various treatments of the particular intersections combine traditional and new insights, and open the path to many provocative questions. Likewise, they generally invite reflection and criticism. More importantly, however, the collection as a whole points to a maximalist project that takes rhetoric beyond the orators, who practised it and the philosophers, who discussed Reviews 309 it. In so doing, it suggests that richer understandings can be had when placing rhetoric at the center of the Hellenic culture and crossing it with other genres (i.e. epic, tragedy, comedy, history). In this regard, the collection recommends itself in its entirety much more than any one of its chapters. The common framework that all contributors share comes from the distinction as well as the connection between rhetoric as the study, and oratory as the practice of persuasion. According to the editor, "The aim of this book is to bring together...discussions of the relationship of Greek oratory and rhetoric to a variety of important areas and genres, at the same time reflecting new trends and ideas now at work in the study of rhetoric" (ix). In the first chapter, "From orality to rhetoric: an intellectual transformation", Carol Thomas and Edward Webb trace the emergence of rhetoric along the orality-literacy continuum. Relying on but also refining the work of George Kennedy, Eric Havelock, Walter Ong and Thomas Cole, the authors point out that even though rhetoric benefited from the contributions of literacy it nevertheless retained its initial oral character. This chapter examines rhetoric along the registers of composition, delivery, and analysis, and pays attention to four features: uses, persuasive intent, magical aura, and the speaker's esteem. In chapter 2, "Rhetorical means of persuasion", Christopher Carey argues that of the three Aristotelian pisteis, pathos and ethos are more indirect while the third, logos, is a more direct means of persuasion. Carey illustrates the uses of pathos and ethos in the actual speeches of orators such as Demosthenes, Aeschines and Lysias, and concludes that Aristotle's distinctions are considerably "neater" than their actual use shows. In chapter 3, "Probability and persuasion: Plato and early Greek rhetoric", Michael Gagarin seeks to minimize the Platonic influence on our understanding of classical Greek rhetoric. His thesis is that Plato's widely accepted claim that the orators prefer probability over the truth is demonstrably wrong. Gagarin reviews the uses of probability arguments in the surviving speeches of orators and sophists and finds no evidence supporting Plato's claim. Gagarin's study shows convincingly that the orators generally value truth; however, they resort to probability when RHETORICA 310 the truth of a case is unknown, unclear, or subject to differing interpretations. In chapter 4, "Classical rhetoric and modem theories of discourse", David Cohen takes a brief but...
May 1998
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Theory, Text, Context: Issues in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory; Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception; Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodemism; Traditionen der klassischen Rhetorik im angelsachsischen England; The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces; Speaking for the Chief: Okyeame and the Politics of Akan Royal Oratory ↗
Abstract
Research Article| May 01 1998 Theory, Text, Context: Issues in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory; Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception; Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodemism; Traditionen der klassischen Rhetorik im angelsachsischen England; The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces; Speaking for the Chief: Okyeame and the Politics of Akan Royal Oratory Christopher Lyle Johnstone,Theory, Text, Context: Issues in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996) 196 pp.Kathy Eden,Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 119 pp.James L. Kastley,Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodernism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), pp. vi + 293.Gabriele Knappe,Traditionen der klassischen Rhetorik im angelsachsischen England (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 1996), xx + 573 pp.Thomas P. Miller,The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces, (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1997), x + 345 ppKwesi Yankah,Speaking for the Chief: Okyeame and the Politics of Akan Royal Oratory, African Systems of Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 194 pp. George Pullman, George Pullman Department of English, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia 30303-3083, USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Richard A. Miller, Richard A. Miller Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio 43403, USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Thomas M. Conley, Thomas M. Conley University of Illinois, 244 Lincoln Hall, 702 S. Wright Street, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Martin Camargo, Martin Camargo Department of English, 107 Tate Hall, University of Missouri Columbia, Missouri 65211, USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Kermit Campbell, Kermit Campbell Department of English, Parlin Hall, University of Texas, Austin, Texas 78712, USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Lynee Lewis Gaillet Lynee Lewis Gaillet Department of English, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia 30303-3083, USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1998) 16 (2): 227–242. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.2.227 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation George Pullman, Richard A. Miller, Thomas M. Conley, Martin Camargo, Kermit Campbell, Lynee Lewis Gaillet; Theory, Text, Context: Issues in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory; Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception; Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodemism; Traditionen der klassischen Rhetorik im angelsachsischen England; The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces; Speaking for the Chief: Okyeame and the Politics of Akan Royal Oratory. Rhetorica 1 May 1998; 16 (2): 227–242. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.2.227 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1998, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1998 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
March 1998
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Abstract
SHORT REVIEWS Christopher Lyle Johnstone, Theory, Text, Context: Issues in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996) 196 pp. In many ways, this collection of articles on Ancient Greek rhetoric in English offers the best of what contemporary historiography and rhetorical theory have to offer. Rather than reading texts in isolation, or presuming interpretive clarity, these articles interpret their objects in relationship to the social, political, and even physical circumstances that influenced their production. Taken together, they summarize much of what is new in ancient rhetoric. Christopher Lyle Johnstone introduces the collection by rehearsing current rhetorical historiography, attributing the term rhetorike to Plato but acknowledging the creative significance of a set of prototypical rhetorical conditions such as the rise of democratic institutions, the spread of literacy, and the concomitant transformation of mythos into logos which made abstract categorization possible. These social, political, and intellectual conditions nurtured rhetoric as a distinct discipline. Johnstone's perspective clearly differentiates this work from earlier creation narratives that attributed rhetoric to the spontaneous genius of specific individuals. Continuing this line of reasoning, the first article, one of Father Grimaldi's last, "How Do We Get from CoraxTisias to Plato-Aristotle in Greek Rhetorical Theory?" is an excellent overview of the sophists' contribution to the development of rhetoric, and thus a contribution to their ongoing rehabilitation. While Grimaldi acknowledges that his task is synthetic and therefore not highly original, the article is nevertheless thorough and cogent. The second article dedicated to sophistic origins, John Poulakos's "Extending and Correcting the Rhetorical Tradition: Aristotle's Perception of the Sophists" argues that Aristotle acknowledged the 227 RHETORICA 228 sophists for inaugurating the study of rhetoric but went to great lengths to correct the logical and linguistic inadequacies that were the inevitable result of their imperfect epistemology. Thus he concludes that Aristotle followed Plato insofar as he critiqued the sophists but "marked out an independent path", for himself by including their efforts as among those founding the rhetorical tradition. In the third piece on the place of sophistry within the tradition, Schiappa argues for what he calls a "predisciplinary approach" to the study of the sophists, by which he means avoiding "vocabulary and assumptions about discursive theories and practice imported from the fourth century when analyzing fifth-century texts" (p. 67). He makes the case for rigorous historiography by rereading Gorgias's Helen in such a way as to prove that it "advanced the art of written prose in general, and of argumentative composition in particular" (p. 78) while in no way succumbing to the tendency to perceive the sophistic piece as somehow indicative of the philosophy/rhetoric split which was an intellectual artifact of later developments. Leaving the sophists but remaining firmly within the realm of current theoretical issues, Michael C. Leff questions the general applicability of Dilip Goankar's assertion that contemporary rhetorical theory differs from ancient theory in that it is hermeneutic rather than performative and dubious about the possibility of human agency fully explaining rhetorical decisions. Leff reads Thucydides's account of the Mytilene disaster as evidence that the ancients were, or at least Thucydides was, aware of how rhetorical discourse could be shaped by circumstances beyond participants' control. Leff ends his argument, however, by asserting that Thucydides' observations were intended to have a therapeutic effect in that "The readers of History...become better equipped to assume the role of agent, for they are better able to interpret that role not just at the moment of action but also from within an understanding of history" (p. 96). Christopher Lyle Johnstone's own noteworthy contribution combines archaeology with acoustics to challenge one of the idols of traditional rhetorical history. Whereas we have always argued that deliberative rhetoric must have played an integral part in Athenian democracy, Johnstone points out that we have never taken into account the physical circumstances of delivery in the open spaces of the ancient agoras. The Pynx, in particular, he argues, was constructed such that even under ideal climatic conditions, perhaps only "half of the 5000 Reviews 229 present could understand what speakers were saying" (p. 126). If this compelling argument is true, then we need to...
