Rhetorica
1293 articlesMarch 2021
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Abstract
The Third Sophistic Laurent Pernot Foreword The Third Sophistic is a cultural and social phenomenon that began in the Greek half of the Roman Empire in the 4th century CE. It comprised personalities who were teachers of rhetoric, orators, and public figures. The numeral adjective “Third” is understood in reference to the First Sophistic, which includes Greek sophists of the 5th and 4th century BCE, and the Second Sophistic, which includes Greek sophists active in the Roman Empire from the 1st to the 3rd century CE. This is a relatively new subject in the field of history of rhetoric and it has been the topic of much recent research: the time to assess the work done and to open future prospects has come. The following essays aim to provide a definition of the Third Sophistic. They describe historical changes, explore geographical areas, unravel social and familial connections, and highlight exceptional individualities. It is hoped that this collection will provide insights into the richness of Greco-Roman rhetoric of Late Antiquity and demonstrate its relevance to literature, politics, and religion. A chronology and a bibliography are provided below for the convenience of readers. L. P. N.B. Of the three papers gathered here, the first two were presented at the ISHR Twenty-First Biennial Conference (London, 26–29 July 2017) as part of the Panel “The Third Sophistic and Its Spaces.” [End Page 174] Chronological Table This chronological table lists the principal authors that are mentioned in the papers. The dates are sometimes approximate or conjectural. The cited names do not only include sophists. 5th cent. BCE Gorgias (480–380) 4th Plato (427–347) Aeschines (390-after 330) 3rd 2nd 1st Potamon of Mytilene (75 BCE –15 CE) 1st cent. CE 2nd Aelius Aristides (117–180) Lucian (120–180) 3rd Philostratus (170–245) Callinicus of Petra (Second half of the 3rd cent.) Julian of Cappadocia (?) Menander Rhetor (Second half of the 3rd cent.) Panegyrici Latini 4th Eusebius of Caesarea (265–339) Prohaeresius (277–369) Lactantius (+325) Libanius (314–393) Themistius (317–390) Himerius (310–390) The Emperor Julian (331/2–363) Aphthonius (Second half of the 4th cent.) Gregory of Nazianzus (330–390) Gregory of Nyssa (330–395) Basil of Caesarea (329–379) John Chrysostom (345–407) Eunapius (349–415) Panegyrici Latini (Cont.) Marius Victorinus (290–365) Symmachus (340–402) Ambrose (335–397) Augustine (354–430) 5th Synesius (370–413) The School of Gaza Damascius (460–538) 6th The School of Gaza [End Page 175] Select Bibliography E. Amato, A. Roduit, M. Steinruck, ed., Approches de la Troisiéme Sophistique: Hommages à Jacques Schamp (Bruxelles: Latomus, 2006). Google Scholar Av. Cameron, “Culture Wars: Late Antiquity and Literature,” in C. Freu, S. Janniard, A. Ripoll, ed., ”Libera Curiositas.” Melanges d’histoire romaine et d’Antiquité tar-dive offerts à Jean-Michel Carrié (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), 307–316. Google Scholar R. C. Fowler, ed., Plato in the Third Sophistic (Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2014). Google Scholar D. Hernández de la Fuente, “Poetry and Philosophy at the Boundaries of Byzantium (5th-7th centuries),” in A. de Francisco Heredero, D. Hernández de la Fuente, S. Torres Prieto, ed., New Perspectives on Late Antiquity in the Eastern Roman Empire (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 81–100. Google Scholar P. Kimball, ed., “The Third Sophistic: New Approaches to Rhetoric in Late Antiquity,” Journal of Late Antiquity 3 (2010). Google Scholar M. Kraus, “Rhetorik und Macht: Theorie und Praxis der deliberativen Rede in der dritten Sophistik. Libanios und Aphthonios,” in M. Edwards, P. Ducrey, P. Derron, ed., La rhetorique du pouvoir: une exploration de Vart oratoire délibératif grec (Vandœuvres: Fondation Hardt, 2016), 299–341. Google Scholar P.-L. Malosse, B. Schouler, “Qu’est-ce que la Troisième Sophistique?” Lalies 29 (2009): 157–224. Google Scholar R. J. Penella, “Prologue,” in A. J. Quiroga Puertas, ed., The Purpose of Rhetoric in Late Antiquity: From Performance to Exegesis (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 1–7. Google Scholar L. Pernot, La rhétorique de l’éloge dans le monde gréco-romain (Paris: Institut d’Etudes Augustiniennes, 1993). Google Scholar A. J. Quiroga Puertas, “From Sophistopolis to Episcopolis. The Case...
February 2021
January 2021
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Marc Fumaroli (1932–2020)In memoriam Laurent Pernot Translated by Jameela Lares Marc Fumaroli aimait à rappeler qu’il avait fait partie du groupe de savants qui, en 1976, conçut le projet de fonder une société consacrée à l’histoire de la rhétorique, avec Anton D. Leeman, Alain Michel, James J. Murphy, Heinrich F. Plett et Brian Vickers. Cette initiative pionnière devait se concrétiser dès l’année suivante, avec la fondation de l’International Society for the History of Rhetoric (ISHR) à Zurich le 30 juin 1977. À cette époque, Marc Fumaroli, né le 10 juin 1932, était déjà un universitaire remarqué. Muni d’une solide formation, agrégé des lettres, ancien pensionnaire de la Fondation Thiers, il soutint sa thèse d’État à l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, en 1976 précisément, et fut élu professeur dans ce même établissement. Spécialiste de la littérature française du XVIIe siècle, il s’inscrivait dans la lignée de grands maîtres comme Paul Bénichou, Raymond Picard et René Pomeau. Natif de Marseille, issu d’une famille corse, ayant passé son enfance à Fès, au Maroc, ce Parisien était un homme de la Méditerranée et de la culture latine. Passionné des arts de la scène, il « écumait les couturières et les premières », selon ses propres mots, et il donna au quotidien danois Jyllands-Posten des critiques qui furent par la suite réunies en un volume hors commerce (Orgies et féeries. Chroniques du théâtre à Paris autour de 1968, Paris, 2002). Dans la décennie qui suivit la fondation de l’ISHR, Marc Fumaroli développa et fit connaître son approche novatrice de la rhétorique, envisagée comme une composante essentielle de la littérature, de l’histoire des idées et du fonctionnement des institutions, tant séculières qu’ecclésiastiques. Il la qualifiait de « nervure » de la civilisation, à cause de son rôle de renfort, de soutien et d’arête saillante. En 1980, parut l’édition imprimée de sa thèse, L’Age de l’éloquence. Rhétorique et « res literaria » de la Renaissance au seuil de l’époque classique (Genève, Droz), puis, en 1985, l’édition commentée des Fables de La Fontaine (Paris, Imprimerie nationale), deux ouvrages qui attiraient l’attention, entre autres, sur l’héritage antique, sur l’influence des jésuites, sur le poids des genres, des topoi et des théories du style. [End Page 1] Directeur de la revue XVIIe Siècle, directeur du Centre d’étude de la langue et de la littérature françaises des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, Marc Fumaroli fut élu professeur au Collège de France en 1986 et donna comme intitulé à sa chaire « Rhétorique et société en Europe (XVIe – XVIIe siècles) ». En 1987, en tant que président de l’ISHR, il eut la responsabilité du VIe congrès de la Société, qui se tint à Tours et à Poitiers et fut applaudi par tous comme une grande réussite. À partir du milieu des années 80, les travaux de Marc Fumaroli changèrent d’échelle. Sans jamais oublier le cœur rhétorique et littéraire de ses préoccupations, il traça des perspectives élargies dans une série de grands livres, dont on ne peut citer ici qu’une sélection. Lecteur infatigable et pénétrant (Exercices de lecture. De Rabelais à Paul Valéry, Paris, Gallimard, 2006), il analysa les échanges feutrés des écrivains avec le pouvoir politique (Le Poète et le Roi. Jean de La Fontaine en son siècle, Paris, de Fallois, 1997 ; Chateaubriand. Poésie et Terreur, Paris, de Fallois, 2003). Il dégagea l’importance, dans l’histoire du monde occidental, du « loisir lettré » (otium literatum), de la conversation et des institutions littéraires, comme les salons ou les académies, qui permettaient le commerce des esprits et l’interaction en matière culturelle (Trois institutions littéraires, Paris, Gallimard, 1994 ; La Diplomatie de l’esprit. De Montaigne à La Fontaine, Paris, Hermann...
