Rhetorica
2062 articlesAugust 2017
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Abstract
While Ellen Terry's Shakespearean roles are commonly discussed in considerations of her work, the actress's involvement with the comic play Nance Oldfield is glossed over if not entirely overlooked. However, Terry bought the rights to this play, revised the script with Bram Stoker, performed the leading role, and invoked this semi-fictional figure across the latter part of her career. This essay examines public theatrical ephemera in conjunction with personal photographs of Terry dressed up as Oldfield at home and the extensive marginalia on Terry's copy of the script to argue that Terry's assumption of ‘Nance Oldfield’ was a rhetorical performance. Terry's alliance with this character, as an on-stage character and an off-stage alter ego, led her to speak with greater confidence about her own professional life and about women's public role in nineteenth-century England.
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Book Review| August 01 2017 Review: Women's Irony: Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories, by Tarez Samra Graban Tarez Samra Graban, Women's Irony: Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories. Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms Series. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. 258 pp. ISBN 978-0-8093-3418-6 Tiffany Kinney Tiffany Kinney University of Utah, Salt Lake City Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2017) 35 (3): 368–370. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2017.35.3.368 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 Tiffany Kinney; Review: Women's Irony: Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories, by Tarez Samra Graban. Rhetorica 1 August 2017; 35 (3): 368–370. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2017.35.3.368 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. © 2017 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.2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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The Artistry of Civil Life: Deliberative Rhetoric and Political Pedagogy in the Work of Nicolaus Vernulaeus (1583–1649)* ↗
Abstract
Attempting to re-invigorate classical deliberative oratory, the Leuven professor of rhetoric Nicolaus Vernulaeus developed a new kind of political eloquence adapted to the needs of counsellors and diplomats working in the service of a monarch. In the present article we shall highlight his largely forgotten contribution to late humanist rhetorical theory and practice. We shall try to show that his rhetorical programme was based on a cogent, pointedly rhetorical view of political life. By analyzing the student orations which were composed under his guidance and subsequently published by him, we shall furthermore try to demonstrate that his training programme was consistent and practical, some striking discrepancies between theory and practice notwithstanding.
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Book Review| August 01 2017 Review: Epideictic Rhetoric: Questioning the Stakes of Ancient Praise, by Laurent Pernot Laurent Pernot, Epideictic Rhetoric: Questioning the Stakes of Ancient Praise, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. xiv, 166 pp. ISBN 978-1-4773-1133-2 Brad L. Cook Brad L. Cook University of Mississippi Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2017) 35 (3): 370–372. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2017.35.3.370 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 Brad L. Cook; Review: Epideictic Rhetoric: Questioning the Stakes of Ancient Praise, by Laurent Pernot. Rhetorica 1 August 2017; 35 (3): 370–372. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2017.35.3.370 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. © 2017 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.2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Abstract
Although highly innovative in its blend of medieval Aristotelian with Horatian and Ciceronian doctrine, the Poetria by the fourteenth-century Swedish writer Mathias of Linköping survives in only one manuscript copy and appears to have had little or no influence outside Sweden. Likely reasons for its failure to gain traction among late medieval teachers of Latin composition are (1) its sharp separation of prose from poetry, (2) its implication that verse composition is a more advanced subject than prose composition, and (3) its disproportionate reliance on theoretical precepts rather than illustrative examples.
June 2017
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Abstract
368 RHETORIC A La bibliografía (pp. 315-340) conclude questo lavoro che si qualifica per la capacité di mettere a fuoco le problematiche delle due declamazioni, nella loro dialettica tra retorica e diritto, e per la possibile apertura di nuove ipotesi di lettura che permettano di ampliare la portata delle modalité retoriche attestate in testi del genere. Sergio Audano, Centro di Studi sulla Fortuna dell'Antico "Emanuele Narducci" - Sestri Levante Tarez Samra Graban, Women's Irony: Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories. Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms Series. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. 258 pp. ISBN 978-0-8093-3418-6 Graban contributes to the field of feminist rhetorical studies by devel oping irony as a critical paradigm to read archives, revisit histories, and reconsider the role of the feminist historian. In her analysis chapters, Graban examines three famous archives of rhetorical agitators: Anne Askew (Renaissance rhetoric), Anne Hutchinson (colonial American rhetoric), and Helen Gougar (American suffragist rhetoric). In her introduction, Graban presents irony as a critical paradigm by differentiating it from previous work that associates it with intention, humor, lying, and evasion. Next, she develops a theory to explore women's ironic, political discourse, which she does by tracing the incompatibilities inside archival documents to facilitate discursive activism and critical disrup tion (p 2). She outlines the scholarly contours of irony as a critical paradigm described as a "reading practice . . . [which allows readers to] question our sense of normative categories" (p. 174). In this chapter, Graban also presents a methodology for employing irony as a critical paradigm. This methodol ogy involves three steps: 1) asking "what consciousness is being raised?," 2) considering "how irony works to reveal other logics," and 3) accounting for the extralinguistic locations of rhetors, audiences, and topoi (pp. 171-72). Graban highlights ironic instances and their potential using three specific methodological advances: interstitial witnessing (chapter one), panhistorical agency (chapter two), and a typology of discursive attitudes (chapter three and four). In the first chapter, Graban posits interstitial witnessing as a method for analyzing ironic discourse because it involves "looking between" or "finding gaps in historical processes" (p. 42). Graban strategically employs interstitial witnessing to locate historical "residue," textual and metadiscursive evidence, to argue that Anne Askew's irony functions as agential. Askew was one of four female martyrs burned by King Henry the VIII and her Examinations chronicle her trial and persecution for heresy. Here, Graban describes Askew's Examinations and her refusal to cooperate during her trial as Reviews 369 undermining public examinations and thereby, ironically, "elid[ing] expec ted outcomes" (p. 25). Askew's performance blurs the genre of "questioning a witness by evading questions and her structure of the Examinations blends genres, specifically dialogues, polemics, and pamphlets. Graban advances Askew s discourse as ironic, because it plays off of incompatible genre expec tations, and agential as it is defined by "the function, uses, purposes, and practices in which they [the discourses] occur and from which they result" (p. 50). In her second chapter, Graban re-reads interpretations of Anne Hutchinson's archive, specifically her responses during her trial that led to her expulsion from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Here, Graban develops another concept, drawing from Debra Hawhee's "pan-historiography."1 Graban maintains that this chronologically and kairotically expansive approach, the pan-historical approach, as she calls it, allows for critics to under stand rhetorical theory7 as synchronic and diachronic because it involves selecting archives from different times based on their content and therefore sets a precedent to move outside of periodization, or portraying certain figu res as "representative entities of particular stances, positions," or identities (p. 9). Also Hutchinson's performance elides gender expectations, as she is a woman expected to keep her experiences silent and private, yet she is per mitted to participate in intellectual debate, thereby performing as masculine in public. This performance blends spheres as public language articulates pri vate experience and through this blending, Hutchinson's trial performance expands women's civic and ecclesiastical duties. In her third and fourth chapters, Graban advances through two centuries to analyze the extensive archive of Helen Gougar, American Suffragist from the state of Indiana. Instead of examining how irony works...
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Abstract
Although highly innovative in its blend of medieval Aristotelian with Horatian and Ciceronian doctrine, the Poetria by the fourteenth-century Swedish writer Mathias of Linköping survives in only one manuscript copy and appears to have had little or no influence outside Sweden. Likely reasons for its failure to gain traction among late medieval teachers of Latin composition are (1) its sharp separation of prose from poetry, (2) its implication that verse composition is a more advanced subject than prose composition, and (3) its disproportionate reliance on theoretical precepts rather than illustrative examples.
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The Artistry of Civil Life. Deliberative Rhetoric and Political Pedagogy in the Work of Nicolaus Vernulaeus (1583–1649) ↗
Abstract
Attempting to re-invigorate classical deliberative oratory, the Leuven professor of rhetoric Nicolaus Vernulaeus developed a new kind of political eloquence adapted to the needs of counsellors and diplomats working in the service of a monarch. In the present article we shall highlight his largely forgotten contribution to late humanist rhetorical theory and practice. We shall try to show that his rhetorical programme was based on a cogent, pointedly rhetorical view of political life. By analyzing the student orations which were composed under his guidance and subsequently published by him, we shall furthermore try to demonstrate that his training programme was consistent and practical, some striking discrepancies between theory and practice notwithstanding.