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Abstract
RHETORICA 232 James L. Kastley, Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodernism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), pp. vi + 293. At a time when so many are trying to "rethink" rhetoric by making up stories about "the sophists" or parroting de Man's version of Nietzsche, Kastley's book is most welcome. In it, we have a thoughtful and illuminating contribution to the conversation that needs to be promoted about the ways in which the past may meaningfully speak to the present. His list of "required reading" is not the standard one. The book begins with readings of the Gorgias and the Meno that present a Plato who was not an enemy of rhetoric but its subtlest theorizer. The two dialogues, Kastley argues, constitute a critique of the rhetoric of private interests. Socrates, by his practice of refutation (elenchos), gets us to see the inevitable entanglements with injustice and injury that ensnare anyone who engages in symbolic action in political concerns. Sophocles' Philoctetes and Euripides' Hecuba are then shown to address problems of the availability of audience, the crisis of trust, and the consequences of marginalization. In the second half of the book, Kastley reads Austen's Persuasion as an allegory confronting the lost public sphere of discourse, offering rhetoric not as a solution, but as a problem. He then presents critiques ("refutations") of Sartre's views in What is Literature? and, in one of the book's most successful chapters, of de Man's views on rhetoric. In his reading of de Man, he offers an adroit demonstration of the ways in which de Man's position is blind to the dangers of collapsing position to truth and of framing rhetoric in terms of cognition rather than action. The final chapter, "Rhetoric and Ideology," takes us to Kenneth Burke—partly by way of Lentricchia's misreading of him—and to an insightful reconsideration of the nature of ideology and of community that yields a vision of a rhetoric that can use the strategies of classical skepticism as critical devices to "expose the exercises and deformations of power operating as a set of structured relationships" (p. 257). Kastley's readings are not without problems. Not everyone will agree, for instance, that Gorgias (in Plato's dialogue) has the best interests of the community at heart (p. 35); and some may feel uncomfortable with Kastely's tendency to shape his expectations of Reviews 233 dramatic characters and explain their actions as though they were real people. The Socrates Kastley portrays seems less like the Socrates of Plato than that of Cameades's Academy. And if Persuasion shows us how, in the wake of social transformations, it became necessary for women to discover how to speak, cannot the same be said of men? On the other hand, Kastley's argument that Sartre quietly allows Kant in by the back door and his detailing of the paradoxical results of de Man's favoring knowledge over action are both persuasive. Even more impressive is the subtlety with which he thinks through the problems posed by post-Enlightenment thinking to reject the temptation to find some place to stand "outside the rhetorical flux" and move, rather, toward a world in which we act, toward a community that is pluralized, temporal, and a provisional form of sharing, where we might begin to wrestle with the injustice and injury that are inevitable, but not insurmountable. Kastley's "refutations" are, in the end, affirmations; and for those he is to be commended. THOMAS M. CONLEY University ofIllinois Gabriele Knappe, Traditionen der klassischen Rhetorik im angelsachsischen England (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 1996), xx + 573 pp. According to Gabriele Knappe, previous efforts to assess the knowledge, use, and function of classical rhetoric in Anglo-Saxon England have failed to distinguish between the tradition of ancient rhetoric proper and elements of rhetorical instruction taken over by grammarians. The goal of the former was the production of prose texts designed to have a specified effect on an audience, while the principal goal of the latter was the proper interpretation of texts and only secondarily their production. Systematic evaluation of all available evidence indicates little or no direct knowledge of...
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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.