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Reviewed by: Principal Writings on Rhetoric by Philipp Melanchthon Kees Meerhoff Philipp Melanchthon, Principal Writings on Rhetoric. Edited by William P. Weaver, Stefan Strohm, and Volkhard Wels. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017. liv + 594 pp. ISBN 9783110561197 Publication of a brand new, state-of-the-art critical edition of Philip Melanchthon’s (1497–1560) major writings on rhetoric is excellent news for all scholars working in the field of Renaissance rhetoric. The volume under discussion here is the very first of a multi-volume edition of the opera philosophic, that is, of all major writings concerning the arts curriculum, taught according to the highest standards of humanism. Volume II-2 will be supplemented by a volume (II-l) in which the writings on dialectic will be published. This volume will also be of particular interest to students of rhetoric, since Melanchthon—following Valla’s and Agricola’s lead—placed dialectic at the heart of rhetoric. Melanchthon firmly believed in the classical [End Page 118] conception of the enkyklios paideia, so eloquently highlighted by Cicero in his oration Pro Archia, which was, not by accident, one of Melanchthon’s favourite speeches. True to the author’s conception, already expressed in his inaugural lecture (1518), the opera philosophies series will also republish his writings on grammar, classical literature, history, ethics, politics, physics, and mathematics. Moreover, since Melanchthon defended his philosophical conceptions on numerous occasions, either personally or by proxy, the final volume will contain his famous declamations concerning all areas of academic teaching. In short, this major enterprise, undertaken by the director of the Melanchthouhaus in Bretten, Günter Frank, and by church historian Walter Sparn, will supersede the previous editions of Melanchthon’s writings, notably the Bretschneider & Bindseil twenty-eight-volume edition published in the Corpus Rcformatontm over the course of the nineteenth century and the so-called MSA-edition of selected writings directed by R. Stupperich and published from 1951 onward. Volume II-2 contains the three textbooks on rhetoric published by Melanchthon in 1519, 1521, and 1531. These textbooks are supplemented by the republication of H. Zwicker’s earlier edition of the Dispositiones rhetoricae (1553), which first appeared in 1911 and was reprinted in 1968. These Dispositiones offer 160 outlines of speeches on all kind of matters and are thus working examples of declamations written according to the rules of composition proposed in the textbooks. Melanchthon’s writings on homiletics (De officiis conionatoris, etc.) are not included in the volume. But they are discussed through the annotations concerning the sections on preaching one finds in the textbooks from the very start. The volume is co-ordinated by William Weaver. Weaver is the editor of the 1521 Institutiones rhetoricae. Stefan Strohm, assisted by Hartmut Schmid, edited the 1519 De rhetorica libri tres. And Volkhard Wels was responsible for editing the 1531 Elementorum rehtorices libri duo. I shall refer to them as Editor B, A, and C, respectively. All texts are published in Latin, without translation; the introductions and annotations are either in English or in German. The quotations given in the notes are in Greek and in Latin. A modern translation with Greek key words added in brackets, especially for the longer quotations in Greek (of Aristotle, Plutarch, etc.), would have been defensible, if not preferable. Each editor enjoyed maximum scientific freedom in accomplishing his formidable task. And each individual edition offers not only a perfectly established text, but also a rich critical apparatus and a wealth of explanatory notes. The introductions and annotations demonstrate in a definitive way the importance of classical and humanist sources in Melanchthon’s writings. Among his humanist predecessors, Agricola and Erasmus are Melanchthon’s key authors; but, at a certain stage, George of Trebizond also played a remarkable part. Erasmus is the chief source, not only as the author of De copia and similar writings, but also as an interpreter of the Scriptures and as a collector of ancient wisdom in the Adagia. With Agricola, he is the great ancestor, who already conceived of rhetoric in close relationship to exegesis and homiletics and who advocated for an eloquence fuelled by [End Page 119] ancient literature. For Melanchthon as well, rhetoric became a tool for analysing...
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Reviewed by: Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change: A Critical Companion by Ann George Kyle Jensen Ann George. Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change: A Critical Companion. Columbia: South Carolina University Press, 2018. xvi + 279 pp. ISBN 9781611179316 It is difficult to appreciate the full achievement of Ann George’s Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change: A Critical Companion unless one has firsthand experience with Kenneth Burke’s extant papers. All archival research is challenging, of course. But Burke’s papers are especially difficult to manage because of the volume and fecundity of his drafting materials. These materials encourage a persistent feeling of insecurity, that hard-won moments of clarity will be run off by new and unexpected variables. I am not surprised that it took George twenty years to track “P&C’s development, theoretical arguments, critical methodologies, and civic pedagogy” (24). Her erudite analysis indicates the time was well spent. George navigates the complicated arguments of Permanence and Change with characteristic precision and grace. In Part I, she addresses the core concepts of Burke’s argument such as piety, perspective by incongruity, metabiology, and the art of living. In Part II, she presents an extended archival account of the book’s production and reception history that complicates prevailing assumptions about Burke’s work as a critic. The two parts are connected by George’s claim that Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change is the originating work of the New Rhetoric. [End Page 116] To make payment on this claim, George emphasizes the value of reading Burke in context. In each chapter, she presents Burke as a writer responding to the problems posed by his historical moment and needing to revise his perspectives as the scene evolved. Because Burke’s interpretation of key events and their resolutions underwent constant revision, critics hoping to understand his arguments must engage with not only his published works but also his extant drafting materials. In between the drafts, we discover a groundbreaking civic pedagogy that will compel new and expert Burke scholars alike. George identifies metabiology as the “ethical grounding for [Burke’s] proposed cultural reorientation.” In doing so, she claims that his insights remain relevant for the contemporary moment (56). George makes this case convincingly, arguing that Burke’s account of human motives “creates the scene and the means that allow Americans to fulfill their deepest human needs, and as they participate in collaborative civic conversations, they instantiate and reaffirm, for themselves and each other, their commitment to democratic values” (224). Forum constraints prevent me from listing the full array of praiseworthy features in George’s book. So, I will focus on what seem to me her most profound contributions. First, George presents perspective by incongruity as a multi-layered concept. There is a reasonable temptation to limit the scope of perspective by incongruity by noting its capacity to denaturalize well established cultural “truths.” But within Burke’s civic pedagogy, perspective by incongruity has “different levels . . . for different situations”: “a freewheeling, outrageous cultural critique by an ‘analyst’/artist/rhetor or an individual who is already alienated from the dominant culture versus the more conciliatory rhetorical means by which piously reluctant audiences can be led to new ways of seeing” (50). Second, when discussing metabiology as purification of war, George presents five different scenes that elucidate the nuances of Burke’s thinking and thus add considerable depth to our understanding of his civic pedagogy. According to George, the purification of war demands that we address simultaneously the interconnections between our biological, cultural, pragmatic, economic, and militaristic assumptions. George’s claim is particularly suggestive because it implies that later works such as A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives evolve from Permanence & Change. Having spent nearly a decade working on the archival histories of A Rhetoric of Motives and The War of Words, I concur with this assertion. Much of what appears in A Rhetoric of Motives is an extension and/or revision of Burke’s earlier arguments. Finally, George claims that Burke’s civic pedagogy is both m extension and revision of epideictic rhetoric. It extends by examining how particular orientations “train people to accept certain ways of knowing and judging...
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Reviewed by: Attic Oratory and Performance by Andreas Serafim Matteo Barbato Andreas Serafim, Attic Oratory and Performance (Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies), London and New York: Routledge, 2017. 156 pp. ISBN 9780367871277 In this slim book, Andreas Serafim sets out to provide a holistic perspective on the performative aspects of Attic oratory through an analysis of two pairs of interrelated judicial speeches: Demosthenes’ and Aeschines’ respective speeches On the Embassy; and Aeschines’ Against Ctesiphon and Demosthenes’ On the Crown. As stated in his introduction, Serafim believes that the speeches of the Attic orators, despite surviving as written texts, can only be fully appreciated if one gives appropriate weight to the interaction between speaker and audience. He adopts an approach based on linguistics and performance studies. This leads him to define performance as the “interactive communication, explicit or otherwise, between the transmitter of a message and its receiver” (pp. 16–17)—in other words, as anything that enables the speaker to elicit a reaction in the audience. Serafim distinguishes between two types of performance techniques (direct/sensory and indirect/emotional) and proposes to look at both in combination. In Chapter 1, Serafim lays out the methodology of his study. He identifies the main areas of performance (rhetorical construction of the audience; relationship between oratory and theatre; inter-generic character portraiture; delivery) that provide the subjects of Chapters 2–5, and he illustrates them through references to ancient and modern scholarship. The discussion, though mostly solid, is at times undertheorized. This is most evident in the analysis of emotions in pp. 21–3. Despite rightly stressing the significance of emotions for performance,i Serafim overlooks an important body of scholarship that highlights the complex nature of emotions, which encompass [End Page 114] social and cognitive as well as bodily aspects.ii Engaging with such studies could have nuanced the distinction between sensory and emotional performance techniques and could have offered an interesting lens for investigating delivery. Chapter 2 examines the strategies (e.g. emotional appeals; imperatives and questions) deployed by the orators to construct the identity of their audience and invite them to act accordingly. Chapter 3 analyses the interrelationship between oratory and theatre, with a focus on the characterisation of one’s opponents as deceitful actors on the judicial stage. While Serafim provides a good discussion of Demosthenes’ use of poetic quotations to stress Aeschines’ connection with theatre, it is surprising that no comparison is made with Aeschines’ own use of quotations in Against Timarchus. This would have allowed Serafim to investigate Aeschines’ negotiation of his image as an actor and its significance for our understanding of Athenian attitudes to theatre. Chapter 4 looks at the orators’ construction of their own and their opponents’ character through patterns borrowed from comedy as well as tragedv and epics. Serafim rightly notes that the judges had experience as theatregoers, which he suggests was exploited by the orators to create favourable and unfavourable dispositions towards themselves and their opponents respectively. Chapter 5 focuses on delivery and is the most effective in stressing the interconnection between the different aspects of performance analysed in the book. Through comparison between rhetorical theory and oratorical practice, Serafim convincingly shows how some rhetorical features of the speeches may be taken as indicative of the gestural and vocal ploys adopted by the orators as part of their performance. Chapter 6 briefly summarises the book’s findings and delineates possible areas for future research. Serafim is at his best when providing rhetorical analyses of specific passages, and he makes a convincing case for understanding performance as a multidimensional phenomenon. The book, however, is somewhat lacking in conceptual breadth, as its main merit lies in combining existing strands in scholarship that focus respectively on oratorical delivery and on rhetoric’s relationship with drama. Serafim’s arguments are sometimes weakened by a lack of engagement with the institutional nature of judicial oratory. At pp. 48–9, for example, Serafim argues that Aeschin. 3.8 addresses the judges with the civic address (“men of Athens”) as opposed to the judicial address (“judges”) in order to make them “realise that both their duty and their status as judges is wholly intertwined with the best interests of...