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370 RHETORICA Graban finds that she is unable to delineate Gougar's affiliations as stable and permanent because her relationships with other suffragists and politicians evolved throughout her life. And lastly, class-consciousness as the organizing topoi allows Graban to "complicate the language surrounding ... the middle class lens [typically used] to view social uplift in Gougar's work" (p. 154). In her final chapter, Graban presents more textual examples of irony through a critical frame—one from Golda Meir, prime minster of Israel, one from Madeline Albright, American diplomat, and another from Barbara Jordan, investigator of the Watergate Scandal. Although some might think Graban falls into the trap of "tokenism," whereby examples of a few stand in for all women, she works against it as she selects archives based on their ironic potential and qualities. Furthermore these archives are situated panhistorically so as not to essentialize women or their writings as representative of a specific place or time. In addition to alleged "tokenism," some might find fault with the scant textual evidence taken from Anne Askew's archive in chapter one. Yet, these critics should keep in mind the erasure of women's rhetoric throughout the Renaissance and employ their critical imagination to reconsider the potential for the evidence that does exist.2 It is also important to note that Graban not only examines textual evidence, she also employs "historical residue" as evidence—residue that includes: organizing topoi, intersecting contexts, and the positioning of audiences. Graban's scholarship resets the terms of scholarly engagement for those working in the field of rhetoric and history by resituating irony and using it to destabilize historical narratives and the ways in which these nar ratives are remembered. Tiffany Kinney, University of Utah, Salt Lake City Laurent Pernot, Epideictic Rhetoric: Questioning the Stakes of Ancient Praise, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. xiv, 166 pp. ISBN 978-1-4773-1133-2 In 1993 Pernot's highly acclaimed, two-volume work, La rhétorique de l'éloge dans le monde gréco-romain appeared. In 2012 at the meeting of the Rhetoric Society of America, with ISHR sponsorship, Pernot conducted a three-day seminar on epideictic for twenty participants (among whom was the current reviewer). Using the format of the seminar but drawing content from his earlier book, Pernot has now produced a concise but 2 J. J. Royster and G. Kirsch, Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition and Literacy Studies (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), 72-73. ' Reviews 371 example-packed history, analytical summary, and contextualizing assessment of the theoretical treatises and actual speeches of ancient Greco-Roman epideictic rhetoric. Two questions drive the presentation: (1) How was it that epi deictic, originally the minor player in the famous trio of judicial, deliberative, and epideictic, acquired the far-and-away dominant role of the three in the Imperial age? and (2), What, in fact, was that role? Through an impressive breadth and depth of reading and a precise deployment of select ancient sour ces, Pernot shows how "every encomium is at once a literary work, a moral problem, and a social rite" (ix). In Chapter 1, "The Unstoppable Rise of Epideictic" (1-28), Pernot surveys the meager evidence for epideictic texts from Classical Greece to Republican Rome (1-9). Epideictic was, in those centuries, something of a sidecar to the normally stand-alone two wheels of deliberative and judicial oratory. Yet, as the chapter title suggests, the epideictic sidecar will "tri umph" (9) in the Imperial period, and the path of that triumph is delineated in the rest of the chapter (9-23). The conclusion? The Imperial period, for the whole of that Greco-Roman world—especially in Greek—"was the begin ning of a new rhetorical world order, in which oratory served no longer to rip apart an adversary or to cow an assembly, but to spread honeyed praise and trumpet meritorious conduct with previously unparalleled frequency and variety" (28). Chapter 2, "The Grammar of Praise," (29-65) surveys the methods and means of epideictic in light of the teaching texts that survive, drawing espe cially from Menander Rhetor, but Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle are also quoted and even Aelius...
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Abstract
In this article we argue that Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms is an indispensible philosophical-anthropological companion to rhetoric. We propose that appropriating Cassirer’s understanding of symbolic forms enables rhetoric to go beyond the dominant perspective of language oriented theory and fully commit to a widened understanding of rhetoric as the study of how social meaning is created, performed and transformed. To clearly bring out the thrust of our enlarged rhetorical-philosophical-anthropological approach we have structured our argument partly as a contrastive critique of Thomas A. Discenna’s recent (Rhetorica 32/3; 2014) attempt to include Cassirer in the rhetorical tradition through a reading of the 1929 debate in Davos between Cassirer and Martin Heidegger; partly through a presentation of the aspects of Cassirer’s thought that we find most important for developing a rhetorical-philosophical-anthropology of social meaning.
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While Ellen Terry’s Shakespearean roles are commonly discussed in considerations of her work, the actress’s involvement with the comic play Nance Oldfield is glossed over if not entirely overlooked. However, Terry bought the rights to this play, revised the script with Bram Stoker, performed the leading role, and invoked this semi-fictional figure across the latter part of her career. This essay examines public theatrical ephemera in conjunction with personal photographs of Terry dressed up as Oldfield at home and the extensive marginalia on Terry’s copy of the script to argue that Terry’s assumption of ‘Nance Oldfield’ was a rhetorical performance. Terry’s alliance with this character, as an on-stage character and an off-stage alter ego, led her to speak with greater confidence about her own professional life and about women’s public role in nineteenth-century England.
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The Rhetoric of Conversion as Emancipatory Strategy in India: Bhimrao Ambedkar, Pragmatism, and the Turn to Buddhism ↗
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Bhimrao Ambedkar, famous for being a political ally to the “untouchable” castes and a political sparring partner to Gandhi in India’ss struggle for independence, is also well-known for his public advocacy for Buddhism. Starting in the 1930s, Ambedkar began arguing that he and his fellow untouchables should convert from Hinduism to escape caste oppression. Ambedkar was also influenced by his teacher at Columbia University, John Dewey. Religious conversion transformed in Ambedkar’s rhetorical strategy to a meliorative program. His rhetoric of conversion operated in three stages: reflection on one’s religious orientation, renunciation of a problematic orientation, and conversion to a more useful orientation. This study explicates the final phase of Ambedkar’s conversion rhetoric, the stage he only expands upon in his oratorical activity during his last decade of life. His rhetorical appeals to convert to Buddhism are found to be performative in nature and to be imbued with a Deweyan ethos of religious rhetoric as an emancipatory device for individuals and communities.
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Il ricco accusato di tradimento. Gli amici garanti - Declamazioni maggiori 11; 16 di Biagio Santorelli ↗
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Reviews Biagio Santorelli, [ps.-Quintiliano] Il ricco accusato di tradimento. Gli amici garanti - Declamazioni maggiori 11; 16 («Collana di studi umanistici » n. 16), Cassino: Edizioni Université di Cassino, 2014, 348 pp. ISBN 978-88-8317-074-4. Le Declamationes maiores attribute a Quintiliano sono, ormai da un quindicennio , oggetto di studio da parte di un agguerrito gruppo di ricerca, sagacemente coordinate da Antonio Stramaglia delTUniversità di Cassino. Agli undici testi già pubblicati si aggiunge ora l'edizione dei due discorsi più brevi della silloge, I'll (dal titolo Dives accusatus proditionis) e il 16 (gli Amici vades), a cura di Biagio Santorelli, il quale aveva già dedicate in particolare alia Declamazione 16, assai spinosa anche sotte l'aspetto testuale (l'elemento più vis toso è la brusca interruzione a 11,4, comune a tutta la tradizione manoscritta), un paio di lavori preparatori: Il tiranno e il corpus vicarium nella XVI Declamazione Maggiore pseudoquintilianea, «MD» 69, 2012, pp. 119-144 e Note critiche ed esegetiche a Ps.-Quintiliano, Declamazioni maggiori 16, «Prometheus» 23, 2013, pp. 227-236. Sono entrambi testi sofisticati, che sarebbe riduttivo inquadrare in via esclusiva corne prodotti scolastici; al contrario, conservano memoria signifi cativa di una lunga tradizione retorica e giuridica, che si interroga sui limiti estremi dei fondamenti sociali ed etici della società romana, dal rapporto spesso ostico tra poveri e ricchi, che in questo caso si traduce in una vera e propria calumnia di tradimento avanzata a danno del ricco nella Declamazione 11 (con la conseguenza che il popote ne lapidó i figli; ritornato vincitore dalla guerra, il ricco richiede il medesimo trattamento per i figli del povero che 1o aveva calunniato, ma quest'ultimo offre in cambio se stesso), alia scelta dolorosa tra la salvaguardia del vincolo deWamicitia nei confronti di un amico trattenuto come prigioniero e il rispetto della pietas verso l'anziana madre cieca (la quale richiede anche l'intervento della legge per impediré la partenza del figlio, necessario al proprio sostentamento , anche a scapito della garanzia del ritomo dall'amico ancora imprigionato ), che caratterizza invece la Declamazione 16. Santorelli, sia nelle Introduzioni ai due testi (rispettivamente alie pp. 15-45 per la Declamazione 11 e alie pp. 175-206 per la Declamazione 16) sia nelle ricche e puntuali Note di commento (pp. 71-168 per il primo testo, pp. 229-313 per il secondo), ricostruisce il retroterra culturale di entrambe le declamazioni. Rhetorica,Vol. XXXV, Issue 3, pp. 366-372. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 1533-8541.© 2017 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.2017.35.3.3b6. Reviews 367 Nel caso del primo testo, lo studioso si sofferma sulla valenza giuridica dei due poli intomo ai quali ruota la vicenda, la proditio e, come visto, la calumnia, tracciando una discussione delle varie formulazioni di questi reati nel sistema giu- íidico e processuale romano. Per quanto riguarda, invece, la Declamazione 16, Santorelli individua la fitta trama di relazioni letterarie che intessono la vicenda: il motivo romanzesco del viaggio avventuroso in terre lontane; l'incontro con un tiranno che vuole non solo saggiare le reazioni psicologiche dei protagonista ma anche vagliare l'essenza dello stesso legame ào\\'amicitia come autentico valore etico; la gara di fedelté tra amici, in mezzo a difficolté di ogni genere, anche quelle generate dalla stessa figura materna. Lo studioso individua in filigrana la ripresa, con alcuni adattamenti, del ben noto exemplurn di Damone e Finzia, che gode di una certa diffusione nella tradizione retorica greco-romana (alie pp. 185-187, si evidenzia in modo particolare il ruolo centrale délia rielaborazione di Valerio Massimo, la cui opera, non a caso, è «destinata in primo luogo all'uso dei declamatori», come si precisa a p. 185). Pertinente Buona è l'analisi dello specifico retorico dei due testi, cui sono rispettivamente dedicate le pp. 33-38 e le pp. 197-202, finalizzato a indirizzare Pinterpretazione normativa da parte dei giudici nella prospettiva piú favorevole a chi sta parlando...