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The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces by Thomas P. Miller ↗
Abstract
RHETORICA 236 Thomas P. Miller, The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces, (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1997), x + 345 pp. Thomas Miller's excellent work The Formation of College English examines a strand in the development of English studies—the civic domain of rhetoric—neglected in other important histories of the discipline: Gerald Graff's Professing English Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), Franklin Court's Institutionalizing English Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), and Robert Crawford's Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). In the role of respondent to the 1997 Conference on College Composition and Communication session "Octalog II: The (Continuing) Politics of Historiography", Miller stressed the "civic sense of the work that lies before us" as historiographers of the discipline of composition and rhetoric. In particular, he praised historical research based on a "civic philosophy of teaching that links critical understanding with collaborative action toward social justice" and applauded archival work "that take[s] up the project of reconstituting the experiences of those who have been erased from accounts of the dominant tradition." In The Formation of College English, Miller "takes up" the little examined "provincial traditions that introduced modem history, politics, rhetoric, literature, and science into the college curriculum as case studies of how the teaching of culture functions as a means of social reproduction and transformation" (p. 19). He offers a comprehensive and unique treatment of territory introduced in recent institutional accounts of the development of American classes in rhetoric/composition, including Nan Johnson's Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in American Colleges (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992) and Winifred Bryan Homer's Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric: The American Connection (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993). Miller asks "from a historical perspective, what then are the practical values of rhetoric and composition?" (p. 285). The answer: studying parallels between "historical situations" leads to Henry Giroux's conception of "teachers as transformative intellectuals" who strive for self-awareness and view "education as a public discourse" (p. Reviews 237 288). Beginning with an examination of the "civic domain, where rhetoric concerns itself with popular values in political action," Miller applies key concepts defining Antonio Gramsci's rhetorical theory ("civil society," "cosmopolitanism," "organic and traditional intellectuals") to his exploration of "how the humanities can prepare students to become productively involved in political debates over popular values in practical action" (p. 7). In the first chapter, Miller points to print economy and the resulting expansion of the reading public as the driving force responsible for effacing rhetoric: "Professors...de-emphasized the composition of public discourse and concentrated on teaching taste to adapt higher education to the mission of instilling a common culture in the reading public" (pp. 60-61). In chapter two, Miller examines the role of professors at the elite English universities, the "antiquarians who divorced the learned tradition from the needs of contemporary learners", in an attempt to preserve English culture against change (p. 64). Conversely, the utilitarian approach to education characteristic of the dissenting academies and subsequently the provincial colleges introduced modem culture into higher education. The new pedagogy at these institutions was based on the belief that "free inquiry would advance liberal reform, economic progress, and rational religion" (p. 85). The next three chapters closely examine the development of the "new rhetoric" at: the Dissenting Academies, which encouraged students to assume a critical perspective on received beliefs; the provincial Scottish Universities, which reformed the university curriculum against a critical reexamination of classicism; and the colonial Irish "contact zones", where outsiders had to teach themselves the proprieties of English taste and usage. Miller's investigation of the classical tradition in Ireland, focusing on the elocutionary movement and English studies outside the university, represents a novel and fascinating contribution to rhetorical studies of this period. Miller devotes the following chapters to closely appraising the contributions to rhetorical theory and practice of perhaps the three most influential figures and movements of the period—Adam Smith and the rhetoric of a commercial society, George Campbell and the "science of man", and Hugh Blair and the rhetoric of belles lettres. In the final chapter, Miller examines the expansion of higher...
February 1998
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Abstract: Despite Joseph Priestley's contemporary importance, little has been written on his rhetoric, A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (1762). Most commentators group him with the other new rhetoricians Smith, Campbell, and Blair, ignoring the philosophical foundations as well as the political and educational practices that informed Priestley's rhetorical theory. Located within a larger context of reform and a specific rhetorical situation at Warrington Academy, Priestley's Lectures illustrate his attempt to establish rational argument as the most compelling way for Dissenters to argue for religious and civil liberty, a goal that clearly distinguishes Priestley from his Scottish contemporaries and that marks the source of his most original contributions to eighteenth-century rhetoric.
January 1998
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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.
June 1997
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Reviews 347 dimension often missing (a point mentioned by Trevor Melia in his erudite Comment). Here rhetoric reaches its fullest extension, becoming one with the domain of poetics - but that should come as no surprise to historians of rhetoric. Jean Dietz Moss Ronald H. Carpenter, History as Rhetoric: Style, Narrative, and Persuasion (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1995). Ronald Carpenter's History as Rhetoric argues that the stories of past events we call "history" draw upon the resources of rhetoric and can serve to shape a public understanding of the world. For postmodernists, this may not qualify as news, but Carpenter is no postmodernist. He relies pri marily on methods that would satisfy the most doctrinaire neoAristotelian or New Critic. He uses the tools of "scientific history" and traditional literary analysis to demonstrate the rhetoricality of history. The focus of Carpenter's book is on American historians of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Frederick Jackson Turner, Carl Becker, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Frank L. Owsley, and Barbara Tuchman. He attempts to show how each of these writers employs techniques of style and/or narrative in an effort to achieve "opinion leadership" beyond the realms of academic history. In the cases of Turner, Becker, Mahan, and Tuchman, Carpenter argues that they achieved an effective "rhetorical impress," making his case by means of close readings of their texts com bined with documentary evidence of the responses of actual readers. As his one negative example, Carpenter attempts to show that Frank Owsley's contribution to the agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand failed in its persuasive purpose. Carpenter devotes three chapters (one each on Turner, Becker, and Mahan) to the effects of style, and three chapters (another on Mahan, plus one each on Owsley and Tuchman) to techniques of narrative. In a long concluding chapter, he ranges more broadly across historical and popular writings and even motion pictures to show the pre science of Turner's frontier hypothesis in respect to twentieth-century American attitudes toward warfare, and to urge the need for alternatives to the frontiersman metaphor in war-related public discourse. Carpenter is at his best when working as a rhetorical analyst on archival materials. In his chapter on Frederick Jackson Turner, for exam- 348 RHETORICA pie, Carpenter traces the evolution of Turner's style, starting with analyses of primary sources from Turner's high-school and college days, and mov ing from those to the later professional writings. Drawing upon both clas sical and modem stylistic theory, Carpenter teases out the stylistic lessons Turner learned as a student and shows how those lessons found their way into his mature work. Carpenter then uses published reviews and corre spondence from readers to support an argument that, through the power of an "oratorical" style, Turner helped establish the frontiersman as an archetype of American culture. The chapter is a model of stylistic analysis and of cautiously developed argument. Equally interesting and somewhat more venturesome in interpreta tion is Carpenter's treatment of Barbara Tuchman's The Guns ofAugust and its role in John Kennedy's decision making during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. That Kennedy had drawn lessons from Tuchman was previously established, and here, as elsewhere in the book, Carpenter acknowledges his debts to other writers with meticulousness and grace. Carpenter's own purpose is to get at specific rhetorical techniques that might account for Tuchman's influence. He draws on Tuchman's correspondence with edi torial adviser Denning Miller in an effort to understand the compositional choices made in the writing of her book, and uses Hayden White's tropical theory to characterize the resulting narrative form. He simultaneously develops a speculative argument that draws on documentary evidence to show how specific narrative and stylistic features of The Guns of August might account for its role in Kennedy's thinking during the crisis. Throughout the chapter, Carpenter interweaves narrative, rhetorical analysis, theoretical explication, and the citation of documentary evidence in an admirably coherent and persuasive form. In the Tuchman chapter, Carpenter focuses on the rhetorical effect of a single work on an audience of one. In other chapters he examines rhetori cal effects wrought on audiences...