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Reviewed by: Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes by Timothy Raylor Torrey Shanks Timothy Raylor, Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. xvii + 334 pp. ISBN 9780198829690 In a meticulous and learned account of Thomas Hobbes’s lifelong relationship to rhetoric and humanism, Timothy Raylor takes up the peculiar but important challenge of proving that something did not happen. That something is Hobbes’s famed double turn, his rejection of humanist rhetoric followed later by a modified return to rhetoric, as defended in Quentin Skinner’s influential study, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (1996). Raylor presents a [End Page 121] Hobbes steadfast in his relationship to both rhetoric and humanism, in contrast to his sharper and unrepentant philosophical turn. The book is provocative in its scrutinizing and overturning of Skinner’s thesis, where it largely sets its sights. It also provokes questions beyond that horizon for the theory and practice of rhetoric in putatively rationalist philosophy. One of several important contributions of Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes is its laser-like focus on the specific rhetorical and humanist traditions from which Hobbes drew insight over the long span of his life. Attending closely to his early pedagogical pursuits with the Cavendish family, the book discerns Hobbes’s commitments among a broad range of humanist and rhetorical approaches available to him. It speaks of Raylor’s attunement to the rhetorical tradition that he weighs pedagogical activities and topics so significantly. The examination of Hobbes’s work as a young tutor and nascent poet take up his incontrovertibly rhetorical humanist phase, during which, Raylor emphasizes, he harbored the pragmatic and skeptical tendencies of a Tacitean more than a Ciceronian civic republican. While Hobbes’s translation of Thucydides distances him from Cicero, the The Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique reveals his enduring commitment to Aristotelian notions of rhetoric. Though he was no ethical Aristotelian, Hobbes found in the Rhetoric a guiding structure of thought that was further inflected through Francis Bacon. Drawing Bacon into the humanist fold, Raylor rightly challenges anachronistic habits of opposing aesthetics and reason, poetry and science, in seventeenth-century philosophy. One benefit is in his richly layered reading of an early poem, De mirabilibus pecci. The poem incorporates catalogue of wonders, travel writing, and epideictic rhetoric, intertwining aesthetic pleasure, knowledge of natural history, and currying favour. Hobbes’s humanism takes new shape here as a contribution to the concerns and methods of an emerging natural scientific inquiry. This is a less familiar Hobbes and a path not taken for a thinker who later championed materialism at the expense of experiential knowledge. Hobbes abandoned natural history, but other Aristotelian tenets endured: a division of knowledge into scientia and opinio and a rhetoric attuned to the passions and pragmatically aimed at persuasion over loftier ethical goals. Crucial evidence for this is found in Hobbes’s choice to teach Aristotle’s Rhetoric and to prepare a Latin Digest and English Briefe. The documents, Raylor argues, do not reject rhetorical humanist (read Ciceronian) culture, but rather offer “a reasonable interpretation and apt condensation of Aristotle” (169). Aristotelian rhetoric is instead the structure through which Hobbes would effect a momentous change a decade later. Reorienting Hobbes’s rhetorical humanist phase around a Baconian Aristotelianism leads to the conclusion that “[i]t is not rhetoric that Hobbes, at the end of the 1630s, rejects, but philosophy—philosophy as it has traditionally been practiced” (176). Philosophy becomes the problem and object of transformation, not rhetoric. Moreover, rhetorical study becomes the driving factor in this reconceptualization of ratiocination. [End Page 122] The Rhetoric helped Hobbes to see that too much of what passed for philosophy was not certain or universal but drawn upon arguments meant to persuade, yielding, at best, probable truths. The natural histories that once interested him are based merely on “experience of fact,” producing only appearances of knowledge (201). With the demotion of natural philosophy, Hobbes elevates and transforms the study of politics into a science grounded in logical demonstration of causes from clearly defined terms, like geometry. Civil philosophy, in other words, is torn from its rhetorical roots in dialectical reasoning, experiential or prudential knowledge, and persuasion...
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This essay examines the supplicatory letter the Swedishborn Helena, marchioness of Northampton, addressed to Thomas Radcliffe, third earl of Sussex, in 1576 or 1577, hoping he would help her regain access to Elizabeth I. The essay situates the letter within the early modern patronage system and the court environment, but foremost within the field of early modern letter-writing in general, and the supplicatory letter in particular. The essay shows how a number of rhetorical strategies, designed to inspire pity and benevolence mainly through ethos and pathos, are employed to create positions for both supplicant and addressee. In this way, the letter reaches the desired goal of regaining royal presence. By looking at the letter through the frames of early modern letter-writing and more general rhetorical practise, the essay points to a tension between the letter’s stated sentiment of “utter confusion” and its highly formalised expression, indicative of the letter’s rhetorical situation and especially of the constraints related to its sender’s social status. The letter is transcribed in an
November 2020
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Review: The Theatre of Justice: Aspects of Performance in Greco-Roman Oratory and Rhetoric, edited by Sophia Papaioannou, Andreas Serafim, and Beatrice da Vela ↗
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Book Review| November 01 2020 Review: The Theatre of Justice: Aspects of Performance in Greco-Roman Oratory and Rhetoric, edited by Sophia Papaioannou, Andreas Serafim, and Beatrice da Vela Sophia Papaioannou, Andreas Serafim, and Beatrice da Vela, eds., The Theatre of Justice: Aspects of Performance in Greco-Roman Oratory and Rhetoric, (Mnemosyne Supplements 403), Leiden: Brill, 2017. 355 pp. ISBN: 9789004334649 Hilary J. C. Lehmann Hilary J. C. Lehmann Knox College Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (4): 437–439. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.4.437 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 Hilary J. C. Lehmann; Review: The Theatre of Justice: Aspects of Performance in Greco-Roman Oratory and Rhetoric, edited by Sophia Papaioannou, Andreas Serafim, and Beatrice da Vela. Rhetorica 1 November 2020; 38 (4): 437–439. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.4.437 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Arabic Jinās is not Pun, Wortspiel, Calembour, or Paronomasia: A Post-Eurocentric Approach to the Conceptual Untranslatability of Literary Terms in Arabic and Ancient Egyptian Cultures ↗
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This article amplifies the call for a paradigm shift across a range of comparative disciplines relevant to non-European cultures, that decentralizes rhetorical concepts from European traditions in comprehending non-European literary and philosophical practices. Such a post-Eurocentric perspective is necessary to both generate a fair comparative module that centralizes the emic (culture-specific) features of a language and to avoid Eurocentric misrepresentation of the non-European culture under consideration. This paper challenges the common academic position that Eurocentric traditions are foundational to understanding ancient Egyptian and Arabic literary systems. The article also considers the graphic nature of the core hieroglyphic script in comparison with Arabic to refute the modern obsession that concentrates on the verbal layers of the scripts and neglects their visual literariness.
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Review: Practicing Citizenship: Women's Rhetoric at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, by Kristy Maddux ↗
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Book Review| November 01 2020 Review: Practicing Citizenship: Women's Rhetoric at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, by Kristy Maddux Kristy Maddux, Practicing Citizenship: Women's Rhetoric at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. 256 pp. ISBN: 9780271083506 Anna Dudney Deeb Anna Dudney Deeb Brenau University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (4): 435–437. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.4.435 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 Anna Dudney Deeb; Review: Practicing Citizenship: Women's Rhetoric at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, by Kristy Maddux. Rhetorica 1 November 2020; 38 (4): 435–437. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.4.435 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Review: Rhetorical Strategies in Late Antique Literature. Images, Metatexts and Interpretation, edited by A. Quiroga Puertas ↗
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Book Review| November 01 2020 Review: Rhetorical Strategies in Late Antique Literature. Images, Metatexts and Interpretation, edited by A. Quiroga Puertas A. Quiroga Puertas ed., Rhetorical Strategies in Late Antique Literature. Images, Metatexts and Interpretation, (Mnemosyne Supplements 406), Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2017. 227 pp. ISBN 9789004340091 Francesco Berardi Francesco Berardi University of Chieti Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (4): 432–435. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.4.432 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 Francesco Berardi; Review: Rhetorical Strategies in Late Antique Literature. Images, Metatexts and Interpretation, edited by A. Quiroga Puertas. Rhetorica 1 November 2020; 38 (4): 432–435. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.4.432 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Abstract
Book Review| November 01 2020 Review: Dalla tribuna al pulpito. Retorica del verosimile, by Fabio Roscalla Fabio Roscalla, Dalla tribuna al pulpito. Retorica del verosimile. Pavia: Pavia University Press, 2017, 130 pp. ISBN: 9788869520457 Mauro Serra Mauro Serra Università degli Studi di Salerno Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (4): 439–442. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.4.439 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 Mauro Serra; Review: Dalla tribuna al pulpito. Retorica del verosimile, by Fabio Roscalla. Rhetorica 1 November 2020; 38 (4): 439–442. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.4.439 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Abstract
The first book of medieval Latin beast epic, Ysengrimus, relates imaginary trials. In the episodes of the stolen ham and the fishing, the characters, Ysengrin and Renart, imagine that they would convene an ecclesiastic assembly, a synod, and that they would plead their case. Their plead reverses right and wrong (translatio criminis), invents speeches to denigrate each other (sermocinatio), and seems to take the form of large digressions. These speeches, which have been considered as “interminable” and “wordy” by J. Mann and É. Charbonnier, can be reassessed through classical rhetoric. This paper aims to demonstrate that, in spite of the extent of these speeches' apparent rambling, we can extricate some rhetorical structures (constitutiones) from the judicial oratory. This is the first point of a speech that also uses prolixity as an “art of being right.”
September 2020
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Arabic Jinās is not Pun, Wortspiel, Calembour, or Paronomasia: Post-Eurocentric Approach to the Conceptual Untranslatability of Literary Terms in Arabic and Ancient Egyptian Cultures ↗
Abstract
This article amplifies the call for a paradigm shift across a range of comparative disciplines relevant to non-European cultures, that decentralizes rhetorical concepts from European traditions in comprehending non-European literary and philosophical practices. Such a post-Eurocentric perspective is necessary to both generate a fair comparative module that centralizes the emic (culture-specific) features of a language and to avoid Eurocentric misrepresentation of the non-European culture under consideration. This paper challenges the common academic position that Eurocentric traditions are foundational to understanding ancient Egyptian and Arabic literary systems. The article also considers the graphic nature of the core hieroglyphic script in comparison with Arabic to refute the modern obsession that concentrates on the verbal layers of the scripts and neglects their visual literariness.