May 2017
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Abstract
Pericles is said to have been affected by Anaxagoras and therefore having improved his speaking skills. A generic influence of philosophical studies is usually supposed but there may be a more specific reason: it was possible to interpret the works of meteorologoi in a limited way, strictly rhetorical, renouncing cosmological speculation but acquiring an effective instrument of persuasion. Some anecdotes in Pericles' life help to understand how this philosophy was translated into political action. Anaxagoras not only improved Pericles' speaking skills but also provided a model of behaviour for any contingency.
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Review: Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction, by Liesbeth Korthals Altes ↗
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Book Review| May 01 2017 Review: Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction, by Liesbeth Korthals Altes Liesbeth Korthals Altes, Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. 325 pp. ISBN (Hardcover) 978-0-8032-4836-6. Daniel A. Cryer Daniel A. Cryer Roosevelt University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2017) 35 (2): 232–234. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2017.35.2.232 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 Daniel A. Cryer; Review: Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction, by Liesbeth Korthals Altes. Rhetorica 1 May 2017; 35 (2): 232–234. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2017.35.2.232 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. © 2017 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.2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Review: Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue: Capitalism and Civil Society in the British Enlightenment, by Mark Garrett Longaker ↗
Abstract
Book Review| May 01 2017 Review: Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue: Capitalism and Civil Society in the British Enlightenment, by Mark Garrett Longaker Mark Garrett Longaker, Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue: Capitalism and Civil Society in the British Enlightenment (RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric), University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015. 170 pp. ISBN 978-0-271-07086-5. Glen McClish Glen McClish San Diego State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2017) 35 (2): 234–236. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2017.35.2.234 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 Glen McClish; Review: Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue: Capitalism and Civil Society in the British Enlightenment, by Mark Garrett Longaker. Rhetorica 1 May 2017; 35 (2): 234–236. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2017.35.2.234 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. © 2017 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.2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
April 2017
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The Art of Listening in the Early Church by Carol Harrison, and: Paul and Ancient Rhetoric: Theory and Practice in the Hellenistic Context by Stanley D. Porter, Bryan R. Dyer, and: Eloquent Wisdom: Rhetoric, Cosmology and Delight in the Theology of Augustine of Hippo by Mark F. M. Clavier ↗
Abstract
Reviews 477 e una vasta messe di rimandi a loci paralleh interni ed esterni alia scrittura declamatoria; non ce virtualmente passaggio, giro di frase o singólo termine rilevante che non sia puntualmente delucidato o del quale non si dibattano le possibili interpretazioni. Infine, la vasta bibliografía che chiude il volume dà conto dello scrupolo documentado di B. e offre ogni possibile sussidio per ampliare la prospettiva di ricerca sui due pezzi pseudo-quintilianei e in generale sulla declamazione latina. In conclusione, è lecito vedere nel volume di B. non solo il frutto maturo di un lucido e coerente percorso di ricerca dell'autrice, ma anche e soprattutto il punto di partenza e la pietra di paragone irrinunciabili di ogni futura ricerca sulle due declamazioni e sulla gamma di questioni délia piú varia natura che esse, come tutti i testi giunti a noi dalla scuola latina, pongono alio studioso e al lettore moderno. Mario Lentano Universitá di Siena Christianizations of Rhetoric Carol Harrison, The Art of Listening in the Early Church, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 302 pp. ISBN: 9780199641437 Stanley D. Porter and Bryan R. Dyer, Paul and Ancient Rhetoric: Theory and Practice in the Hellenistic Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 330 pp. ISBN: 9781107073791 Mark F. M. Clavier, Eloquent Wisdom: Rhetoric, Cosmology and Delight in the Theology ofAugustine ofHippo, Turnhout: Brepols, 2014. 303 pp. ISBN: 9782503552651 For readers of Rhetorica (and for historians of rhetoric more generally), the Christianization of rhetoric is one of the basic intellectual historical pro cesses of Late Antiquity. What are the principal options for representing that process? In reviewing volumes by Carol Harrison and Mark Clavier, as well as one edited by Stanley Porter and Bryan Dyer, we can survey three options. According to one school of thought, rhetoric is at its most intellectually generative when it cannot do the things that it was originally built to do and when as a result it must transpose its themes into a new key to fulfill new purposes. Carol Harrison gives us an example of this kind of displacement in Late Antiquity when she explores the implications of a Christian transfor mation of rhetoric from an art of speaking into an art of listening. The contexts in that Christianizing world may have been new, but she is adamant that the intellectual foundations were rhetorical. In her words, "if we do not 478 RHETORICA pay attention to the rhetorical culture [of Late Antiquity], we will fail to appreciate why the fathers wrote and spoke in the way they did; why their style is so distinctive and yet so easily identifiable as that of an educated per son of their day; what their hearers expected of them; how their hearers were able to hear them effectively" (Harrison p. 48). Indeed, Harrison is showing the figure of the orator itself being transformed into the person of the listener when she parses Augustine's assertion in On Christian Doctrine that one would have to pray (and be an orator) before one could speak (and be a dictor ). Her gloss is supple: "prayer is perhaps one of the most intriguing exam ples of the practice of listening in the early Church, for it is not at all clear who is doing the listening and who is speaking" (Harrison p. 183). And this spon sors two thoughts: that the speaking of prayer was a particularly intense lis tening and that there might be a kind of "confidence, or parrhesia" deriving from "the assurance that [the] hearer is God, the Father" (Harrison p. 195). Now, contingency had been one of the great categories of ancient Greek rhetoric. Within a Christian frame of reference, this orientation to contingency began to look like an immersion in the world encountered by human beings after the Fall. On the one hand, God's creation in fact expres sed a stability, equilibrium, and symmetry. On the other, as it was encoun tered by the human sensorium, that world (and human entanglements with it) seemed thoroughly, endemically, mutable. Just so, Harrison's book privi leges the embodiment of that human sensorium and begins with the assumption that, when developing an art of listening, we should look...
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Abstract
A complex definition of the figure, anadiplosis, develops in the tradition that runs from ancient Greek and Roman rhetoricians up to sixteenth-century continental rhetorical theorists such as Susenbrotus. Drawing on and enriching this tradition, the English rhetoricians of Shakespeare’s day defined the figure as the repetition of the word or words with which one phrase or line ends, at or near the beginning of the succeeding phrase or line. A series of anadiploses was understood to make for a gradatio (or climax). Having been schooled in these and other definitions of the tropes and figures, Shakespeare implements anadiplosis, as well as the rhetoricians’ rich metaphorical description of it, in his text. In so doing, he enhances his representation of people who are impassioned, thoughtful, witty, deranged, and ridiculous. In keeping with the rhetoricians’ recognition of the polysemy of the figure, Shakespeare also implements this figure to narrate events and make some of them seem inevitable (usually in history and tragedy) and others unlikely (usually in comedy). The Shakespearean script also frequently includes dialogic anadiplosis: the sharing of the figure by two speakers. In this form, it plays a significant role in Shakespeare’s creation of authentic dialogue.
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Abstract
Messalla Corvinus, celebrated as one of the greatest orators of the generation after Cicero, offers an ideal case study for political life in the triumviral period and early principate. His distinctive style is reminiscent of what Cicero described as the middle style, exemplified by Marcus Calidius and Cicero’s Pro Lege Manilla and Pro Marcello. This style complemented his mild, accomodationist political persona, evident especially in his support of Augustus and his rejection of the office of urban prefect, in a synergistic fusion of style and ethos.