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344 RHETORICA and yet know all it takes to be American" (p. 245). In the Afterword, Clark and Halloran reiterate that one of their inten tions in editing this volume was to encourage more narratives of the histo ry of rhetorical theory and practice in the nineteenth century. In its poten tial for encouraging additional studies and new theories of cultural and public discourses, this volume has certainly taken a considerable step toward fulfilling its editors' hopes. Rosa A. Eberly Science, Reason, and Rhetoric, eds. Henry Krips, J. E. McGuire, and Trevor Melia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995). This volume of twelve essays and six comments treats a continuingly provocative subject. The book, the product of a conference convened to inaugurate a new program in the rhetoric of science at the University of Pittsburgh, offers some illuminating discussions of the varied appearances of rhetoric in the practice of science. That practice the editors describe carefully in the introduction to the volume. Describing three possible approaches to science, they seek to adopt the third: studies which would "stress the variety and complexity inherent in the production of scientific knowledge and also the attendant human contexts within which science is made and established." Thus they would accept even "accounts of science that are patently not rhetorical." The paths not chosen include a Gorgianic view—science, unable to produce truth, develops strategies of inquiry and uses rhetoric to construct tropes and audiences—and the view that science is sub specie rhetoricae. The book promotes reflection about the relation of rhetoric and science, but, unfortunately, it contains no index to facilitate the examination of concepts, terms, and names. My focus here will be on what seems to me to be the contribution of the volume to rhetoric of sci ence studies and on the problems presented by the ahistorical approach of some of the essays. From the editors' introduction, it should not be surprising that the nature and practice of science is the focus of the volume. The nature and practice of rhetoric as an art in itself, however, receives little attention. Most authors proceed as if rhetoric is simply a familiar term without a his tory or a discipline, but whose presence in science should be remarked upon. This curious approach is exemplified in the lead-off essay by Stephen Toulmin, the title of which, "Science and the Many Faces of Reviews 345 Rhetoric, would seem to promise to furnish the necessary background. In an attempt to bridge the gap envisioned by philosophers between the polar extremes of rhetoric and rationality, Toulmin turns to the Organon of Aristotle to illustrate the varied and overlapping types of reasoning prac ticed by human beings. But his account disappoints by its brevity. In his survey of the Organon, although he makes brief initial reference to the Analytics and the use of dialectical or topical reasoning in science, he then moves on to rhetoric, failing to treat Aristotle's conception of rhetoric or to remark on its relation to dialectic, a point that would seem to illuminate both science and a rhetoric of science. He intends, he says at the end of his seven-page essay, only a "'clearing away [of] the underbrush,"' making no attempt to discuss "questions about the rhetoric of science, or about scien tists as rhetors." J. E. McGuire and Trevor Melia, whose responses to Alan Gross's The Rhetoric of Science (1990) have appeared twice in Rhetorica, again reply neg atively to Gross's view that science is merely rhetorical invention and rep resentation, always relative to time and place (p. 77). Neither foundationalists nor nonfoundationalists, they position themselves as minimal real ists, seeing the actual practice of science as constitutive of science. They argue for a "proportionalizing rhetoric" (one that presumes a balance between representation and investigative practice) which would reflect "the proportionalizing strategies of scientific fallibilism" (p. 86). Several studies attend to sociological aspects of rhetoric. Trevor Pinch, in his analysis of the presentation of the Cold Fusion Process, demonstrates the importance of analyzing spoken rhetoric within its con text as a means to understanding both the presentation and reception of science by different audiences. Steve Fuller calls for...
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Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Transformations in the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric ed. by Gregory Clark, S. Michael Halloran ↗
Abstract
340 RHETORICA singularly persistent—and, one might add, singularly disturbing in some contexts—would be thoroughly vindicated. Whatever one's perspective, however, no one who is seriously inter ested in early modern culture, the history of pedagogy, or the history of ideas can afford to neglect this major contribution. Terence Cave Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Transformations in the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric, eds. Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993). Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran's point of departure for this important collection of essays is Gerald Graff's claim in Professing the University that the collegiate oratorical culture in the first half of the nine teenth century linked college curricula with the "literary culture outside" (pp. 2-3). Yet as their introduction makes clear, "the culture outside dur ing the early years of the nineteenth century was not 'literary' in our sense of the term, but oratorical. Its most prized symbolic work was that of the orator" (p. 3). In fact, "literary" is just one species of expertise that began to develop during the course of the century. As Clark and Halloran write in their introduction, "both the theory of rhetoric taught in the schools and the practice of public discourse sustained outside them were transformed during the nineteenth century from those of the neoclassical oratorical cul ture into those of the professional culture we see characterizing both col leges and communities by its end" (pp. 5-6). Clark and Halloran use the Burkean concept of transformation to describe the changes in nineteenthcentury oratorical culture, and though the historiographical stance of the introduction and the collective practices of the nine essays are somewhat at odds, this collection makes a significant contribution to scholarship describing the move from a collective moral authority to an individual authority which became grounded, ultimately, on notions of expertise. Further, the volume contributes to studies of collective reading and writ ing practices by positing "oratorical culture" as a concept beside "audi ence," "community," "rhetorical culture," and "public" to describe where and how groups analyze and produce discourses collectively. In "Edward Everett and Neoclassical Oratory," Ronald Reid argues that Everett's successes and failures "illustrate the nation's changing Reviews 341 oratorical culture" (p. 29) because "Everett exemplifies the declining repu tation of neoclassical oratory" (p. 30). Reid contends that Everett's reputa tion declined because he could not adapt the neoclassical oratory in which he was trained at Harvard to the needs of Jacksonian democracy. Thus Reid's essay replaces Clark and Halloran's introductory trope of transfor mation with that of paradigm shift—"the old oratorical culture" versus "the new oratorical culture." The tensions among different conceptions of permanence and change within Reid's essay force us to question whether oratorical culture, or any culture, is not always undergoing transforma tions and how serviceable the notion of "oratorical culture" is for studying change. The contradictory tendencies inherent in belletristic rhetoric are taken on more directly by Gregory Clark in his essay "The Oratorical Pulpit of Timothy Dwight." Clark's argument centers on how Dwight combined Scottish conceptions of taste with the Evangelical Calvinism of his infa mous grandfather, Jonathan Edwards. The combination, which resulted in a distinctive theory and practice Clark calls "oratorical poetics," empha sized "the force of the language of sentiment" in service to "sustaining a common moral and political culture" (p. 58). Though Dwight's lectures on rhetoric are lost, Clark uses edited editions of the lecture notes of two of Dwight's students to reconstruct what Dwight probably taught. Instruction, of course, raises the question of native ability and of who was authorized to instruct whom. Again, Clark emphasizes the contradictions inherent in belletrism and Enlightenment rhetorics of all kinds, and articu lates how those contradictions asserted themselves in early nineteenthcentury America in particular. Russel Hirst's essay on Austin Phelps, Bartlett Professor of Oratory in Andover Theological Seminary from 1848 to 1879, is a rich historical study of how individualism and collectivism manifested themselves in the orato ry and homiletic theory of a less-known figure in the history of rhetoric. Valuable as it is both historically and for...