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Rhetorical Strategies in Late Antique Literature. Images, Metatexts and Interpretation ed. by A. Quiroga Puertas ↗
Abstract
Book Reviews A. Quiroga Puertas ed.z Rhetorical Strategies in Late Antique Literature. Images, Metatexts and Interpretation, (Mnemosyne Supplements 406), Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2017. 227 pp. ISBN 9789004340091 Gli studi sulla letteratura nel tardo-antico si arricchiscono di un prezioso e agile strumento di ricerca grazie alia pubblicazione, a cura di A. Quiroga Puertas, di una raccolta di saggi su testi e autori di II-V sec. L'approccio esegetico e di natura retorica e tende a individuare nelle fonti le diverse soluzioni adottate dagli scrittori per rispondere alle istanze che le mutate condizioni sociali, politiche e culturali hanno imposto alia comunicazione letteraria. L'introduzione di Lieve Van Hoof (pp. 1-6) apprezza il contributo che la mis cellanea porta alia bibliografia di settore: l'analisi di testi trascurati, come il Simposio di Metodio o le Vite di Eunapio, ma anche il ricorso a un'ampia gamma di "interpretative strategies'' che, aggiungiamo noi, e possibile declinare in rapporto ai tre motivi-guida evocati nel sottotitolo. L'interesse per le immagini e in generale per gli effetti di evidenza visiva provocati dal testo sostanzia i lavori di J. B. Torres Guerra, A. Quiroga Puertas, L. Miguelez Cavero. J. B. Torres Guerra (Image and Word in Eusebius of Caesarea, VC 3.4-24: Constantine in Nicaea, pp. 73-89) prende in esame la descrizione dell'ingresso solenne di Costantino al concilio di Nicea nel terzo libro della Vita omonima per analizzare le tecniche ecfrastiche usate da Eusebio di Cesarea per rappresentare vividamente la scena. L'attenzione alia registrazione dei dati visivi si traduce nella costruzione di un autentico tableau vivant in cui ogni particolare assume valore simbolico per esprimere l'idea di ordine e armonia assicurati all'impero e alia cristianita dal monarca. A. Quiroga Puertas (In Heaven unlike on Earth. Rhetorical Strategies in Julian's Caesars, pp. 90-103) ritrova la stessa relazione tra ekphrasis e propaganda politica nelle Vite dei Cesari di Giuliano dove l'allusione si carica di valenze filosofiche legate al Neoplatonismo nella scena del banchetto di dei e imperatori (307c-308b), mentre il riuso dei procedimenti encomiastici codificati dalla precettistica (Menandro) e applicati da Giuliano per costruire la galleria dei ritratti imperiali, talora fortemente sarcastici , e finalizzato alia restaurazione dei vecchi ideali di moralita pubblica e pagana. Anche nello studio di L. Miguelez-Cavero, che considera la des crizione della collana di Armonia nelle Dionisiache di Nonno di Panopoli (Harmonia s Necklace, Nonn. D. 5, 135-189: a Set of Jewellery, ekphrasis and a Narrative Node, pp. 165-197), l'analisi delle tecniche di visualizzazione si Rheforzczz, Vol. XXXVIII, Issue 4, pp. 432-442. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http:/ /www. ucpress.edu/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.Org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.4.432 Book Reviews 433 allarga a considerare le relazioni con il contesto di circolazione dell'opera e Yekphrasis diviene uno spazio per interrogarsi sull'intersezione tra retorica e societa. Attraverso una serie di puntuali raffronti con la produzione artistica di eta imperiale e con la tradizione della manualistica retorica, l'autrice indica gli elementi che realizzano la scrittura visiva di Nonno di Panopoli individuando modelli iconografici e letterari senza rinunciare a contestualizzare il brano nell'economia narrativa del poema. L'intertestualita e l'elemento su cui vertono gli studi di R. C. Fowler, B. MacDougall e J. Campos Daroca. R. C. Fowler (Ecyppoouvr) and Self-Knowledge in Methodius' Sym posium, pp. 26-43) si propone di ricostruire l'ampio spettro di significati che il termine acocppoabv^ assume nel Symposium di Metodio e che non e possibile sintetizzare in traduzione con un singolo vocabolo. L'analisi degli echi platonici presenti nell'opera supporta l'interpretazione di questo ter mine che non si identifica semplicemente con la castita, ma interessa anche la conoscenza di se e il rapporto che l'uomo ha con la realta circostante . La soluzione adottata da Metodio smorza l'intransigenza di alcune posizioni cristiane in tema di verginita in contrasto...
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The Theatre of Justice: Aspects of Performance in Greco-Roman Oratory and Rhetoric ed. by Sophia Papaioannou, et al ↗
Abstract
Book Reviews 437 brush to reveal how these women's collective voices defined women's citi zenship in an era that suppressed it. Maddux aims to account for women's diverse practices of citizenship and civic roles at the time of the fair. This book is ultimately successful in deepening our understanding of what constitutes citizenship by accounting for multiple practices of women's citizenship. Maddux recognizes that her work can only account for a small fraction of the robust event, but her accounting is fruitful and informative. Her work certainly adds to public address and citizenship scholarship, and offers many points of departure for future study. For example, she includes a brief discussion of the interna tional nature of the women's congresses in the conclusion chapter, leaving the door open for others to take up her call to pay more attention to the fair from a transnational perspective. In Practical Citizenship, Maddux achieves her goal of recovering new forms of women's citizenship at the fair, which should encourage future scholarship and therefore an even greater under standing of women's contributions to this rich rhetorical event. Anna Dudney Deeb Brenau University Sophia Papaioannou, Andreas Serafim, and Beatrice da Vela, eds., The Theatre of Justice: Aspects of Performance in Greco-Roman Oratory and Rhetoric, (Mnemosyne Supplements 403), Leiden: Brill, 2017. 355 pp. ISBN: 9789004334649 This collected volume is an exciting and timely contribution to the study of ancient Greek and Roman rhetoric. The introduction lays out the work's premise: oratory, like theater, is always a performance involving a triangular dialogue between performer, opponent or co-actor, and audience. Influenced by the field of Performance Studies, the editors regard rhetorical texts as events rather than objects. As such, the texts can be used to recapture ele ments of the original performance and to reveal aspects of performance beyond oral delivery. The chapters represent a wide range of approaches to analyzing performative aspects of oratory. The majority of the chapters are on Attic oratory, with one chapter on Thucydides and five excellent chapters on Roman oratory. The following brief sketches of the contents will demon strate the breadth of approaches contained in this volume. The book's first section, "Speakers—Audience," contains five chapters. Ian Worthington suggests that speakers appearing before the Assembly required more skill in acting than those who spoke in the courts because deliberative speakers could be more versatile in responding to the audience and other politicians. Andreas Serafim examines Demosthenes s use of direct address, arguing that Demosthenes uses the address ta VApsc AOfjwioi in order to create a "rhetoric of community," establishing himself and the jurors 438 RHETORIC A as an in-group while excluding his opponent (31). In contrast, the address & devSpec; dixacFToci would remind the jurors that they were themselves being judged by the watching populace. Brenda Griffith-Williams claims that theat rical elements in Isaios 6 (the scheming hetaira, the bumbling old man) served to distract from the case's relatively flimsy evidence by building a sense of familiarity among the jurors in their capacity as theatergoers. Guy Westwood considers the dearth of examples of eidolapoeia, the impersonation of a dead person, in Classical Athenian oratory. He suggests that this practice might have been considered undemocratic, if a speaker was thought of as personally appropriating an ancestor who should belong to all. Catherine Steel demonstrates that Cicero's published speeches are misleading: in live performance, informal elements would have interrupted the speakers, requiring them to reveal their ability to successfully interact with the people and to gauge the attitude of the judges and spectators. In fact, oratory is unlike theater in that its performance is never fully scripted. The second section, "Ethopoiia," has two chapters. Christos Kremmydas demonstrates that Thucydides reveals the character and intentions of indivi duals and cities through dialogue—especially their style of argumentation and use of gnomic statements—as much as through narrative. Henriette van der Blom shows how Metellus Numidicus reinvented himself after being recal led from Africa in 107 bce. An examination of the fragments of his speeches reveals that Metellus used the "rhetoric of inclusion" to bring the people to his side while simultaneously...
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Abstract
Book Reviews 435 Nazianzo attraverso le categorie della stilistica antica sulla falsariga della polemica tra retori asiani e retori atticisti! Questo volume, che si conclude con utili indici di nomi e luoghi notevoli, offre un'interessante sintesi suggerendo con i suoi contributi proficue linee di indirizzo e metodologie d'indagine per le future ricerche sul tardo-antico. Francesco Berardi University of Chieti Kristy Maddux, Practicing Citizenship: Womens Rhetoric at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. 256 pp. ISBN: 9780271083506 The 1893 Chicago World's Fair lasted a mere five months, but the copi ous records of speeches and programs from the event capture the tremen dous social, economic, and political evolution that took place during the Gilded Age. In Practicing Citizenship: Women's Rhetoric at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, Kristy Maddux zeros in on this fascinating period during which women were "caught in a dilemma of citizenship" (vii), meaning that they were legally full citizens but were not allowed to vote. The fair marked an almost unprecedented occasion for women's public address. Close to 800 women spoke as part of the fair's congresses on issues such as education, government, and religion. Maddux argues that the participation of these women enacted diverse citizenship practices that complicate previous understandings of women's citizenship in this era. To uncover how women negotiated greater participation in public life, Maddux analyzes a large batch of texts to identify "interrelationships or overlaps and how they wor ked together to project ideas of women's citizenship" during the fair (46). Maddux brings together the subjects of practicing citizenship, which has been of ongoing interest to rhetorical scholars, and women's public address at the fair, which is a subject that is ripe for analysis but has yet to receive extensive consideration from rhetorical scholars. Maddux conducts a rhetorical analysis of a discursive event that has largely been the purview of English and history scholars. She also moves away from what has been a traditional focus on suffragist rhetoric and toward previously unconsidered or undervalued women's citizenship practices. She argues that scholars have previously limited their focus to women's citizenship as the fight for suffrage, which fails to account for all the other ways in which women were organiz ing together and defining their public roles in the late nineteenth century. To recover women's citizenship practices, Maddux considers the fair as a "multivocal projection of the circulating discourses of the Gilded Age," rather than more common readings of the fair as a representation of contem poraneous ideas or an illusory vision of a perfect United States (25). Maddux identifies four practices of women's citizenship that frame the remaining analysis chapters: deliberative democracy, racial uplift, organized womanhood, 436 RHETORICA and economic participation. In Chapter 2, Maddux analyzes programs and promotional documents that demonstrate how the fair's congresses "pro jected a vision for deliberative democracy" for women (52). The congresses served as spaces for women's self-government and for defining their civic role. Women could celebrate their identities as women but also depart from their gendered identities when they spoke about their accomplishments in civil, scientific, and educational work. Chapter 3 considers how sixteen Congress speeches characterized acts of racial uplift as practices of citizen ship. For these women, the goal of racial uplift was to help women of vari ous ethnicities, races, and classes succeed, which in turn would benefit all of humankind. African American and white women forwarded discourses based on evolutionary progress against a backdrop of racial oppression that infused the fair and projected a model of racial uplift through working together. Chapter 4 examines how women considered membership and ser vice in voluntary organizations as platforms for citizenship. Women partic ipated in civil society and shaped their futures, and the futures of their nations, through organized womanhood. Finally, Maddux focuses on women's industrial participation and financial leadership as political prac tice in Chapter 5. Through speeches based in liberalism and republicanism, says Maddux, "these speakers offered models of female financial leader ship" and portrayed this leadership as an act of citizenship (172). The con clusion attends to...