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[Quintilian] The Son Suspected of Incest with His Mother («Major Declamations», 18–19) by Bé Breij ↗
Abstract
Reviews Bé Breij, [Quintilinn] The Son Suspected ofIncest with His Mother («Major Declamations», 18-19), Edizioni Université di Cassino, Cassino 2015, pp. 612. ISBN: 9788883170577 Un padre tortura il figlio in una stanza appartata della casa per strappargli la verità in mérito alie voci che lo vogliono coinvolto in una relazione incestuosa con la madre. Il giovane muore fra i tormenti; la madre chiede allora al marito cosa abbia appreso nel corso dell'interrogatorio, e al suo rifiuto di rispondere lo accusa di mala tractatio. È questo il tema delle ultime due Declamaziotii maggiori, la raccolta di diciannove controversie allestita a Roma nell'ultimo scorcio del IV secolo d.C. e fatta circolare sotto il nome di Quintiliano: la prima reca l'accusa della madre, la seconda la difesa del padre. Ai due testi in questione Bé Breij (d'ora innanzi B.), una delle più intel ligent! e prolifiche studiose della declamazione latina, aveva già dedicate nel 2007 un ampio commente, oltre a numerosi interventi di minore respiro; il volume recupera dunque un decennio di scavo esegetico, sviluppando linee di ricerca tracciate negli studi già pubblicati e insieme aspetti rimasti prece dentemente in ombra. Nella lunga introduzione si affrontano sistemáticamente le questioni legate ai protagonisti delle due Maiores, alla cornice giuridica della loro controversia, agli aspetti stilistici e retorici dei pezzi pseudo-quintilianei. B. delucida anzitutto storia e contenuti della patria potestas, rilevando in particolare come il diritto di metiere a morte un figlio risulti applicate in un numero esiguo di casi. Molto opportunamente, B. prende tuttavia le distanze da quanti considerano la patria potestas poco più che un idolum storiografico e sottolinea come essa contribuisse in ogni caso a configurare un rapporte fortemente sbilanciato tra padri e figli. Non a caso, la declamazione latina dedica uno spazio cospicuo ai conflitti generazionali: una scelta che da un lato aiutava i giovani romani a verbalizzare le frustrazioni indotte da una struttura familiare spesso oppressiva, daU'altro li preparava al ruolo di pater familias cui essi erano chiamati in età adulta. La studiosa osserva che m nessuna controversia i figli sembrano contestare il potere che i padri esercitano su di loro; al contrario, i retori che parlano in difesa dei padri rivendicano il carattere inevitabile e giusto della misura punitiva; quanti invece intervengono a favore dei figli biasimano l'abuso della patria potestas, ma ne lasciano intatti Rhetorica, Vol. XXXV, Issue 4, pp. 475-483. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 1533-8541.© 2017 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.2017.35.4.475. 476 RHETORICA i fondamenti: la declamazione discute insomma i comportamenti del padre, ma frnisce con il presérvame la posizione di vértice all'intemo della famiglia. Il secondo parágrafo concerne il motivo dell'incesto, anch'esso indagato dapprima nelle fonti storiche, giuridiche e letterarie, quindi in riferimento specifico alia declamazione, dove il tema ricorre quattordici volte; le due Maiores restaño comunque le uniche a trattare la piú problemática fra le relazioni incestuose, quella che coinvolge un figlio e sua madre. Di grande rilievo è il parágrafo successivo, relativo al quadro giuridico che regola entrambe le controversie pseudo-quintilianee, quello della actio¡nalae tractationis. In particolare, B. nota correttamente come essa venga spesso brandita per contestare un danno inflitto non tanto alia moglie quanto al figlio di costei, danno che in molti casi coincide con la morte del figlio stesso. Le controversie insistono talora sulla sproporzione fra l'accusa di maltrattamento e la gravità delle colpe maritali cui essa si riferisce e non mancano di elevare il proprio lamento contro un sistema legislativo che non consente altra via di espressione giuridica al dolor delle donne per i torti loro inflitti dai propri mariti; pur con questi limiti, tuttavia, l'azione per mala tractatio dá comunque voce alie istanze delle mogli e permette di esplorare la patria potestas da un terzo e ulteriore punto di vista, dopo quello di padri e...
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La rhétorique philosophique de Michel Spéranski dans le contexte culturel russe de la fin du XVIIIe siècle ↗
Abstract
Cette publication présente la Rhétorique de Michel Spéranski qui se veut philosophique. A ce titre, elle revêt un caractère nouveau dans le paysage intellectuel russe de la fin du XVIIIe siècle.
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«Con righe a puntini… quasi per suggerire ‘continua’». Aposiopesi e retorica del silenzio nella poesia montaliana ↗
Abstract
The paper deals with the analysis of the rhetorical morphology and of the semantic functions of various emersions of ‘aposiopesis’ (or ‘reticence’) in The Occasions (1939) by Eugenio Montale, poetic collection characterized by an important ‘silence strategy’ (“to omit the occasion-spur”). The theory and the praxis of the non-said and the non-finite efficaciously outline, between inventio and disposition an original and coherent definition and explanation of some recurring stylistic patterns of Montale’s poetry. Moreover, the critical recognition allows to clarify the essential role of the rhetorical use of silence and “textual scars” in the lyrical creation of negative or positive epiphanies and, more generally, in the poetic construction of memory, transfiguration and meaning.
March 2017
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“The Truth of Reliable Tradition”: Saadya Gaon, Arabic Rhetoric, and the Challenge to Rhetorical Historiography ↗
Abstract
This article explores the rhetoric of medieval rabbi and philosopher Saadya Gaon, arguing that Saadya typifies what LuMing Mao calls the “interconnectivity” of rhetorical cultures (Mao 46). Suggesting that Saadya makes use of argumentative techniques from Greek-inspired, rationalist Islamic theologians, I show how his rhetoric challenges dominant works of rhetorical historiography by participating in three interconnected cultures: Greek, Jewish, and Islamic. Taking into account recent scholarship on Jewish rhetoric, I argue that Saadya’s amalgamation of Jewish rhetorical genres alongside Greco-Islamic genres demonstrates how Jewish and Islamic rhetoric were closely connected in the Middle Ages. Specifically, the article analyzes the rhetorical significance of Saadya’s most famous treatise on Jewish philosophy, The Book of Doctrines and Beliefs, which I argue utilizes Greco-Islamic rhetorical strategies in a polemical defense of rabbinical authority. As a tenth-century writer who worked across multiple rhetorical traditions and genres, Saadya challenges the monocultural, Latin-language histories of medieval rhetoric, demonstrating the importance of investigating Arabic-language and Jewish rhetorics of the Middle Ages.
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Abstract
Pericles is said to have been affected by Anaxagoras and therefore having improved his speaking skills. A generic influence of philosophical studies is usually supposed but there may be a more specific reason: it was possible to interpret the works of meteorologoi in a limited way, strictly rhetorical, renouncing cosmological speculation but acquiring an effective instrument of persuasion. Some anecdotes in Pericles’ life help to understand how this philosophy was translated into political action. Anaxagoras not only improved Pericles’ speaking skills but also provided a model of behaviour for any contingency.
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Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue: Capitalism and Civil Society in the British Enlightenment by Mark Garrett Longaker ↗
Abstract
234 RHETORICA drawn to images from these periods - "the body's inside and outside, the heart offered on an outstretched hand" - that reveal "historically elaborated semiot ics of the self," expressing competing views of what constituted a moral bal ance of public and private (214). So, when she offers her detailed case study of irony and sincerity in the ethos of author Dave Eggers, it is grounded in a historical understanding of these terms. Historians of rhetoric may find themselves frustrated by aspects of Korthals Altes's book, a point she acknowledges as a likely effect of the wide net she casts. For example, her central term, ethos, is not as thoroughly historicized as are other framing concepts like sincerity, irony, and hermeneutics. While she traces these over centuries, her approach to ethos is to provide snapshots from ancient Greece and Rome and then to pick up the term in its modern uses in narrative analysis. This method drops at least one major thread that seems highly germaine to her project: the pre-Aristotelian sense of ethos, robustly revived in the last two decades, as location or haunt. Korthals Altes's use of topoi answers her need to flesh out the rhetorical commonplaces of ethos construction, but her discussion of the textual, virtual, and physical spaces that modem authors inhabit calls out to ethos's more ancient meaning. Further, the degree to which ethos overlaps with related terms like posture, self, persona, and implied author, are never made clear. But in placing ancient renderings of ethos within modem methods of literary criticism, Ethos and Narrative Interpretation reminds us just how fraught and complex the practice of reading others has always been. Daniel A. Cryer, Roosevelt University Mark Garrett Longaker, Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue: Capitalism and Civil Society in the British Enlightenment (RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric), University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015. 170 pp. ISBN 978-0-271-07086-5. While reading Mark Garrett Longaker's recent book, Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue: Capitalism and Civil Society in the British Enlightenment, I was struck by the author's reluctance to employ contemporary theory as a lens through which to evaluate Enlightenment perspectives on civic virtue, eco nomics, and rhetoric, for indeed, twenty-first-century rhetorical studies often marshal critical perspectives to try the past. While it is impossible to read his torical texts innocently, Longaker strives to explore his principal figures—John Locke, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, and Herbert Spencer—on their own terms. Thus, I was not surprised when in his conclusion he explicitly addresses his approach, revealing that although he is "a political socialist and a historical materialist," he adheres to the principle audite et alteram partem: "listen even to the other side" (pp. 134-35). It is this careful listening, which enables Reviews 235 Longaker to articulate his subjects significance in the British Enlightenment, that perhaps best characterizes this fine volume. In his introduction, Longaker concisely presents his "principal argument"—that "in the late seventeenth, mid-eighteenth, and mid-nineteenth centuries a British philosopher, a political economist, a rhetorical theorist, and a sociologist all tried to cultivate bourgeois virtue by teaching rhetorical style, each building on others' ideas and each addressing a unique stage of capitalist development" (p. 2). Each of the study's four chapters features one of Longaker's principal theorists, along with his key rhetorical emphasis: Locke and clarity, Smith and probity, Blair and moderation, and Spencer and economy. In chapter 1, Longaker astutely distills Locke's well-known recommenda tions concerning the abuses of language and his mistrust of disputation into "four rules to remedy language's infirmity" (p. 14). Conducting a "synthetic reading" of Locke's work, he then demonstrates how each rule elucidates dif ferent areas of the philosopher's corpus. For example, the "Rule of Propriety" describes Locke's view of both effective language and stable currency. Longaker closes the chapter by suggesting that Locke's actual prose style conforms to his rules of clarity and that his writings on education "developed a rhetorical pedagogy of clarity" (p. 37). Although most scholars of rhetoric who consider Locke tend to highlight a few of his well-worn...