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Abstract
Ever since Aristotle noted in the Rhetoric that, when fashionable, delivery ταύτό πoiήσϵι τη υποκριτική (has “the same effect as acting”; 1404a), classical and medieval rhetorical theorists fulminated against a crowd-pleasing oratory that had devolved into a theatrical spectacle more akin to that provided by the comic “actress” or the “effeminate” male. It cannot be coincidental, however, that, as the fifth rhetorical canon documents the theatricalization of rhetoric, it also offers companion testimony about the so-called emasculation of eloquence. In this essay, I examine the early belief that legal and religious rituals crossed gender lines into effeminacy at they same time that they crossed genre lines into theater. Close analysis suggests that the persistent association between theatrics, bad rhetoric, and effeminacy struck four different targets in a single, well-conceived blow: it marginalized women, homosexuals, bad oratory, and theater by casting certain types of speakers and speech as perverse and disempowered. Delivering delivery today thus entails exposing the ways in which early theorists themselves attempted to deliver it from evil.
March 1997
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Reviews 215 expediency. Jean-Louis Labarrière treats Aristotle's remarkable compari son of deliberative oratorical style to skiagraphia, or chiaroscuro, in painting. In Section IV, Alexander Nehamas, in an essay that first appeared in Rorty's 1992 collection on the Poetics, writes on pity and fear in the Rhetoric and Poetics, while André Laks (following influential essays by G. E. R. Lloyd, J. Lallot, and I. Tamba-Mecz and Paul Veyne) attempts a unifying interpretation of Aristotle's theory of metaphor. We have here, then, a formidable collection of essays by students of ancient philosophy, one which future scholars of rhetoric will need to take into account. If the shadow of Plato looms large behind most of the essays, that should come as no great surprise. As is the case with all col lections, it would be easy to fault this one for what is omitted or ignored here: it would have been valuable, for example, to have such a group of philosophers comment in more detail on the presocratic / sophistic back ground of the Rhetoric. But that would be to miss the virtues of what is included. I prefer, as I have indicated, to take the publication of this col lection as an auspicious omen for the philosophical study of rhetoric in general, and of the Rhetoric in particular. John T. Kirby Barbara Cassin, L'effet sophistique (Paris: Gallimard, NRF Essais, 1995), 693 pp. To readers who are not quite acquainted with the idiosyncrasies of French publishing, the release by Gallimard of Barbara Cassin's L'effet sophistique may seem unremarkable. However, for such a mainstream publisher to take the major step of printing nearly seven hundred pages of rhetorical analysis, even in a series devoted to philosophy (NRF Essais), is most remarkable. It means, in terms of France's intellectual landscape, that "rhetoric" has broken into a different field of readership, more accus tomed to reading (and giving credence to) Jean-François Lyotard than, say, Marc Fumaroli. Setting aside this strategic effect, L'effet sophistique bears all the charac teristics of being a major work on at least three counts. Firstly, it heralds a shift in French philosophy from denying history of rhetoric the status of a discipline to its reincorporation in philosophical debates. However, Cassin's work keeps its distance from both deconstruc tion and history of ideas (as in De Romilly's Les grands sophistes dans 216 RHETORICA l'Athènes de Périclès [Paris: De Fallois, 1998]). Secondly, L'effet sophistique has the merit to question sources and to provide new translations and insights into mistranslations (Cassin also heads a team working on a Vocabulaire européen des philosophies). A main tenet of Cassin's method is to immerse her reading-as-translation into the history of readings of particu lar texts such as Gorgias' Praise of Helen or Sextus Empiricus' Aduersus mathematicos VU, 65-87, or Galen's Libellus de captionibus and excerpts from Lucian as well as the remains of Antiphon the Sophist. Thirdly, it offers conceptual tools to formulate a theory of political or civic discourse not unrelated to current debates on the nature of democracy, diversity, and human rights. In this respect, L'effet sophistique truly does justice to the art of rhetoric by inscribing an analysis of the Sophists in the history of their reception by ancient and modern philosophy and in "current affairs." What is most topical is the way Cassin articulates the opposition of what she terms "Arendts' Greece" and "Heidegger's Greece" (pp. 248-69), by way of conclusion to a chapter on "City as Performance." She elucidates how Arendt constructs the primacy of politics over philosophy by resort ing to Protagoras. L'effet sophistique formulates one central question: in the conflict between the two logoi that haunts ancient thought, between ontology and logology, between the Sophist and the Philosopher, how did the First and the Second Sophistics position themselves as key operators in the inven tion of "fictionality"? Can we reconstruct the rhetorical history of that "Other" of philosophy and of good Politics, the Rhetor—either Protagoras, Gorgias, and Antiphon or Philostratos, Ælius Aristides, Lucian, and Longus—and, in the process, obtain a...
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Abstract
Cicero and Quintilian were critics of oratory who knew Greek well. They both have much to say about Demosthenes and are important figures in the history of Demosthenic scholarship. Cicero discusses Demosthenes mainly in the <i>Orator</i>, which he wrote primarily as an answer to the Atticists and as a defence of his own oratory. His comments, therefore, tend to be tendentious and to reflect Ciceronian practice more than that of Demosthenes. Quintilian, on the other hand, who was a critic rather than a practicing orator and who does not have an “axe to grind,” makes many perceptive comments about Demosthenic oratory.
February 1997
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Moderation, Religion, and Public Discourse: The Rhetoric of Occasional Conformity in England, 1697-1711 ↗
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Abstract: This paper analyzes the rhetoric of the eighteenthcentury English debate over occasional conformity in order to develop a better understanding of how persuasive appeals to moderation were used in this particular case. This debate is noteworthy because it reveais how the eighteenth-century veneration of moderation was influeneed by the seventeenth-century Protestant reading of the New Testament. This understanding of moderation led to some of the first arguments suggesting a need for separation of church and state. Further, this example extends our theoretical understanding of moderate rhetoric when we observe its use as a justification for social change.