August 2020
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Review: <i>Plato on the Value of Philosophy: The Art of Argument in the Gorgias and Phaedrus</i>, by Tushar Irani and <i>The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion</i>, by James L. Kastely ↗
Abstract
Book Review| August 01 2020 Review: Plato on the Value of Philosophy: The Art of Argument in the Gorgias and Phaedrus, by Tushar Irani and The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion, by James L. Kastely Tushar Irani, Plato on the Value of Philosophy: The Art of Argument in the Gorgias and Phaedrus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, xiv + 217 pp. ISBN 9781316855621James L. Kastely, The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015, xvii + 260 pp. ISBN 9780226278629 Robin Reames Robin Reames University of Illinois at Chicago Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (3): 328–332. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.3.328 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 Robin Reames; Review: Plato on the Value of Philosophy: The Art of Argument in the Gorgias and Phaedrus, by Tushar Irani and The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion, by James L. Kastely. Rhetorica 1 August 2020; 38 (3): 328–332. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.3.328 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. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Review: <i>Lecturing the Atlantic: Speech, Print, and an Anglo-American Commons, 1830–1870</i>, by Tom F. Wright ↗
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Book Review| August 01 2020 Review: Lecturing the Atlantic: Speech, Print, and an Anglo-American Commons, 1830–1870, by Tom F. Wright Tom F. Wright. Lecturing the Atlantic: Speech, Print, and an Anglo-American Commons, 1830–1870. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, xi + 245 pp. ISBN 9780190496791 Granville Ganter Granville Ganter St. John's University, Queens, New York Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (3): 323–325. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.3.323 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 Granville Ganter; Review: Lecturing the Atlantic: Speech, Print, and an Anglo-American Commons, 1830–1870, by Tom F. Wright. Rhetorica 1 August 2020; 38 (3): 323–325. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.3.323 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. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Book Review| August 01 2020 Review: La prière dans la tradition platonicienne, de Platon à Proclus, by Andrei Timotin Timotin, Andrei, La prière dans la tradition platonicienne, de Platon à Proclus. Turnhout, Brepols [coll. Recherches sur les rhétoriques religieuses], 2017, 296 pp. Jean-François Pradeau Jean-François Pradeau Université Lyon III – Jean Moulin Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (3): 325–328. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.3.325 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 Jean-François Pradeau; Review: La prière dans la tradition platonicienne, de Platon à Proclus, by Andrei Timotin. Rhetorica 1 August 2020; 38 (3): 325–328. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.3.325 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. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Abstract
The Cane Ridge Revival drew nearly twenty thousand participants, sparking the transformative Second Great Awakening. Barton Stone was the minister who organized and shared preaching responsibilities for the revival, and eventually, his disciples formed one of the largest American religious traditions, the Stone-Campbell Movement. In this paper, I examine portions of nine fictional dialogues published by Stone during the final year of his life, wherein he explicitly outlined the parameters of effective rhetoric or “useful preaching.” I argue that Stone developed a rhetorical theory that rebelled against authority by granting agency to the audience even in the processes of invention and interpretation, a theory that produced idiosyncratic theological convictions and a movement practically incapable of confessional unity.
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1 Corinthians 10:1–4: The Rhetorical-Poetic Effect of Vividness and Emotions in Paul's Exhortation to Monotheism in the Context of 10:1–22 ↗
Abstract
In 1 Cor. 10:1–22, Paul deals with the role of Christ and his relationship to God. This is an important ethical topic that Paul deems necessary to discuss with the Corinthian believers. In order to make an effective, thus persuasive, argument, he follows the ancient Greco-Roman tradition of rhetoric and poetics. I argue that vv. 1–4 is Paul's introduction to his vivid representation of monotheism (vv. 5–22). As he presents his narrative of the wilderness events, he employs various rhetorical-poetic techniques to evoke in his hearers imaginative and emotional experiences that will transport them into a higher level of ethical consciousness, a new monotheistic reality in Christ.
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Review: <i>Il velo delle parole. L'eufemismo nella lingua e nella storia dei Greci</i>, by Menico Caroli ↗
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Book Review| August 01 2020 Review: Il velo delle parole. L'eufemismo nella lingua e nella storia dei Greci, by Menico Caroli Menico Caroli, Il velo delle parole. L'eufemismo nella lingua e nella storia dei Greci. Bari: Levante editori, 2017, 464 pp. ISBN 9788879496766 Simone Beta Simone Beta Dipartimento di Filologia e critica delle, letterature antiche e moderne, Università di Siena, Via Roma 56, I-53100 Siena beta@unisi.it Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (3): 321–323. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.3.321 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 Simone Beta; Review: Il velo delle parole. L'eufemismo nella lingua e nella storia dei Greci, by Menico Caroli. Rhetorica 1 August 2020; 38 (3): 321–323. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.3.321 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. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
June 2020
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Abstract
The Cane Ridge Revival drew nearly twenty thousand participants, sparking the transformative Second Great Awakening. Barton Stone was the minister who organized and shared preaching responsibilities for the revival, and eventually, his disciples formed one of the largest American religious traditions, the Stone-Campbell Movement. In this paper, I examine portions of nine fictional dialogues published by Stone during the final year of his life, wherein he explicitly outlined the parameters of effective rhetoric or “useful preaching.” I argue that Stone developed a rhetorical theory that rebelled against authority by granting agency to the audience even in the processes of invention and interpretation, a theory that produced idiosyncratic theological convictions and a movement practically incapable of confessional unity.
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1 Corinthians 10:1–4: The Rhetorical-Poetic Effect of Vividness and Emotions in Paul’s Exhortation to Monotheism in the Context of 10:1–22 ↗
Abstract
In 1 Cor. 10:1–22, Paul deals with the role of Christ and his relationship to God. This is an important ethical topic that Paul deems necessary to discuss with the Corinthian believers. In order to make an effective, thus persuasive, argument, he follows the ancient Greco-Roman tradition of rhetoric and poetics. I argue that vv. 1–4 is Paul’s introduction to his vivid representation of monotheism (vv. 5–22). As he presents his narrative of the wilderness events, he employs various rhetorical-poetic techniques to evoke in his hearers imaginative and emotional experiences that will transport them into a higher level of ethical consciousness, a new monotheistic reality in Christ.
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Abstract
Book Reviews Menico Caroli, Il velo delle parole. L'eufemismo nella lingua e nella storia dei Greet. Bari: Levante editori, 2017, 464 pp. ISBN 9788879496766 Parlare di eufemismi a proposito di alcuni autori della letteratura greca, come per esempio Aristofane, potrebbe sembrare un paradosso: come sa bene chi ha preso almeno una volta in mano il mitico saggio di Jeffrey Henderson dedicato alia 'musa maculata',1 Aristofane, e con lui tutti i poeti comici delYarchaia, diceva pane al pane e vino al vino. Eppure non sempre, tra un termine schiettamente osceno e il suo equivalente piu o meno pudico, chi scriveva commedie (o si dedicava ad altri generi letterari che, in modo analogo, non disprezzavano il greco non politically correct, come per esem pio il giambo o l'epigramma) sceglieva il primo. Lo dimostrano i numerosissimi esempi raccolti da Menico Caroli (d'ora in avanti C.) nel suo bellissimo libro II velo delle parole, dedicato al ruolo dell 'eufemismo nella lingua e nella cultura greca (ma con continui sconfinamenti nel mondo romano), nato da una tesi di laurea in Grammatica greca seguita da Francesco De Martino e discussa alEUniversita di Bari. C., che oggi insegna lingua e letteratura greca alEUniversita di Foggia, ha dedicato alia commedia la parte piu cospicua del suo voluminoso saggio (che, se si contano anche le died illustrazioni inserite in fondo al volume, sfiora le cinquecento pagine). L'ultimo capitolo, intitolato L'eufemismo e il comune senso del pudore, discute a lungo dei tentativi (nel complesso, peraltro, assai poco riusciti) di evitare, quando era possibile, il ricorso all'aischrologhia nelle tante scene comiche che riproducevano situazioni francamente oscene. Prima di Aristofane e dei suoi sodali, perd, C. ha affrontato anche altri autori (o meglio, altri ambiti semantici e culturali), dove l'eufemismo ha sem pre giocato un ruolo di primo piano. Nella seconda parte del libro, intitolata Lessico degli eufemismi greci, egli attraversa con sicurezza mondi differenti, passando dalla religione alia filosofia, dalla giurisprudenza alia storia, dalla politica al teatro, utilizzando come base documentaria non solo le testimonianze letterarie, ma anche quelle epigrafiche e papirologiche, che sono state spesso escluse dall'indagine dei linguisti. :J. Henderson, The Maculate Muse. Obscene Language in Attic Comedy (New Haven-London 19751; New York-Oxford 19912). Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVTH, Issue 3, pp. 321-332. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www. ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.38.3.j>21 322 RHETORICA Una posizione particolare occupano i capitoli che aprono la sezione: L’eufemismo e le tenebre della superstizione e "Non abbellirmi la morte''. In questi due capitoli, dedicati alia modalita dell'interdizione magico-religiosa, C. affronta i temi legati al destino dell'uomo e, in particolare, alia morte (quel concetto che, molto piu degli altri, gli antichi - cosi come fanno anche i modemi - cercavano di velare grazie alia tecnica deU'eufemismo). A dimostrazione dell'ampiezza e della profondita della sua indagine c'e inoltre il fatto che, tra i tanti autori vagliati da C., ci sono anche figure secondarie , come per esempio la misteriosa Filenide, la scrittrice di Samo vissuta tra il IV e il III secolo a.C., alia quale si deve il piu antico manuale erotico della civilta occidental, conservato in modo purtroppo estremamente frammentario da un papiro ossirinchita,2 i cui pochi resti vengono discussi nel capitolo La permuta eufemistica del difetto, dedicato al "lessico dei vizi e dei difetti, di natura e di comportamento". Un altro autore poco noto e Damascio di Damasco, ultimo scolarca dell'Accademia filosofica di Atene, che tra il V e il VI secolo d.C. scrisse l'opera Sulla vita del filosofo Isidoro, a noi nota grazie alia 'recensione' che ne fece il patriarca Fozio nella sua Biblioteca-. nello stesso capitolo, C. ricorda come, secondo il suo biografo, Damascio rifiutasse sdegnoso tutti quegli accorgimenti linguistici che permettevano di ridimensionare i difetti e le debolezze degli altri, smascherando quindi la pericolosa vicinanza tra l...