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Abstract
This paper focuses on the use of the “exemplum” of Alexander in seven Imperial speeches by Libanius (4th c. AD). These are studied and analysed under both a macro- and a micro-perspective: in the first case, the analysis highlights the individual historical examples, their rhetorical function and their literary form. These aspects are subsequently discussed with respect to the specific literary genre, the position of exempla within the speech structure, as well as their aims and impact. Of special interest are the different ways in which Libanius uses the sometimes positive and sometimes negative image of Alexander in order to reinforce his argumentation and to guide his rhetorical strategy in specific pathways.
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Arte della parola e parole della scienza. Tecniche della comunicazione letteraria nel mondo antico cur. di Raffaele Grisolia, Giuseppina Matino ↗
Abstract
Reviews RaffaeleGrisolia, Giuseppina Matino (a cura di), Arte della parola e parole della scienza. Tecniche della comunicazione letteraria nel mondo antico, Napoli: M. D'Auria editore, 2014,280 pp. € 68,00. ISBN 978-8870-9236-05. Il volume raccoglie tredici saggi prodotti da un gruppo di ricerca attivo presso PUniversitá Federico II di Napoli ed integra una precedente collezione allestita dai medesimi curatori e apparsa nel 2012. Il primo contributo (A. Borgo, Tra storia e retorica: il contrasto CiceroneAntonio nella settima suasoria di Seneca il Vecchio, pp. 9-24) esamina il tema declamatorio che vede Antonio promettere salva la vita a Cicerone proscritto a patto che questi dia alie fiamme la propria opera. Seneca si mostra attento agli effetti che le guerre civili e l'avvio del principato esercitano in ámbito cultúrale, restringendo la liberta e perseguitando la dissidenza, e la figura di Cicerone incarna la contrapposizione fra potere e ingenium, parola tematica , quest'ultima, della settima suasoria. Proprio sulla carenza di ingenium di Antonio l'oratore aveva del resto insistito nella seconda filippica, fonte privilegiata dei declamatori; per questa via, pero, la lotta si sposta sul piano etico e cultúrale e i retori si fanno paladini di un'opposizione desiderosa di mantenere vivi gli ideali culturali della res publica piú ancora di quelli politici. C. Carotenuto tratta di Prassi retorico-lingüistica del «Líber Abad» di Leonardo il Pisano (pp. 25-44), o Leonardo Fibonacci, autore nel XIII secolo del primo trattato di matemática che diffonde in Occidente le conoscenze indiane mediate dagli Arabi; in attesa di un'edizione critica del Liber, in corso di allestimento da parte dell'autrice, il saggio si propone un primo sondaggio della lingua usata da Leonardo. I caratteri indagati riguardano Puso del congiuntivo esortativo, proprio della trattatistica didascalica; Paltemanza tra seconda persona singolare e prima plurale, comune al linguaggio matemático tardo-medievale; la terminologia del calcólo, che prevede costantemente l'imperativo dell'operazione e il futuro del risultato; la costruzione dei verbi della moltiplicazione, in cui a per si altemano in e contra; Pimpiego dei preverbi per conferiré maggiore precisione ai termini tecnici; Pesame del lessico discipli nare, ancora non definito in modo univoco. II contributo di F. Conti Bizzarro, Un cattivo sovrano in Polluce (pp. 45-55), muove dal passo deWOnomasticon in cui viene tracciato il quadro del re malvagio : i termini impiegati da Polluce sono accuratamente analizzati e se ne Rhetorica,Vol. XXXV, Issue 2, pp. 228—236. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 1533-8541.© 2017 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.2017.35.2.228. Reviews 229 rintracciano i paralleli nel teatro trágico e nella storiografia, che ne fa uso in particolare nei ritratti dei principi romani (Tiberio, Caligola, Nerone). F. Ficca discute Un esempio di "connulicazione mancata”: il discorso di Druso nelfinale délia «Consolado ad Liviam» (pp. 57-73), esaminando la prosopopea di Druso e il suo rapporto con il contesto precedente. La comunicazione tra madre e fíglio è "mancata" perché alla disperata domanda della prima - Ubi es?, ripetuto tre volte - non fa eco alcuna risposta da parte del secondo, che rivendica solo i propri titoli di gloria; inoltre, le parole di Druso contengono appena un breve inciso propriamente consolatorio. Viene quindi sviluppato un puntúale confronto con le eonsolationes senecane, dal quale si traggono elementi per la datazione delFoperetta, che risente del modello senecano e al tempo stesso difficilmente potra collocarsi oltre l'epoca giulio-claudia. II saggio di G. Germano, Nuove funzioni dell'erudizione classica e comunica zione letteraria nel mondo poético di Giovanni Pontano: gli esempi di «Hendec.» II24 e«Urania» I 970-1023 (pp. 75-93), discute i modi in cui la poesia umanistica in latino riprende e rifunzionalizza l'apparato mitologico-erudito mutuato dalla cultura classica. La prima lirica è dedicata al letterato di origine bizantina Manilio Cabacio Rallo e presenta una rarefatta evocazione di sette divinité del corteggio di Venere...
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Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction by Liesbeth Korthals Altes ↗
Abstract
232 RHETORICA l'attenzione a generi e tipologie testuali apparentemente minori, come la scoliastica , l'epistolografia, la favolistica e altri ancora, di cui si rivendica persua sivamente, alla luce di una analisi minuta e puntúale, Taita caratura letteraria e la ricercata raffinatezza fórmale. Infime, va sottolineato corne Tindagine linguistico-retorica non sia pressoché mai fine a se stessa, ma concorra a illuminare strategie comunicative, intenzioni letterarie, prese di posizione ideologiche , e questo non solo per gli autori classici, ma anche per i testi umanistici, troppo spesso appiattiti da un pregiudizio critico che li vede come mero prodotto di una pedissequa riproduzione dei modelli antichi. Per tutte queste ragioni, Topera curata da Raffaele Grisolia e Giuseppina Matino si legge con grande interesse, stimola nuovi percorsi di ricerca, invita ad approfondire Tindagine sui testi e sugli autori presi in considerazione nei diversi saggi: che è quanto ogni autentico studio scientifico dovrebbe fare. Mario Lentano, Universita di Siena Liesbeth Korthals Altes, Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. 325 pp. ISBN (Hardcover) 978-0-8032-4836-6. In his contribution to the edited volume The Ethos of Rhetoric, Robert Wade Kenny observed that even after centuries of inquiry into ethos, it still "calls to us as something to be understood," a point powerfully captured in Liesbeth Korthals Altes's Ethos and Narrative Interpretation. Korthals Altes identifies as a narratologist, and though her book is not directed specifically at historians of rhetoric it offers perspectives on ethos that will likely be new and useful. Korthals Altes's focus on ethos is part of a rhetorical tradition in literary studies intent on considering the author, or the "implied author" as Wayne Booth defined it in The Rhetoric ofFiction, as an integral site of inquiry into the meanings of texts. Like Booth, she is drawn to ethos and rhetoric through Aristotle's "pragmatic" vision (6) that "elucidates what makes per suasive discourse effective and stipulates what means of persuasion can best be used in specific situations in the public domain" (2-3), and while she does not break new ground in her conception of ancient rhetoric (nor does she claim to), her uses of ancient terms aim to extend its influence in a variety of disciplines, particularly narrative theory, hermeneutics, sociology, and cognitive psychology. Uninterested in building ethos "as a consistently rigor ous analytical concept," she instead sees it as a node connecting "heteroge neous aspects of narratives" and the ways they are interpreted (xiv). Korthals Altes uses Aristotle's Rhetoric to build a methodological founda tion that serves her well throughout the book. For her, "the treatise's interest resides in Aristotle's subtle analysis of the various - rational, emotional, and social - components of persuasion and of the implied interactive mechanisms" Reviews 233 (3). She is less concerned with interactions between the three domains of logos, pathos, and ethos and more interested in those she sees contained in ethos itself. One such "interactive mechanism" lies in the connection between ethos and phronesis, which "crucially connects rhetoric to ethics" (257n6), important for Korthals Altes as she develops the argument that narrative literature cons tructs ethical codes in storyworlds and in the minds of readers. An interactive mechanism equally central to the book is "ethos topoi," which she briefly defi nes as "culturally recognized grounds for rhetorical credit" (62) related specifi cally to the character of a speaker or author that "provide an interface between perceived textual clues and cultural norms and shared character repertoires" (211). She notes that Aristotle's ethos topoi, developed as they were for "public speech in the Athenian state," are practical wisdom, virtue, and good will, and she defines these for her modern purposes to include the broad categories of morality, truth, expertise and experience, and social and political power (63), which she breaks into more specific qualities as her interpretive needs dictate. Ethos topoi serve as an important heuristic for what Korthals Altes calls her "metahermeneutic" project: tracing the complex interpretive path ways of a reader "assessing] a discursive ethos" (ix). She develops, for example, specific topoi for assessing the ethos of the "engagé," or socially engaged, writer, someone who at...