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Sir Walter Raleigh's Speech from the Scaffold: A Translation of the 1619 Dutch Edition, and Comparison with English Texts. ↗
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Research Article| February 01 1997 Sir Walter Raleigh's Speech from the Scaffold: A Translation of the 1619 Dutch Edition, and Comparison with English Texts. John Parker and Carol A. Johnson, Sir Walter Raleigh's Speech from the Scaffold: A Translation of the 1619 Dutch Edition, and Comparison with English Texts (Minneapolis, MN: Associates of the James Ford Bell Library, 1995), ii + 79 pp. J. Vernon Jensen J. Vernon Jensen Department of Speech Communications, 9 Pleasant St. S.E., University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1997) 15 (1): 112–114. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1997.15.1.112 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation J. Vernon Jensen; Sir Walter Raleigh's Speech from the Scaffold: A Translation of the 1619 Dutch Edition, and Comparison with English Texts.. Rhetorica 1 February 1997; 15 (1): 112–114. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1997.15.1.112 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1997, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1997 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
January 1997
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Moderation, Religion, and Public Discourse: The Rhetoric of Occasional Conformity in England, 1697–1711 ↗
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This paper analyzes the rhetoric of the eighteenth- century English debate over occasional conformity in order to develop a better understanding of how persuasive appeals to moderation were used in this particular case. This debate is noteworthy because it reveals how the eighteenth-century veneration of moderation was influenced by the seventeenth-century Protestant reading of the New Testament. This understanding of moderation led to some of the first arguments suggesting a need for separation of church and state. Further, this example extends our theoretical understanding of moderate rhetoric when we observe its use as a justification for social change.
November 1996
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Abstract: The teaching and practice of rhetoric at Trinity College, Dublin, in the eighteenth century have been little discussed in the literature. This article describes the curriculum and pedagogy related to the old and “new rhetoric” of the Scottish enlightenment as disclosed by documents in the archives of Trinity College Library; the published lectures of two Erasmus Smith Professors of Oratory and History, John Lawson and Thomas Leland; and the lectures of Thomas Sheridan on elocution. Minutes of the student historical clubs in which debates and harangues are preserved illustrate the interests of the students, their techniques of debate, and the demonstrative exhortations of their officers. The student orations chronicle the gradual absorption of the principles of the new rhetoric at the College.
August 1996
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Abstract: Traditional histories of rhetoric assume that the practical oratory of lawcourts and political assemblies is the “primary,” original form of rhetoric in its “preconceptual” or predisciplinary origins in archaic Greece. Hesiod's “Hymn to the Muses,” however, presents both prince and bard as practicing an art of psychagogic suasion, and presents the prince's discursive power as dependent on, and derived from, the paradigms of eloquence and wisdom embodied in the epideictic/poetic discourse of the bard: epideictic is the “primary” form of “rhetoric” in Hesiod's world. Hesiod's account agrees with what is known about the discursive practices of oral/traditional societies worldwide.
May 1996
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Abstract: Ideology can be considered the ethos of the modern, liberal, democratic, capitalist nation state. Working from the descriptions of political ethos in Aristotle's Rhetoric, Tapies, and Politics, the differences from and similarities to post-Renaissance political structures underline the modern insistence on ways to stabilise the representation of the group in power, giving it its veil of authority, as well as ways to stabilise the description or definition of the individual within the nation. Looking at a number of contemporary commentaries from both political theory and cultural studies, the essay elaborates the rhetoric necessary to constitute ideology as the ethos of the nation state, and goes on to detail some of the constraints on the individual who, in gaining access to power, becomes subject to that state. The rhetoric of ideology provides not only an ethos for the character of the group in power, but also a set of guidelines for establishing a spedfic responsive state in the audience, an ethics of pathos. Its ethos is a strategy that imposes a strategy. The circularity of this ethos marks many of the analyses undertaken by current theory, and it has only recently been challenged by, among others, feminist historians of rhetoric. The discussion moves to a point where it asks: given that multinational and transnational corporations now share with the nation state the regularisation of capitalist exploitation, is ideology effective as a political rhetoric any more? Who is the wife of the nation state? And, what is the ethos of the multinational?
November 1995
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Abstract: This paper examines Cicero's relation to Roman imperialism by focusing primarily upon his speech in behalf of Pompey's special command against Mithradates (Pro lege Manilia, 66 BC) and his speech in favor of extending Caesar's command in Gaul (De provinciis consularibus, 56 BC). These two moments in which Cicero contributed substantially to the empowerment of the two great imperialist generais who destroyed the Republic suggest the need to reassess versions of Cicero's career which see film primarily in terms of domestic Roman politics and cast him as the heroic, would-be savior of the Republic. Applying a Marxist reading particularly indebted to Pierre Macherey, I try to explore the internal contradictions of the texts as pointers to the contradictions of late Republican society, contradictions which constitute the very conditions of possibility for Cicero's political participation.
August 1995
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Abstract: It is often asserted nowadays that the medieval period “fragmented” the classical rhetorical inheritance, while the Renaissance restored it to its former coherence. The story of the assimilation in the Middle Ages and Renaissance of Quintilian's Institutes of Oratory is examined here in order to demonstrate the problems inherent in such a position. It is argued that the full utilization of the text of Quintilian's Institutes of Oratory in the Renaissance, along with the discrediting of the Ad Herennium (as a work of Cicero) that is associated with the name of Raffaello Regio in the last decade of the fifteenth century, are not the instances of the “recovery” of antiquity and supersession of “medieval philology” that they are often thought to be. Instead the opposite seems to be the case. The philological “recovery” of Quintilian led away from the incorporation of the Institutes into contemporary rhetorical practice and towards philology for its own sake. This, together with the bitter professional jealousies among the Italian schoolmen of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, led, almost “accidentally” as it were, to a “sundering” of the “whole” that the Middle Ages had put together out of rhetorical fragments from antiquity. The medieval period, less concerned with philological niceties than with the practical utility of good advice from the past, constructed a new kind of rhetorical text from an amalgam of old texts: the Ad Herennium commentary, made up of the text of the Ad Herennium, explanations, summaries, and discussions from the medieval schoolroom, and portions of Boethius' De differentiis topicis, Quintilian's Institutes, and other classical sources. This serviceable “unity” the Renaissance “sundered” by (a) discrediting the Ad Herennium as an authoritative Ciceronian text, and (b) placing the Institutes far beyond the practical capabilities of contemporary rhetorical training courses by restoring it to its original length (vis-à-vis the abridgements and assimilations of the medieval period). In this process of turning the classical texts into icons, the Renaissance scholars were predictably unable to re-create the kaleidoscopic, one-thousand-year reality of rhetorical attitudes and texts in antiquity, from the fragments that the Middle Ages had used to build up their new form of integrated text. Much had been lost, but what had been gained?