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Plato on the Value of Philosophy: The Art of Argument in the Gorgias and Phaedrus by Tushar Irani, and: The Rhetoric of Plato’s Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion by James L. Kastely ↗
Abstract
328 RHETORICA de cinq siecles qui separe le pseudo-Platon et Maxime). L'ouvrage hesite, puisqu'il mentionne incidemment ces auteurs platoniciens, tout comme il hesite, pour les besoins de son objet, entre un traitement exclusivement philosophique et une approche plus rhetorique de la priere. On forme evidemment ces regrets parce que Ton y est conduit par l'aptitude d'AT a produire des syntheses eclairantes. Sans doute Porphyre et ses predecesseurs platoniciens n'avaient-ils pas lu Lacan, mais ils n'en tenaient pas moins lame pour structuree, consciemment et inconsciemment, comme un langage. Qu'elle ne soit pas exprimee en paroles, phonetiquement, ne change rien au fait qu'elle est foncierement logike (meme si elle se fait sans le truchement du logos, y compris du logos interieur, empreint de passion ; p. 158), qu'elle est de l'ordre du discours et que la pensee est toujours, depuis Platon, un discours, sinon un dialogue. AT nous invite a distinguer de maniere tranchee la priere silencieuse et phi losophique de la priere prononcee. Mais sans doute doit-on temperer cette opposition. La priere silencieuse en quoi consiste l'exercice theoretique de l'intellection, est une forme de communication, de partage et d'entente avec la divinite. C'est ce qui explique, pour n'en retenir qu'un exemple, que les demons soient designes par Porphyre comme des divinites intermediaries, des « transporters » de messages, qui font circuler prieres humaines ou pre scriptions divines en les transmettant d'un destinataire a l'autre. Comme le dit le debut de la longue sequence demonologique du De Abstinentia, en II 36 (§3), c'est la mission proprement angelique des demons que de transmettre des messages et des conseils. Parmi lesquels figurent les prieres. Le silence n'est aucunement suspension de l'expression et de la communication entre les hommes et les dieux. L'ouvrage d'AT connaitra la meme fortune que sa precedente synthese« demonologique », en devenant l'etude de reference sur son objet. Jean-Francois Pradeau Universite Lyon III - Jean Moulin Tushar Irani, Plato on the Value of Philosophy: The Art of Argument in the Gorgias and Phaedrus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, xiv + 217 pp. ISBN 9781316855621 James L. Kastely, The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015, xvii + 260 pp. ISBN 9780226278629 Scholarship on rhetoric in Plato habitually suffers from certain limita tions. While recent decades have seen profound revolutions in how Plato's dialogues are read and interpreted (inspiring profound changes in Plato Book Reviews 329 scholarship generally), these changes have had too little impact on how Plato's treatment of sophistry and rhetoric is conceived. Among the most important of these changes is the development of literary-dramatic readings of the dialogues, which consider the works' philosophical content by relation to their literary form as dialogues. According to this view, reading Plato entails an awareness of dialogue's distinctive capacity for masking authorial intention and voice. Such a reading resists the hasty assumption that the works put forth Plato's dogmatic or doctrinal positions for which Socrates was the presumed mouthpiece. Rather, as literary-dramatic representations, the dialogues give voice to indirect positions and hidden views. In spite of this enhanced sensitivity to Plato's authorial choices, there has been on the whole no significant alteration to the view that Plato held rhetoric in contempt or extreme distrust, believing it to be a sham art, a threat to true philosophy, and an inferior method to dialectic. Hence rhetoric is mere rhetoric—the lesser counterpart of philosophy, useful only for speaking to ignorant masses, for whom more rational methods are ineffectual. He may have offered marginal and grudging allowance for rhetoric in the Phaedrus dialogue, but only as an unrealizable ideal that sacrifices practical effectiveness. This leads to the second limitation. Studies of rhetoric in Plato often orbit around the two dialogues where rhetoric is treated most explicitly— the Gorgias and the Phaedrus—and neglect the relevance of many of Plato's other dialogues for understanding his conception of rhetoric, despite the fact that language, rhetoric, and sophistry are abiding (albeit implicit) concerns across the corpus of dialogues. Where these...
May 2020
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La Construcción Retórica de la Ciencia por el Joven Adam Smith: The Rhetoric Construction of Science by the Young Adam Smith ↗
Abstract
El presente artículo interpreta la obra de Adam Smith a partir de la retórica. Basándose en el análisis comparativo de los textos, afirma la dependencia de la Historia de la Astronomía con respecto a las Lecciones sobre retórica y, con ello, la naturaleza retórica del uso smithiano de la ciencia. Tras analizar las metáforas utilizadas por Smith, deja de lado la metáfora gravitacional y la de la mano invisible y se centra en las basadas en el teatro y en la analogía con la máquina. De esto concluye que Smith recurrió al potencial constructivo de la retórica para superar el escepticismo humeano, lo cual, a su vez, tiene consecuencias sobre nuestra comprensión de la historia de la retórica.
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Abstract
Book Review| May 01 2020 Invention and Authorship in Medieval England, by Robert R. Edwards Robert R.Edwards, Invention and Authorship in Medieval England (Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture), Columbus: The Ohio State Press, 2017. 230 pp. ISBN 9780814213407 Jordan Loveridge Jordan Loveridge Jordan Loveridge Departments of Communication and English Mount Saint Mary's University 16300 Old Emmitsburg Rd. Emmitsburg, MD 21727 Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (2): 232–234. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.232 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 Jordan Loveridge; Invention and Authorship in Medieval England, by Robert R. Edwards. Rhetorica 1 May 2020; 38 (2): 232–234. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.232 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. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Abstract
Book Review| May 01 2020 Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives: Composing Pasts and Futures, by Jean Bessette JeanBessette, Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives: Composing Pasts and Futures. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017, 202 pp. ISBN 9780809336234 Morgan DiCesare Morgan DiCesare Morgan DiCesare Department of Communication Studies University of Iowa 25 South Madison Street Iowa City, IA 52242 morgan-dicesare@uiowa.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (2): 225–227. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.225 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 Morgan DiCesare; Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives: Composing Pasts and Futures, by Jean Bessette. Rhetorica 1 May 2020; 38 (2): 225–227. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.225 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. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Abstract
Book Review| May 01 2020 The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory, by Peter A. O'Connell Peter A.O'Connell, The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017, 282 pp. ISBN 9781477311684 Ruth Webb Ruth Webb Ruth Webb Universite dé Lille ruth.webb@univ-lille.fr Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (2): 227–229. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.227 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 Ruth Webb; The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory, by Peter A. O'Connell. Rhetorica 1 May 2020; 38 (2): 227–229. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.227 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. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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<i>Speeches for the Dead: Essays on Plato's Menexenus</i> by Harold Parker and Jan Maximilian Robitzsch ↗
Abstract
Book Review| May 01 2020 Speeches for the Dead: Essays on Plato's Menexenus by Harold Parker and Jan Maximilian Robitzsch HaroldParker and Jan MaximilianRobitzsch, eds., Speeches for the Dead: Essays on Plato's Menexenus, (Beiträge zur Altertumskunde 368), Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2018. 202 pp. ISBN 9783110573978 Peter A. O'Connell Peter A. O'Connell Peter A. O'Connell Departments of Classics and Communication Studies The University of Georgia Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (2): 229–232. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.229 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 Peter A. O'Connell; Speeches for the Dead: Essays on Plato's Menexenus by Harold Parker and Jan Maximilian Robitzsch. Rhetorica 1 May 2020; 38 (2): 229–232. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.229 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. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Abstract
In Plato's early dialogues, the impossibility of talking to the crowd appears as a constitutive element of the opposition between rhetoric and dialectic and raises the understudied question of the role of the audience in Socratic thought. However, Xenophon's Socrates constantly identifies public and private speech. But this likening is also found in the Alcibiades Major, which gives a key to understand the true meaning of this assimilation: one can convince an audience, by talking to each individual in the crowd. The need to address each one implies an adaptation of language that can be found in the texts of different disciples of Socrates. The rhetorical aspects of the Phaedrus' psychagogia should then be understood, not as a new Platonic concept which allows the good orator to address the many, but rather as a new formulation of a well-known and shared Socratic ideal.