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Friendship, temperance and the probable: Erasmus, sermo rhetoric, and the early modern English civic state ↗
Abstract
The essay explores Erasmus’ development of a fourth category of rhetoric, the familiar, in its work as a rhetoric of the absent audience in both personal and sociopolitical contexts, and as a rhetoric resonant with early modern theories of friendship and temperance. The discussion is set against a background of Caxton’s printing of the translation of Cicero’s De Amicitia, because Erasmus casts friendship as the context for appropriate communication between people from quite different education and training, along with the probable rhetoric that enables appropriate persuasion. The probable rhetorical stance of temperate friendship propo ses a foundation for a common weal1 based on a co-extensive sense of selfhood. This focus suggests that the familiar rhetoric set out in Erasmus’ De Conscribendis epistolis draws on Cicero’s rhetoric of sermo2 at the heart of friendship.3 It explores the effects of the rhetorical stance of probable rhetoric, both for personal and social writing, and for political action, and looks at the impact of sermo rhetoric on ideas of identity and civic politics in an age of burgeoning circulation of books (both script and print). The essay concludes with three post-Erasmian case studies in English rhetoric [Elyot, Wilson, Lever] that use probable rhetoric to document approaches to individual and civic agency and which offer insights into the Western neoliberal state rhetorical structures of today.
February 2017
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Abstract
Book Review| February 01 2017 Review: Scientists as Prophets: A Rhetorical Genealogy Lynda Walsh, Scientists as Prophets: A Rhetorical Genealogy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. pp. 264. ISBN: 978-01-99-85709-8 (HB) Thomas M. Lessl Thomas M. Lessl Thomas M. Lessl Department of Communication Studies University of Georgia 625 Caldwell Hall Athens, GA 30602 USA tlessl@uga.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2017) 35 (1): 118–120. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2017.35.1.118 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 Thomas M. Lessl; Review: Scientists as Prophets: A Rhetorical Genealogy. Rhetorica 1 February 2017; 35 (1): 118–120. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2017.35.1.118 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. © 2017 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.2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Abstract
Book Review| February 01 2017 Review: La sociabilité épistolaire chez Cicéron Jacques-Emmanuel Bernard, La sociabilité épistolaire chez Cicéron, Paris: Honoré Champion, 2013. 641 pp. ISBN 978-2-7453-2591-4 Marcos Martinho Marcos Martinho Marcos Martinho rua Peixoto Gomide, 601, ap. 132 CEP: 01409-001 Sao Paulo / SP Brasil marcos.martinho@usp.br Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2017) 35 (1): 112–116. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2017.35.1.112 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 Marcos Martinho; Review: La sociabilité épistolaire chez Cicéron. Rhetorica 1 February 2017; 35 (1): 112–116. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2017.35.1.112 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2017 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.2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Antiguos y modernos en la obra retórica y oratoria de Francesco Panigarola (1548–1594): tonitrua cum fulgure ↗
Abstract
In this paper we attempt to identify the traces of the past in the rhetorical writings and sermons by Francesco Panigarola (1548–1594), probably the most popular Italian preacher in the Cinquecento. Our aim is to highlight some aspects of his rhetorical background, trying to show that he draws not only on Classical and Christian models but also on contemporary ones. In fact, as we shall make clear, Panigarola's theoretical principles and his own preaching are the result of the harmonization of Classical and Christian models with the new demands of ecclesiastical rhetoric and oratory in the Counter Reformation period.
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Abstract
Truth-construction and -mediation are theorized both by Thucydides xyngrapheus and by the internal rhetores in his History, with tensions between these perspectives highlighting rhetorically significant moments of political communication. The historian posits the (negative) configuration “contest – pleasure – hearing – untruth – useless” as contrastive foil to his own model of “rigorous enquiry – pleasure disavowed – seeing – truth – useful.” Cleon the demagogue, in a process of rhetorical “contaminatio” or creative fusion, artfully (mis)appropriates and instrumentalizes this model in his critique of Athenian assembly culture, embedding the signature Thucydidean categories in a spirited anti-Thucydidean argument. His distinctive approach, conflating Thucydidean categories and noteworthy Periclean echoes, marks him as both anti-Pericles and anti-Thucydides, and signals a counter-model to the historian's own schema of truth-construction. As such, Cleon's tirade fits into the History's wider concern with the corruption of political discourse over the course of the war.
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Abstract
Book Review| February 01 2017 Review: The Genres of Rhetorical Speeches in Greek and Roman Antiquity Cristina Pepe, The Genres of Rhetorical Speeches in Greek and Roman Antiquity. International Studies in the History of Rhetoric 5. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013. xviii + 618 pp., ISBN: 978-90-04-24984-4 Mike Edwards Mike Edwards Mike Edwards Department of Humanities University of Roehampton Erasmus House Roehampton Ln, London SW15 5PU United Kingdom Mike.Edwards@roehampton.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2017) 35 (1): 110–112. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2017.35.1.110 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 Mike Edwards; Review: The Genres of Rhetorical Speeches in Greek and Roman Antiquity. Rhetorica 1 February 2017; 35 (1): 110–112. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2017.35.1.110 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. © 2017 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.2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Abstract
Gertrude Bucks (1899) The Metaphor: A Study in the Psychology of Rhetoric (Die Metapher: Eine Studie in der Psychologie der Rhetorik) ist ein einzigartiges Essay. In vielerlei Hinsicht prognostiziert das Essay die Metaphern des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts in der Rhetorik, der Linguistik und den Kognitionswissenschaften, inklusive Richards (1936) gefeierten Bemerkungen über die mentale Grundlagen von Metapher, sowie der einflussreichen “konzeptuellen Metapher” in Lakoff und Johnson (1980). Bucks Essay spiegelt auch die Themen der Metaphern welche die Deutsch und Französisch lexikalische Semantik des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts faszinierten. Die Metapher ist zwar ein Original, aber eine dennoch vernachlässigt Verbindung der rhetorischen Tradition, der linguistischen Wende und der Kognitionswissenschaft. Wir kartographieren die Konturen dieses Zusammenhangs, und explizieren, wie Bucks Argumente in die Geschichte der kognitiven Metapherstudien hineinpassen, mit einem Augenmerk sowohl auf Müllers Philologie des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts als auch bezüglich Lakoff und Johnsons Linguistik zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts.
November 2016
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Book Review| November 01 2016 Review: Tecniche teatrali e formazione dell'oratore in Quintiliano, by Francesca Romana Nocchi Francesca Romana Nocchi, Tecniche teatrali e formazione dell'oratore in Quintiliano (Beiträge zur Altertumskunde 316), Berlin-Boston: de Gruyter, 2013. 232 pp. ISBN: 9783110324464 Giuseppe Aricò Giuseppe Aricò Giuseppe Aricò Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore Viale Aretusa 19 20148 Milano Italy giuseppe.arico@unicatt.it Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2016) 34 (4): 455–458. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2016.34.4.455 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 Giuseppe Aricò; Review: Tecniche teatrali e formazione dell'oratore in Quintiliano, by Francesca Romana Nocchi. Rhetorica 1 November 2016; 34 (4): 455–458. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2016.34.4.455 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2016 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.2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Abstract
Although scholars have historically minimized the relationship between medieval grammatical and rhetorical traditions and Chaucer's poetics, Proserpina's angry speech in the Merchant's Tale represents the intersection of medieval classroom grammar exercises, Geoffrey of Vinsauf's theory of delivery, and poetics. Proserpina's angry speech reveals that her rhetoric is calculated to subvert the masculine power structures that surround her. Such a focus on Chaucer's depiction of women's persuasive tactics helps to highlight Chaucer's deep engagement with rhetoric beginning in the 1380's. Moreover, this investigation asks for increased attention to the overlap between classroom grammatical traditions, rhetorical theory, and medieval poetics.