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Abstract: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the enemy of books and civilized learning, might seem poles apart from Quintilian, who was so popular in France in the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, although there are only small traces of direct contact between the author of Émile and the Institutio, comparison between the two works is illuminating. Both are large-scale educational treatises embodying a vision of humanity. The important common ground between them concerns the importance of early childhood, a certain moral idealism, and the prfrence for a manly form of speech. Significant divergences begin to appear in relation to three major areas of concern: citizenship and the public life, the relation of words to things, and the question of acting, imagination, and fiction. Je ne me lasse point de le redire: mettez toutes les leçons des jeunes gens en actions plustôt qu'en discours; qu'ils n'apprennent rien dans les livres de ce que l'expérience peut leur enseigner. Quel extravagant projet de les exercer à parler sans sujet de rien dire, de croire leur faire sentir sur les bancs d'un collège l'énergie du langage des passions, et toute la force de l'art de persuader sans intérêt de rien persuader à personne! Tous les préceptes de la rhétorique ne semblent qu'un pur verbiage à quiconque n'en sent pas l'usage pour son profit. Qu'importe à un Ecolier comment s'y prit Annibal pour déterminer ses soldats à passer les Alpes? (I never tire of repeating it: put ail your tessons for young people into actions, not speeches; let them learn nothing from books which they could learn from experience. What an insane idea to exercise them in speaking when they have nothing to speak about, to believe one can make them feel on their school benches the language of the passions and ail the force of the art of persuasion, when they have no interest in persuading anybody! All the precepts of rhetoric are pure verbiage to anyone who cannot see what use they are to him. What does it matter to a schoolboy how Hannibal set about persuading his soldiers to cross the Alps?)
November 1994
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Research Article| November 01 1994 Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory Arm Vasaly, Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1993), xii + 301 pp. Christopher P. Craig Christopher P. Craig Department of Classics, 710 McClung Tower, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996-0471, USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1994) 12 (4): 455–456. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1994.12.4.455 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Christopher P. Craig; Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory. Rhetorica 1 November 1994; 12 (4): 455–456. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1994.12.4.455 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 1994, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1994 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
August 1994
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Things, Thoughts, and Actions: The Problem of Language in Late Eighteenth-Century British Rhetorical Theory ↗
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Research Article| August 01 1994 Things, Thoughts, and Actions: The Problem of Language in Late Eighteenth-Century British Rhetorical Theory H. Lewis Ulman, Things, Thoughts, and Actions: The Problem of Language in Late Eighteenth-Century British Rhetorical Theory (Cartiondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994), 240 pp. Barbara Warnick Barbara Warnick Department of Speech Communication, DL-15, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1994) 12 (3): 351–353. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1994.12.3.351 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 Barbara Warnick; Things, Thoughts, and Actions: The Problem of Language in Late Eighteenth-Century British Rhetorical Theory. Rhetorica 1 August 1994; 12 (3): 351–353. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1994.12.3.351 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 1994, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1994 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
February 1993
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Abstract: In Book 4 of De doctrina Christiana St. Augustine suggests that the three levels of style in Christian oratory should reflect the level of emotional impact on the audience, which would result in frequent variation through the course of the speech. Augustine's literary theory seems to be in complete agreement with contemporary oratorical practice, not only Latin, in the West, but Greek too—witness St. Gregory of Nazianzus, whose Oration 42, The Last Farewell,is used as an example in this article. Finally, a comparison between Augustine's views and those of some later Greek rhetoricians suggests that he may have been influenced as much by their ideas as by his acknowledged source and predecessor, Cicero.
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Research Article| February 01 1993 Funeral Oratory and the Cultural Ideals of Italian Humanism John M. McManamon, S.J., Funeral Oratory and the Cultural Ideals of Italian Humanism (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), xiv + 343 pp. John Ward John Ward Department of History, Sydney University, Sydney NSW 2006, Australia Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1993) 11 (1): 89–91. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1993.11.1.89 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation John Ward; Funeral Oratory and the Cultural Ideals of Italian Humanism. Rhetorica 1 February 1993; 11 (1): 89–91. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1993.11.1.89 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search Copyright 1993, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1993 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
November 1992
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Research Article| November 01 1992 The Limits of Narrative: Truth Aspiring Discourse in the Bible Allen Scult Allen Scult Dept. of Speech Communication, Drake University, 206 Medbury Hall, Des Moines, lowa 50311-4505. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1992) 10 (4): 345–365. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1992.10.4.345 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Allen Scult; The Limits of Narrative: Truth Aspiring Discourse in the Bible. Rhetorica 1 November 1992; 10 (4): 345–365. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1992.10.4.345 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search Copyright 1992, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1992 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
May 1992
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Research Article| May 01 1992 Parliamentary Oratory in Medieval Aragon Mark D. Johnston Mark D. Johnston 219 East Harrison Street, lowa City, lowa 52240. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1992) 10 (2): 99–117. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1992.10.2.99 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 Mark D. Johnston; Parliamentary Oratory in Medieval Aragon. Rhetorica 1 May 1992; 10 (2): 99–117. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1992.10.2.99 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 1992, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1992 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
August 1991
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Research Article| August 01 1991 Ramist Concepts of Testimony, Judicial Analogies, and the Puritan Conversion Narrative John Charles Adams John Charles Adams Speech Communication Department, College of Visual and Performing Arts, 400 Sims Hall V, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York 13244-1230. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1991) 9 (3): 251–268. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1991.9.3.251 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation John Charles Adams; Ramist Concepts of Testimony, Judicial Analogies, and the Puritan Conversion Narrative. Rhetorica 1 August 1991; 9 (3): 251–268. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1991.9.3.251 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 1991, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1991 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
February 1991
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Research Article| February 01 1991 Identitas, Similitudo, and Contrarietas in Gervasius of Melkley's Ars poetica: A Stasis of Style William M. Purcell William M. Purcell University of Washington, Department of Speech Communication, DL-15, Seattle, Washington 98195. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1991) 9 (1): 67–91. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1991.9.1.67 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation William M. Purcell; Identitas, Similitudo, and Contrarietas in Gervasius of Melkley's Ars poetica: A Stasis of Style. Rhetorica 1 February 1991; 9 (1): 67–91. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1991.9.1.67 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 1991, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1991 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
February 1990
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Research Article| February 01 1990 Aristotle's Rhetoric in Byzantium Thomas M. Conley Thomas M. Conley Department of Speech Communication, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 244 Lincoln Hall, 702 South Wright Street, Urbana, Illinois 61801 Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1990) 8 (1): 29–44. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1990.8.1.29 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 Thomas M. Conley; Aristotle's Rhetoric in Byzantium. Rhetorica 1 February 1990; 8 (1): 29–44. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1990.8.1.29 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 1990, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1990 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