March 2020
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Book Reviews 227 compelling theoretically, the case study did not fully examine the implications of the project's reliance on homonormativity. Bessette concludes with two provocations for the future of queer retroactivism. First, she argues that a near-future task may be to challenge the centrality of corporations in digital media production. And second, she follows Carla Freccero in noting that the hauntological past must be heard, on its own terms. Bessette's work with a variety of grassroots lesbian archives is an engaging read and offers a useful approach to historical scholarship. But I felt that she did not spend enough time parsing out the affordances and limitations of grassroots archives in relation to their institutional counterparts. Fittingly, Bessette's most important insight is her notion of retroactivism, a concept that can hopefully open up more space for reconsidering archival identification, queer or otherwise, into the future. Morgan DiCesare University of Iowa Peter A. O'Connell, The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017, 282 pp. ISBN 9781477311684 The close connections between rhetorical and theatrical performance as two of the major types of civic spectacle in Classical Athens are well esta blished, but we are hampered by the fact that our knowledge of courtroom practice is largely dependent on the surviving texts of the speeches. Unlike their Roman counterparts, the surviving fourth-century Greek treatises have little to say about delivery or about the type of spectacular effects alluded to in Attic comedy and in the speeches themselves, which creates a challenge to the modem researcher. Peter O'Connell's book, based on his PhD disser tation, is one of several recent studies to take up that challenge1 and is dis tinguished by its focus on sight and visual effects in Athenian trials. O'Connell's book stands out for its focus on the role of vision, both physical and mental, and metaphors of sight in forensic oratory (with a brief foray into the funeral oration). It makes an important contribution to the study of vivid language and visual effects as an integral part of the process of persuasion and underlines the continuing importance of these tools through modem comparisons. The author's solution to the lack of theoretical discussions contemporary with the speeches is to draw principally on an impressively wide range of ancient speeches, giving close readings of ^ee, for example, N. Villaceque, Spectateurs de Paroles: Deliberation democratique et theatre a Athenes a Vepoque classique (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013) and A. Serafim, Attic Oratory and Performance (London : Routledge, 2017). 228 RHETORICA selected passages (summaries of all the speeches discussed are given in an invaluable appendix). The astute close readings of these passages are supple mented by appeals - made with all due caution — to the critical and theoreti cal discussions of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. The result sheds a new light on the functioning of judicial oratory as a multi-sensory persuasive per formance, though the nature of the material inevitably raises some questions. All the major passages are quoted in the Greek and in the author's own English versions. The choice of a very literal translation style serves to clarify the sense of the words discussed but at the occasional cost of fluidity. The first of the book's three parts asks what was visible to the jury within the courtroom, analysing passages that comment on the impact of the presence and physical appearance of the various parties to the case in the courtroom and of material evidence. Against the background of the close association of vision and knowledge in the Greek language, the second section analyses the importance of vision and of metaphors of vision in Athenian law, forensic oratory, and, beyond the courts, in classical Greek philosophical and medical texts. It is here that O'Connell, through citations from Sophists such as Protagoras, Antiphon, and Gorgias, raises the vital epis temological question of how juries could decide upon events they had not themselves witnessed. This is backed up by an illuminating analysis of the lan guage of visibility in Antiphon and in Gorgias' Defense of Palamedes, which explores the challenge of proving the non-existence...
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Abstract
I argue here that the medieval French Philomena, found exclusively within the Ovide moralisé, a fourteenth-century translation and adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, adumbrates a theory of vocal repetition as an aesthetic that is shared by both birds and humans. Various common rhetorical devices that foreground acoustic reduplication appear in high density in the text, where they are often collocated with evocations of birdsong. After exploring the parallels between these devices and the structure of avian vocalization, I show the presence of several passages in the text that can be read simultaneously as onomatopoeic evocations of birdsong and as standard referential language. I also propose a solution to the mysterious label associated with the text's author, "Chrétien li gois" ("Chretien the jay").
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Book Reviews 229 O'Connell is very effective when analysing the use of vivid language to make the audience imagine scenes they have not witnessed themselves, dis cussing Aeschines' passage on the sack of Thebes, Demosthenes on Phokis, and Lycurgus on the scene at Athens after the catastrophic military defeat at Chaeronea. His analyses make use of both ancient criticism and modem lit erary tools. Taken together, they make a strong case for accepting the ancient commentators' evaluation of these passages as able to make the audience "see" the scene in imagination. The most stimulating part of this final section however is the final chapter on "shared spectatorship" with its examples of the interaction between the mental images of past actions or absent persons created by the orators' language and the actual sights of the courtroom. O'Connell shows how the orators encourage a type of mental superimposition (my term) of the idea of the sight evoked - and created - by the orator onto the accused present in the courtroom. This is particularly satisfying as an example of actual and virtual sights being used as a sustained strategy throughout a speech and underlines the multiple possibilities for manipulation. One area that could have been addressed in more detail is the sugges tion on p. 32 that appearance—real or imagined—might spark a process of enthymematic reasoning (the accused has the commonly accepted characte ristics of a murderer/adulterer therefore it is likely that he is guilty as char ged). But this rich and stimulating study has a great deal to offer specialists in ancient and modem rhetoric and in ancient Greek literature and culture. Ruth Webb Universite de Lille Harold Parker and Jan Maximilian Robitzsch, eds., Speeches for the Dead: Essays on Plato's Menexenus, (Beitrage zur Altertumskunde 368), Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2018. 202 pp. ISBN 9783110573978 Plato's Menexenus is a rhetorical masterpiece. That, at any rate, seems to have been the judgment of generations of Athenians, who, Cicero tells us, had someone recite Socrates' funeral oration annually (Orator 151). The speech can be stirring, especially when Socrates speaks in the voice of the dead soldiers and urges their sons to lives of virtue. But is it sincere? Before he delivers the speech, Socrates claims that it is easy to give funeral orations, since all you have to do is praise Athenians to Athenians. The speech misrepresents historical events and doesn't even reflect Socrates own sentiments, since he attributes it to Pericles mistress Aspasia. To make matters worse, Socrates seems to be delivering the speech years after he, and probably Aspasia as well, had died. The puzzles of the Menexenus have no easy answer. Unable to resolve its contradictions in a satisfactory t47av, scholars have tended to focus on its relationship with other surviving 230 RHETORICA Athenian funeral orations and with the rest of Plato's works. This thoughtprovoking volume is no exception. The contributors approach the text from the perspectives of philosophy and political thought, but their argu ments will also be inspiring to readers interested in rhetoric in Plato and in Classical Athens. After a brief introduction, Speechesfor the Dead reprints Charles H. Kahn's 1963 article, "Plato's Funeral Oration: The Motive of the Menexenus" Kahn argues that the Menexenus is a political pamphlet, expressing Plato's dislike of the policies of Pericles and his successors, especially the capitulation to Persia in the King's Peace of 386. The eight new essays in Speeches for the Dead are influenced not so much by Kahn's specific arguments as by his approach, which poses five questions about the Menexenus: Why Aspasia? Why the anachronisms? Why the historical distortions? Why did Plato write a funeral oration? Why did that oration continue to be delivered years after it was written? Only some of the authors invoke these questions directly, but a fundamental "why" lies behind each of the essays. They all seek to explain why the Menexenus is the way it is by treating it as a work of serious Platonic philosophy. In "Reading the Menexenus Intertextually," Mark Zelcer takes seriously Socrates' claim that Aspasia composed the speech he delivers by gluing together pieces she had left...
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232 RHETORICA concludes it is the definitive guide to the Menexenus that the back cover pro mises, there is something here for everyone who wants to think critically about the dialogue and its problems. Peter A. O'Connell The University of Georgia Robert R. Edwards, Invention and Authorship in Medieval England (Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture), Columbus: The Ohio State Press, 2017. 230 pp. ISBN 9780814213407 It is a philological distinction commonly invoked by historians of rhetoric that invention, rhetoric's first and arguably foremost canon, has something of a double meaning. The Latin invenire can mean "to find" or "to come upon," or it can mean "to create" or "to contrive." In Invention and Authorship in Medieval England, Robert Edwards shows how medieval authors invented (in both senses of the term) authorial identities that wor ked within accepted traditions of literary production and interpretation, and also sometimes questioned or subverted those traditions, showing that "authorship is at once rhetorical and literary, historical and poetic" (xi). Yet, while Edwards observes that rhetorical theory was an important ele ment of literary production and of identification with distinct traditions, the relationship between the literary, the rhetorical, and distinct models of authorship remains comparatively underexplored. The result is a deep and compelling literary analysis of canonical English authors such as Marie de France, Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, but a somewhat incom plete discussion of the intersection of rhetoric and poetics in English literary culture. This incompleteness, however, should not dissuade the prospective reader from engaging with this text. Edwards' deep knowledge of classical and medieval culture is evident throughout all of the chapters of Invention and Authorship in Medieval England. Indeed, the relationship of each literary figure to classical and vernacular traditions is of paramount concern to Edwards, as he notes that "the agency . . . working in medieval English texts consciously foregrounds the decision to write within traditions and conventions" (xv), meaning that authors only achieve authorship by "consciously placing themselves through their works within the interpretive structure of a literary system" (xvi). Each chapter, then, endeavors to place each literary figure within such a liter ary system. Chapter 2, for instance, demonstrates how Marie de France "exer cises agency to revise her received materials [e.g. primarily those of Ovid] from popular and learned sources and to create a hybrid classicism in which she operates as a counterpart and conscious alternative to a Latin auetor" (34). In general, Edwards' claims in regard to such systems are well-defended; for instance, he thoroughly defends his assertion that "in Ovid's Book Reviews 233 erotodidactic poems . . . Marie finds a topic and conceptual frame for invention and authorship rather than rhetorical adornment and learned allusion" (40). This assessment is itself valuable, as it counters common readings of Marie (and indeed, many other medieval authors) that reduce their receptions and appropriations of classical literary culture to derivate borrowings, as Edwards himself observes (39). Likewise, Edwards' discus sion of Gower and his use of elements of scribal and textual culture—such as the accessus,- prologues, paratexts, and others (63-104)—is well-supported and fascinating. Yet, some other chapters, such as the section on Chaucer, do not fully account for the potential influence of contemporary theories of rhetoric and poetics that would have been instrumental for defining attitudes toward lit erary authorship. This omission is striking, first, because Edwards observes the connections between literary authorship and rhetoric in the introductory chapters of his text, and second, because his incorporation of scholarship by historians of rhetoric such as Rita Copeland and James J. Murphy suggests a knowledge of this sub-field and how it may have influenced English literary attitudes. For example, while Edwards observes that Chaucer is associated with a catalogue of works by his contemporaries, as well as that these works are largely "generated through forms of poetic imitation," (110) it was sur prising to see that he made little connection to the tradition of the medieval artes poetriae (aside from a reference in a footnote citing Murphy, which men tioned Geoffrey of Vinsauf and Matthew of Venddme). Arguably these artes represent an early example of the codification of contemporary medieval poets such as Alan of...