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Book Review| November 01 2016 Review: Visual Rhetoric and Early Modern English Literature, by Katherine Acheson Katherine Acheson. Visual Rhetoric and Early Modern English Literature, London: Ashgate, 2013. 174+x pp. ISBN: 9780754662839 (hardback) Chris Dearner Chris Dearner Chris Dearner University of California, Irvine 2414 N.W. 32nd St, Oklahoma City, OK 73112 USA cdearner@uci.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2016) 34 (4): 458–460. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2016.34.4.458 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 Chris Dearner; Review: Visual Rhetoric and Early Modern English Literature, by Katherine Acheson. Rhetorica 1 November 2016; 34 (4): 458–460. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2016.34.4.458 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. © 2016 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.2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Book Review| November 01 2016 Review: Rhetoric and Rhythm in Byzantium: The Sound of Persuasion, by Vessela Valiavitcharska Valiavitcharska, Vessela. Rhetoric and Rhythm in Byzantium: The Sound of Persuasion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 243 pp. ISBN: 9781107273511 Debra Hawhee Debra Hawhee Debra Hawhee Penn State University College of the Liberal Arts 435 Burrowes Building University Park , PA 16802 USA hawhee@psu.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2016) 34 (4): 465–467. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2016.34.4.465 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 Debra Hawhee; Review: Rhetoric and Rhythm in Byzantium: The Sound of Persuasion, by Vessela Valiavitcharska. Rhetorica 1 November 2016; 34 (4): 465–467. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2016.34.4.465 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. © 2016 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.2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Review: Hellenistic Oratory: Continuity & Change, edited by Christos Kremmydas and Kathryn Tempest, and Libanius the Sophist: Rhetoric, Reality, and Religion in the Fourth Century, by Raffaella Cribiore ↗
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Book Review| November 01 2016 Review: Hellenistic Oratory: Continuity & Change, edited by Christos Kremmydas and Kathryn Tempest, and Libanius the Sophist: Rhetoric, Reality, and Religion in the Fourth Century, by Raffaella Cribiore Christos Kremmydas and Kathryn Tempest, eds., Hellenistic Oratory: Continuity & Change, Oxford, 2013. 420 + x pp. ISBN: 9780199654314Raffaella Cribiore, Libanius the Sophist: Rhetoric, Reality, and Religion in the Fourth Century, Ithaca: Cornell, 2013. 260 + x pp. ISBN: 9780801452079 Jeffrey Walker Jeffrey Walker Jeffrey Walker Dept. of Rhetoric & Writing University of Texas at Austin Mailstop B5500 Austin, Texas 78712 USA JSWalker@austin.utexas.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2016) 34 (4): 460–465. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2016.34.4.460 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 Jeffrey Walker; Review: Hellenistic Oratory: Continuity & Change, edited by Christos Kremmydas and Kathryn Tempest, and Libanius the Sophist: Rhetoric, Reality, and Religion in the Fourth Century, by Raffaella Cribiore. Rhetorica 1 November 2016; 34 (4): 460–465. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2016.34.4.460 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. © 2016 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.2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Abstract
Notwithstanding its value as the earliest extant New Persian treatment of the art of rhetoric, Rādūyānī's Interpreter of Rhetoric (Tarjumān al-Balāgha) has yet to be read from the vantage point of comparative poetics. Composed in the Ferghana region of modern Central Asia between the end of the eleventh century and the beginning of the twelfth century, Rādūyānī's vernacularization of classical Arabic norms inaugurated literary theory in the New Persian language. I argue here that Rādūyānī's vernacularization is most consequential with respect to its transformation of the classical Arabic tropes of metaphor (istiʿāra) and comparison (tashbīh) to suit the new exigencies of a New Persian literary culture. In reversing the relation between metaphor and comparison enshrined in Arabic aesthetics, Rādūyānī concretized the Persian contribution to the global study of literary form.
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This study examines the uses of the term harmonia in Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetics and aims at identifying a consistent meaning of this word when applied to the literary arts. A difficulty arises from the fact that harmonia commonly denotes the melodic component of music and speech, but is mentioned in connection with the hexametric rhythm in two parallel passages from the Poetics and the Rhetoric, the latter of which is textually problematic. The solution presented in this article suggests an interpretation which assigns to harmonia the meaning of ‘speech melody’ and supports the least disruptive emendation of the contested passage from the Rhetoric.
September 2016
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This study examines the uses of the term harmonia in Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics and aims at identifying a consistent meaning of this word when applied to the literary arts. A difficulty arises from the fact that harmonia commonly denotes the melodic component of music and speech, but is mentioned in connection with the hexametric rhythm in two parallel passages from the Poetics and the Rhetoric, the latter of which is textually problematic. The solution presented in this article suggests an interpretation which assigns to harmonia the meaning of ‘speech melody’ and supports the least disruptive emendation of the contested passage from the Rhetoric.
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Notwithstanding its value as the earliest extant New Persian treatment of the art of rhetoric, Rādūyānī’s Interpreter of Rhetoric (Tarjnnān al-Balāgha) has yet to be read from the vantage point of comparative poetics. Composed in the Ferghana region of modern Central Asia between the end of the eleventh century and the beginning of the twelfth century Rādūyānī’s vernacularization of classical Arabic norms inaugurated literary theory in the New Persian language. I argue here that Rādūyānī’s vernacularization is most consequential with respect to its transformation of the classical Arabic tropes of metaphor (istiāra) and comparison (tashbīh) to suit the new exigencies of a New Persian literary culture. In reversing the relation between metaphor and comparison enshrined in Arabic aesthetics, Rādūyānī concretized the Persian contribution to the global study of literary form.
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Reviews 465 In chapters 3 and 4 Cribiore works through the question(s) of Libanius' opinions of paganism and Christianity in his letters and speeches, showing convincingly that Libanius held a moderate cultural-conservative position that enabled him to genuinely be friends with Christians as well as pagans — which, after all, one would expect from a rhetorician who grasps the value of argumentum in utranique parton not only as a method of debate but also as a way of life, an ethic for a civilized, humane society. Despite these criticisms I do in fact like this book. I particularly like its refutation of the Gibbonesque judgment on Libanius, and its portrait of rhetoric in late antiquity as very much still alive and doing practical civic as well as cultural work (see in particular p. 36). In a sense this book is a sort of appendix to The School of Libanius, which I think remains the most impor tant of Cribiore's books for rhetoricians and historians of rhetoric. Different readers of this journal will want to read both Libanius the Sophist and Hellenistic Oratory for different reasons, and your responses likely will differ from mine, depending on your scholarly interests and orientation. Bottom line, these books give us a closer, better description of rhetoric in the Hellenistic age and late antiquity, and belong on the rhetorician's bookshelf. Jeffrey Walker, University of Texas at Austin Valiavitcharska, Vessela. Rhetoric and Rhythm in Byzantium: The Sound of Persuasion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 243 pp. ISBN: 9781107273511 Midway through the introduction to Rhetoric and Rhythm in Byzantium, Vessela Valiavitcharska sets forth the book's aim, which is to "make a step toward contributing to" an understanding of "the argumentative and emo tional effects of discourse, and of the mental habits involved in its produc tion" (p. 12). That professed goal, enfolded in prepositions and couched in the incremental language of a step—and a single step at that—is modest. And while the framing of the book, and for that matter, Valiavitcharska her self, exude modesty, the rigor, disciplinary reach, and sheer brilliance of her study calls for less modest account. That is where I come in. In addition to its intrinsic value of reclaiming the Old Church Slavic homily tradition for rhetorical study, Rhetoric and Rhythm in Byzantium joins at least three rising trends in rhetorical studies. The first two are burgeoning interests in 1) Byzantine rhetoric and 2) the recovery of pre-modern class room practices. Thomas Conley and Jeffrey Walker have both pointed out the importance of Byzantine rhetoric and have done much to dismantle assumptions that this period presents merely a redaction of classical texts and teaching. Scholars in the U.S. (David Fleming, Raffaella Cribiore, Marjo rie Curry Woods, Martin Camargo) and Europe (Manfred Kraus, Ruth Webb, 466 RHETORICA María Violeta Pérez Custodio) have revived an interest in the progymnasmata and have developed new methods for identifying and extrapolating class room practices from extant artifacts. Valiavitcharska both makes use of those methods and extends them. These two contexts together mean that there ought to be a broad, interdisciplinary readership for Rhythm and Rhetoric in Byzantium. But there is still a third exciting context for this work, one that extends its reach past classical scholars and historians of rhetoric and to scholars concerned with sensory dimensions of rhetoric, specifically those facilitating rhetoric's sonic turn. Scholarship in rhetoric, communication, and commu nications have very recently seen an uptick in interest in how sound shapes thought, interaction, messages, and sociality. Scholars such as Gregory Goodale, Matthew Jordan, Joshua Gunn, Richard Graff, and Jonathan Sterne are leading the way here. This work, partly a response to what rhetoric scholar Sidney Dobrin (following Donna Haraway) calls the "tyranny of the visual," is cutting edge. Some of it is historical, but (with the important exception of Graff) the history is usually limited to the twentieth century, mainly because of its focus on sound-recording technologies, which are rela tively recent. Valiavitcharska's work promises to turn the heads of these scholars and their followers, to reveal to them the intricate and longstanding root system of sonic rhetoric, and to stretch...