November 1989
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Research Article| November 01 1989 On the Rhetorical Significance of P. Hamb. 131 Robert N. Gaines Robert N. Gaines Department of Speech Communication, University of Maryland at College Park, Tawes Fine Arts Building 1147, College Park, Maryland 20742-1221. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1989) 7 (4): 329–340. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1989.7.4.329 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 Robert N. Gaines; On the Rhetorical Significance of P. Hamb. 131. Rhetorica 1 November 1989; 7 (4): 329–340. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1989.7.4.329 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1989, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1989 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
May 1989
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Research Article| May 01 1989 Political Style in Cicero's Letters to Atticus Robert Hariman Robert Hariman Department of Speech Communication, Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa 50311. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1989) 7 (2): 145–158. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1989.7.2.145 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 Robert Hariman; Political Style in Cicero's Letters to Atticus. Rhetorica 1 May 1989; 7 (2): 145–158. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1989.7.2.145 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1989, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1989 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
February 1989
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Research Article| February 01 1989 The Invisible Rhetorician: Charles Darwin's "Third Party" Strategy John Angus Campbell John Angus Campbell Department of Speech Communication, University of Washington, Seattle, Washmgton 98195. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1989) 7 (1): 55–85. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1989.7.1.55 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 John Angus Campbell; The Invisible Rhetorician: Charles Darwin's "Third Party" Strategy. Rhetorica 1 February 1989; 7 (1): 55–85. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1989.7.1.55 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1989, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1989 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
May 1988
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Research Article| May 01 1988 Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education. Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education.Bruce A. Kimball, with a Foreword by Joseph L. Featherstone. Teachers College Press, 1986. pp. 293. $19.95. Robert Hariman Robert Hariman Department of Speech Communication, Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa 50311. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1988) 6 (2): 199–204. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1988.6.2.199 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Robert Hariman; Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education.. Rhetorica 1 May 1988; 6 (2): 199–204. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1988.6.2.199 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 1988, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1988 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
November 1987
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Research Article| November 01 1987 Transsumptio: A Rhetorical Doctrine of the Thirteenth Century William Purcell William Purcell Department of Speech Communication, Augustana College, Rock Island, IL 61201 Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1987) 5 (4): 369–410. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1987.5.4.369 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation William Purcell; Transsumptio: A Rhetorical Doctrine of the Thirteenth Century. Rhetorica 1 November 1987; 5 (4): 369–410. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1987.5.4.369 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 1987, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1987 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Research Article| November 01 1987 Hermogenes' On Types of Style Hermogenes' On Types of Style by Cecil W. Wooten, Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1987, pp. xviii+ 159. Thomas Conley Thomas Conley Department of Speech Communication, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801 Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1987) 5 (4): 431–436. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1987.5.4.431 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Thomas Conley; Hermogenes' On Types of Style. Rhetorica 1 November 1987; 5 (4): 431–436. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1987.5.4.431 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 1987, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1987 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
August 1987
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he purpose of present paper is to draw attention to some complexities involved in Paul O. Kristeller's classic formulation of nature of Renaissance humanism. According to KristeUer, in a lecture first deUvered in 1954 and reissued most recently in 1979, the humanists of Renaissance were professional successors of medieval Italian didatores, and inherited from them various patterns of epistolography and public oratory, aU more or less deternuned by customs and practical needs of later medieval society. Yet medieval didatores were no classical scholars and used no classical models for their compositions. It was novel contribution of humanists to add firm belief that in order to write and to speak well it was necessary to study and to imitate ancients.' The neat picture of humanism that emerges is of a professional commitment to classicize rhetorical practice of medieval world.
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Research Article| August 01 1987 Rhetoric and Law in Pietro Bembo's Opere William E. Wiethoff William E. Wiethoff Department of Speech Communication, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405 Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1987) 5 (3): 265–278. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1987.5.3.265 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation William E. Wiethoff; Rhetoric and Law in Pietro Bembo's Opere. Rhetorica 1 August 1987; 5 (3): 265–278. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1987.5.3.265 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 1987, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1987 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Research Article| August 01 1987 Rhetorical Emphases of Taoism J. Vernon Jensen J. Vernon Jensen Department of Speech Communication, 317 Folwell Hall, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455 Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1987) 5 (3): 219–229. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1987.5.3.219 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 J. Vernon Jensen; Rhetorical Emphases of Taoism. Rhetorica 1 August 1987; 5 (3): 219–229. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1987.5.3.219 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 1987, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1987 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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ernadino de Sahagun, the foremost chronicler of sixteenth-century Mexico, observed that all nations looked to the learned and powerful to persuade, and to men eminent in moral virtues. There are examples of such men the Greeks and Romans, Spanish, French and Italians. Also among the Aztecs learned, virtuous, and enterprising were held in high esteem, and they elected high priests, lords, chiefs, and captains from among them, however low their destiny may have been. These ruled over the repubUc and lead the armies, and presided over the temples.' Sahagun and others dUigently recorded the orations of these learned, virtuous, and enterprising rhetoricians providing posterity with a remarkable record of pre-Uterate rhetoric. Historians of Mexico have long recognized that an examination of these speeches provides insights into the thought and culture of the Aztecs unavaUable from other sources. To the historian of rhetoric the orations preserved by Sahagun are equally invaluable for they constitute one of the most complete accounts of the rhetoric of an oral culture. Thus an examination of Aztec oratory is instructive of the role of rhetoric in the life of the early Mexicans as well as indica-
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Research Article| August 01 1987 The Significance of the Rhetorimachia of Anselm de Besate to the History of Rhetoric Beth S. Bennett Beth S. Bennett Department of Speech Communication, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487 Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1987) 5 (3): 231–250. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1987.5.3.231 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 Beth S. Bennett; The Significance of the Rhetorimachia of Anselm de Besate to the History of Rhetoric. Rhetorica 1 August 1987; 5 (3): 231–250. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1987.5.3.231 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 1987, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1987 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.