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Abstract
In Plato’s early dialogues, the impossibility of talking to the crowd appears as a constitutive element of the opposition between rhetoric and dialectic and raises the understudied question of the role of the audience in Socratic thought. However, Xenophon’s Socrates constantly identifies public and private speech. But this likening is also found in the Alcibiades Major, which gives a key to understand the true meaning of this assimilation: one can convince an audience, by talking to each individual in the crowd. The need to address each one implies an adaptation of language that can be found in the texts of different disciples of Socrates. The rhetorical aspects of the Phaedrus’ psychagogia should then be understood, not as a new Platonic concept which allows the good orator to address the many, but rather as a new formulation of a well-known and shared Socratic ideal.
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Abstract
Book Reviews Jean Bessette, Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives: Composing Pasts and Futures. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017, 202 pp. ISBN 9780809336234 Since queer, feminist, and rhetorical scholars have "returned" to the archive over the past twenty years, Bessette's book brings queer and feminist archival theories to bear on rhetorical studies. Bessette is concerned with how lesbian collectives have composed a past for themselves and oriented themselves toward new possibilities for identification that could challenge "then-present social and political denigrations of same-sex desire and rela tionships" (2). The result is a retooling of familiar rhetorical concepts for the study and historiographic consideration of queer and feminist collective pasts. Bessette's rewriting of archival logics through rhetorical concepts is useful for both queer rhetoricians and wider archival studies. Particularly, her read ing of identification through retroactivism and the notion of "documenting the search" offer new approaches for any archival engagement (125). The book begins with the theoretical insights of queer and feminist archival scholarship before turning to specific technologies in each chapter that offer insights into the retroactivist impulses of lesbian rhetors and lesbian communities. Bessette begins by drawing on Lucas Hilderbrand's "retroactivism," a concept that Hilderbrand uses to engage his longings for a personal and nostalgic queer past. Bessette links retroactivism to the account of identifica tion given by Kenneth Burke to argue that grassroots collectives sought the "displacement—and replacing—of pejorative accounts of lesbianism with new versions of the past" (10). These revisions of the past were marshalled to produce different definitions of lesbianism and open space for alternative futures. She argues that rhetorical studies, and particularly Burke's under standing of identification, already offer the requisite tools for engagements with queer archives. Chapter one contends that Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon's influential book LesbianANoman is itself an archive. Bessette reads the short personal stories contained in LesbianANoman as anecdotes that demonstrate the ephemeraUty of the queer archive (26). She argues that these anecdotes were arranged to produce a respectable white middle-class narrative of lesbian identity, in line with the goals of its authors who were leaders in the Daughters of Bilitis. This identity was framed to challenge dominant homophobic social narratives, and Bessette centers the function of exclusion in identification. Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVhl, Issue 2, pp. 225-234. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www. ucpress.edu/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.38.2.225 226 RHETORICA Whereas chapter one addresses a printed text as archive, chapter two turns to a "place-based" understanding of archives through a reading of the Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA) and the June L. Mazer Archives (JLMA). Bessette argues that classification in the LHA, an archive which accepts "any thing a lesbian has touched," operates as a "rhetorical topos" which "blurs the boundaries between archival categories, creating the conditions for a genera tive, flexible identity" (61). Bessette contends that the LHA offers the possibil ity of making seemingly disparate connections through browsing. Bessette then turns to the JLMA and a photograph collage from Ester Bentley that sits in view outside of the domain of a particular collection. Due to its position, she argues that these photos instill in visitors a sense of possibility for historical connection that crosses the categories of the archive. The chapter concludes with a brief review of the JLMA's recent partnership with UCLA. Bessette suggests that the queemess of the JLMA's collection may be lost when viewing their materials in UCLA's straight, institutional reading room, a point I believe needs additional substantiation. Chapter three turns to documentary films and their "fabrication of the past" (95). Bessette reads these films as allowing for a composition of lesbian histories that challenge "dependencies upon lesbian history for present sexual identification" (97). Bessette analyzes five historiographic lesbian films through a relevant multimodal rhetorical strategy. The films and their respective strategies include "unstable identity categories" in The Female...
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La Constructión Retórica de la Ciencia por el Joven Adam Smith: The Rhetoric Construction of Science by the Young Adam Smith ↗
Abstract
El presente artículo interprets la obra de Adam Smith a partir de la retórica. Basándose en el análisis comparative de los textos, afirma la dependencia de la <i>Historic de la Astronomía</i> con respecto a las <i>Lecciones sobre retórica</i> y, con ello, la naturaleza retórica del uso smithiano de la ciencia. Tras analizar las metáforas utilizadas por Smith, deja de lado la metáfora gravitacional y la de la mano invisible y se centra en las basadas en el teatro y en la analogía con la máquina. De esto concluye que Smith recurrió al potencial constructive de la retórica para superar el escepticismo humeano, lo cual, a su vez, tiene consecuencias sobre nuestra comprensión de la historia de la retórica.
February 2020
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Review: The Concept of Conversation: From Cicero's Sermo to the Grand Siècle's Conversation and The Conversational Enlightenment: The Reconception of Rhetoric in Eighteenth-Century Thought, by David Randall ↗
Abstract
Book Review| February 01 2020 Review: The Concept of Conversation: From Cicero's Sermo to the Grand Siècle's Conversation and The Conversational Enlightenment: The Reconception of Rhetoric in Eighteenth-Century Thought, by David Randall David Randall, The Concept of Conversation: From Cicero's Sermo to the Grand Siècle's Conversation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018, vi + 266 pp. ISBN 9781474430104David Randall, The Conversational Enlightenment: The Reconception of Rhetoric in Eighteenth-Century Thought, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019, vii + 288 pp. ISBN 9781474448666 James Donathan Garner James Donathan Garner James Donathan Garner Department of Rhetoric and Writing University of Texas at Austin 204 W 21ST ST Austin, TX 78712 j.garner@utexas.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (1): 122–126. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.122 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 James Donathan Garner; Review: The Concept of Conversation: From Cicero's Sermo to the Grand Siècle's Conversation and The Conversational Enlightenment: The Reconception of Rhetoric in Eighteenth-Century Thought, by David Randall. Rhetorica 1 February 2020; 38 (1): 122–126. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.122 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Abstract
The presence of a singular rhetorical figure, the dialogismos, in Charisius' Ars grammatica, in Iulius Ruphinianus' De figuris and in some exegetical notes by Donatus to Terence, yields the opportunity to reflect on the mutual influences between rhetoric and grammar in the textbooks of the Late Empire. A mediating role seems to be played by the Progymnasmata.
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Abstract
Book Review| February 01 2020 Review: From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics, by Quentin Skinner Quentin Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, xiii + 432 pp. ISBN 9781107128859 Kathy Eden Kathy Eden Kathy Eden English Department Columbia University 602 Philosophy Hall New York, New York 10027 khe1@columbia.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (1): 118–122. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.118 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 Kathy Eden; Review: From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics, by Quentin Skinner. Rhetorica 1 February 2020; 38 (1): 118–122. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.118 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Staging Oratory in Renaissance Germany: The Delivery of Andrés Laguna's Europa Heautentimorumene (1543) ↗
Abstract
Not much is known about the actual practice of delivering orations in the Renaissance. In some instances—particularly in instances of orations held at universities—there is the possibility to consult sources like the diaries of the faculties, in order to get some information about the actio of a specific oration. In other instances, sometimes the printed orations themselves, the context they were given in, the author's rhetorical upbringing, and the links between oratory and contemporary acting can provide indications of the way orations were performed. The Latin oration Europa heautentimorumene by the Spanish doctor Andrés Laguna, which was delivered in January 1543 at the University of Cologne and printed shortly afterwards, constitutes such a case.
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Abstract
Book Review| February 01 2020 Review: An Argument on Rhetorical Style, by Marie Lund Marie Lund, An Argument on Rhetorical Style. Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2017, 220 pp. $25 (paper). ISBN 9788771844344 Arthur E. Walzer Arthur E. Walzer Arthur Walzer Professor Emeritus, Communication Studies University of Minnesota 40 Prospect Park W, 1J Brooklyn, NY 11215 awalzer@umn.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (1): 129–132. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.129 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 Arthur E. Walzer; Review: An Argument on Rhetorical Style, by Marie Lund. Rhetorica 1 February 2020; 38 (1): 129–132. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.129 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
January 2020
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Staging Oratory in Renaissance Germany: The Delivery of Andrés Laguna’s Europa Heautentimorumene (1543) ↗
Abstract
Not much is known about the actual practice of delivering orations in the Renaissance. In some instances—particularly in instances of orations held at universities—there is the possibility to consult sources like the diaries of the faculties, in order to get some information about the actio of a specific oration. In other instances, sometimes the printed orations themselves, the context they were given in, the author’s rhetorical upbringing, and the links between oratory and contemporary acting can provide indications of the way orations were performed. The Latin oration Europa heautentimorumene by the Spanish doctor Andrés Laguna, which was delivered in January 1543 at the University of Cologne and printed shortly afterwards, constitutes such a case.
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Abstract
The presence of a singular rhetorical figure, the dialogismos, in Charisius’ Ars grammatica, in Iulius Ruphinianus’ De figuris and in some exegetical notes by Donatus to Terence, yields the opportunity to reflect on the mutual influences between rhetoric and grammar in the textbooks of the Late Empire. A mediating role seems to be played by the Progymnasmata.