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Hellenistic Oratory: Continuity & Change ed. by Christos Kremmydas, Kathryn Tempest, and: Libanius the Sophist: Rhetoric, Reality, and Religion in the Fourth Century by Raffaella Cribiore ↗
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460 RHETORICA readings of major sixteenth and seventeenth century works. The book is also an excellent jumping-off point for future research, and Acheson s spe cific insights relating to the four particular modes of brainwork the book deals with and the work's broader project of finding productive crossmodal correspondences will certainly be productive for many working in the Renaissance. Chris Dearner, University of California, Irvine Christos Kremmydas and Kathryn Tempest, eds., Hellenistic Oratory: Continuity & Change, Oxford, 2013. 420 + x pp. ISBN: 9780199654314 Raffaella Cribiore, Libanius the Sophist: Rhetoric, Reality, and Religion in the Fourth Century, Ithaca: Cornell, 2013. 260 + x pp. ISBN: 9780801452079 Recently I was looking at an early 15th-cenury manuscript copy of a 14th-century Greek "synopsis of rhetoric" in the Austrian National Library in Vienna. Christian Walz, in the preface to his 1832 edition of this text, says that he has not seen the Vienna manuscript, but cites an 18th century scholar who cites a 17th century scholar who has (Walz vol. 3, pp. 465-466). It occurred to me that I might have been the first person since the 17th century to actually open the Vienna manuscript and read it. True or false, there's a certain roman ticism in such experience, and a certain pleasure: the intrepid academic, decoder of texts, historian and rhetorician, paddles alone upriver past ruins and jungles, armed with machete, flashlight, and a pencil sharpener, into the world that time forgot. Heureka; I havefound it; houtos ekeinos; this is that. Thus I am happy with both books on review here. Both offer new per spective^) on an insufficiently studied part of rhetoric's ancient history— four fifths of it, in fact: the roughly eight centuries from the Hellenistic age to the end of the ancient world. Both books, moreover, offer a case wellgrounded in the available evidence and delivered in a (mostly) clear, accessi ble style. In short they have many virtues, and are a pleasure to read. Let's paddle upriver a little way. I'll start with Kremmydas and Tempest. i. Hellenistic Oratory and the Myth of Decline At stake throughout this volume is the pervasive myth that rhetoric, or more precisely oratory (rhetoric-al performance), "declined" in the Hellenistic age, the period conventionally dated from the death of Alexander (in 322 BCE) to the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium by the soon-to-be emperor Augustus (in 31 BCE). The myth presumes that Reviews 461 rhetoric is the art of practical civic discourse embodied in the speeches of the foui th-centui y Attic Orators, especially Demosthenes, and that it flouris hes in democratic polities and languishes under autocratic rule. There are no preserved examples of Hellenistic oratory, which prompts an inference that little or nothing worth preserving was produced. Rhetoric (says the myth) had lost its civic role and was reduced to "merely" epideictic and literary functions for most of the next three centuries. Elsewhere I have argued against the "decline" story, mostly on probabi listic and definitional grounds (Rhetoric & Poetics in Antiquity, Oxford 2000, ch. 3). One can make epideictic/panegyric discourse the paradigmatic ("cen tral," "primary") form of rhetoric, as do Chaim Perelman and Kenneth Burke, in which case "rhetoric" seems to have enjoyed a great flourishing in the Hellenistic age. But even if we define rhetoric as the art of the Attic Orators, the fact is that it continued to play an important civic role. Law-courts contin ued to be busy, city councils continued to meet, kings and governors engaged in deliberative discourse with their advisors (if they were wise), inter-city diplomacy involved embassies and large amounts of written correspondence and chanceries to manage it, and so on. The needs of empire created jobs in the imperial bureaucracv, for which a rhetorical education was required, and there were municipallv sponsored ("public") as well as independent ("private") schools to serve the need in cities large and small, as can he seen in the papyrus fragments of boys' rhetorical exercises found at Oxyrhynchus and other prov incial towns in Hellenistic Egypt. Schools of rhetoric multi plied and throve. There were significant advances too in rhetorical theory...
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El comentario de Alardo de Amsterdam a los Progymnasmata de Aftonio traducidos al latín por Rodolfo Agrícola ↗
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Although Alardus of Amsterdam’s commentary to the Latin translation of the Greek rhetorician Aphtonius’ Progymnasmata by Rodolphus Agricola did not have the influence of the one by Reinhardus Lorichius, who used the partim Agricola, partim Catanaeo translation, it was published previously and served as a model to later commentaries. Thus, Lorichius and Juan de Mal Lara’s commentaries exhibit many similarities with the one by Alardus as regards commented expressions and contents. However, we cannot talk of servile imitation as, in spite of the clear coincidences, we also find important differences, and every commentator shows a personal view and presents his own contributions.
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Reviews Francesca Romana Nocchi, Tecniche teatrali efonuazione dell'oratore in Quintiliano (Beitrdge zur Altertumskunde 316),. Berlin-Boston: de Gruyter, 2013. 232 pp. ISBN: 9783110324464 Nell'ambito dell'ormai consolídala tradizione di studi sui rapporti tra attivit oratoria e arte teatrale puesto libro si colloca con una sua spécificité, che ne fa uno strumento non trascurabile per Eapprofondimento della problemática. Si tratta di "un'indagine lingüistica e storico-letteraria" che, incentrata in particolare sul capitolo quintilianeo dedicate alla docenza del comoedus (1, 11, 1-14), mira a ricostruirne "la tradizione [...], attraverso il vaglio delle fonti letterarie, epigrafiche e papirologiche", e a "precisare quale sia stato il reale influsso delle tecniche recitative sulla formazione dell'oratore" (p. VII). La trattazione si articola in una Introduzione (pp. 1-6) e in sei densi capitoli, due dei quali, il terzo e il sesto, costituiscono la rielaborazione di altrettanti contributi precedentemente pubblicati. Quest'uitima circostanza, tuttavia, non porta alcun nocumento all'organicitá del volume, che si pre senta come una ricerca articolata ma unitaria, nella quale "i riferimenti alEarte scenica sono [...] ripartiti in rapporto alie diverse fasi di apprendimento , [...] nella convinzione che Quintiliano avesse in mente un progetto didattico ben preciso per un loro proficuo impiego" (p. 1). II primo capitolo (pp. 7-25) prende in esame le Intersezioni fra teatro e oratoria prima di Quintiliano: da Aristotele, che per primo riconosce gli stretti rapporti fra técnica oratoria e úzózptn» z scenica - ma con una posizione scettica nei confronti della componente psicagogica - a Demostene, per il quale è lecito supporre una fase di formazione presso uno o piú attori, al "rap porto controverso" (p. 18) che fra le due arti si realizza in ambiente romano. La prevenzione verso la técnica psicagogica e la condanna della histrionum levis ars non impediscono a Roma la stima e la frequentazione reciproca di attori e oratori (condivisibili le notazioni sul possibile "ruolo educativo" di Roscio nei confronti di Cicerone: pp. 22-23 e n. 46), e le "reciproche e necessarie relazioni" che si instaurano fra le due arti (p. 24) stimolano Eesigenza di una teorizzazione. Su questi fondamenti si sviluppano i successivi capitoli, riguardanti l'elaborazione di Quintiliano. Il secondo, Didattica della voce (pp. 27—94), disegna il curriculum dell'apprendista oratore dalla formazione prescolare Rhetorica, Vol. XXXIV, Issue 4, pp. 455-467. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 1533-8541. V 2016 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: 10.1525/rh.2016.34.4.455. 456 RHETORICA al paedagogium e al ludus primi magistri, alia scuola del grammaticus, alia docenza del comoedus e al completamente) didattico presso il retore; il quarto, Sermo corporis (pp. 117-148), riguarda Yactio, ancora una volta nei rapporti con il teatro, ma con riferimenti anche ad altre esperienze, come la preparazione ginnica presso i palaestrici, in particolare presso quelli specializzati nella chironomia; il quinto (pp.149-181) prende in esame due figure retoriche, Prosopopea e etopea, particolarmente connesse con la gestualità. II terzo e il sesto capitolo (Imago est animi voltus: la maschera fra teatro e oratoria, pp. 95-115; Lettura di Menandro alia scuola del grammaticus, pp. 183-200) - gié editi separatamente, come sopra detto (rispettivamente in Rationes rerum 1 (2013): 165-199 e in Segno e testo 10 (2012): 107-138) - integrano la trattazione con la discussione di due rilevanti problemi solo apparentemente marginali. Chiudono il volume una ricchissima Bibliografía (pp. 201-218) e una serie di preziosi indici: Indice dei loci notevoli (pp. 218-224); Indice dei nomi e delle cose notevoli (pp. 225-228); Indice degli autori moderni (pp. 229-232). La posizione di Quintiliano risalta chiaramente dall'analisi testuale e dal costante confronto con la tradizione retorica precedente, in particolare con Cicerone. Come per l'Arpinate, anche per Quintiliano il problema è quello "di salvaguardare la dignità della professione oratoria prendendo le distanze dagli eccessi scenici e di assicurare la crédibilité dell'oratore, veritatis actor" (p. 2). A differenza dell'attore, la cui...