Book Review| February 01 2022 Review: Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention, by Steele Nowlin Steele Nowlin, Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention. Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016. 274 pp. ISBN: 9780814213100 Denise Stodola Denise Stodola Kettering University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (1): 98–100. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.98 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Denise Stodola; Review: Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention, by Steele Nowlin. Rhetorica 1 February 2022; 40 (1): 98–100. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.98 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. © 2022 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.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviewed by: Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention by Steele Nowlin Denise Stodola Steele Nowlin, Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention. Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016. 274 pp. ISBN: 9780814213100 It is unusual but incredibly useful when authors challenge their readers to think about familiar terms in unfamiliar ways, which is what Steele Nowlin has done here. Calling upon his readers to view the terms “affect” and “invention” through a different lens, he shows us that these two concepts are intimately linked even though “affect” is often used as a synonym for emotion. For Nowlin, affect and emotion are separate concepts that interact with each other. In fact, in his configuration, affect [End Page 98] is a type of “emergence” that precedes an actual feeling or emotion. Because affect concerns an “emerging” potential, it is thus linked to invention, which is, itself, an emerging potential. More specifically, affect emerges and then “collapses” into emotion, and this is analogous to the way in which invention “collapses” into poetic form. By reshaping our perceptions of how affect precedes emotion and is therefore analogous to invention preceding form, we are then able to view poetic invention differently. Ultimately, invention not only shapes poetic form, but can, in many cases, expose cultural narratives that are themselves in need of revision. Moreover, Nowlin does a fine job of contextualizing his theoretical approach within the introductory chapter. He asserts that his work relies heavily on Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, as well as Eve Sofosky Sedgwick. He also uses the work of scholars like Eric Shouse, Brian Massumi, Gregory J. Seigworth, Melissa Gregg, Lauren Berlant, Mary Carruthers, and Rita Copeland. By showing the relationship of his work to that of other scholars—not only those focused on critical theory, but also those who specialize in “feeling theory,” as well as medieval scholars and rhetoricians— Nowlin provides a solid foundation for his theoretical approach. On the other hand, the order of the subsequent chapters is somewhat strained. In the first two chapters, he focuses on Chaucer, first on House of Fame in Chapter 1, and then on Legend of Good Women in Chapter 2. The placement of these chapters makes sense insofar as they both focus on Chaucer and illustrate not only how Chaucer’s works can been seen to deploy Nowlin’s formulation but also how neither of the works pushes past a potential realization of cultural narratives into any sort of action. In House of Fame, physical movement aligns affect with invention, bringing together the literary with the political and ultimately illustrating how the affective dynamic helps us to understand “patterns of cultural power.” In this case, that power is the power of literary men to find their own fame by using women. Dido, in fact, becomes a symbol for what Nowlin calls the “coemergence” of affect and invention, and the form resulting from invention does not provide any answer to Dido’s plight. Legend of Good Women, however, addresses misogyny and antifeminism more fully. Ultimately, though, it does not move past its own misogyny, but rather leaves the reader understanding how unethical that misogyny is. As such, it reveals the cultural narratives in which the work itself exists. By putting these two chapters next to each other, we are able to see both poems rely on affective invention and how the Legend of Good Women moves closer to an invention that more clearly articulates the misogyny of the culture in which it was produced. Chapters 3 and 4 could be brought together into one chapter as both focus on Gower’s Gonfessio Amantis, and both illustrate Gower’s success with the use of affective invention to effect potential change. Chapter 3 shows that the affective invention in the Confessio reveals masculinist cultural discourses and how they shape cultural reality, suggesting a potential need to transform the culture in which it was produced. Similarly, Chapter 4 argues that the chronicle form as a means of codifying significant cultural events and providing an authoritative version of those events has fundamentally opposite [End Page 99] impulses from what Gower’s poem ultimately achieves: invention of not only a...

Reviews 115 of the high Middle Ages, Scholastics, scholars of the emergent scientific rex olution, and authors of the great late medieval vernacular literary works all had distinctly different understandings, valorizations, and usages of sense-derived knowledge and the category of 'experience'. This observation would, I think, impact Carruthers' analysis of the stylistic notion of 'curiositas ', particularly in relation to Bernard of Clairvaux (pp. 149-150): the cita­ tions from Bernard suggest a response to 'curiositas' as much ethical as aesthetic/ I do not mean these comments to detract from what is clearly a bril­ liant and erudite study of the aesthetic pleasure readers took in rhetorically constructed texts in the Middle Ages. My concern is not about Carruthers' analysis so much as her positioning of it under the critical terms 'Beauty' and 'Experience'. A title like 'The Pleasure of Aesthetic Judgments in the Middle Ages', though less impactful, might have captured the nature of the argument more accurately. I strongly recommend this book to all inter­ ested in the aesthetic reception of rhetorical texts in the Middle Ages and invite them to take the thought-provoking iter laid out for them by Profes­ sor Carruthers. Their experience of beauty along the way will be, in the way of experience, for them alone to judge. Juanita Feros Ruys Michelle Baliff, ed.z Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013. 238 pp. ISBN 9780809332106 Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric is well-conceived collection of essays on historiography. Most of the essays review the literature relevant to the area of historiography addressed and illustrate the historiographic principles considered with an example. These features, probably the result of editor Baliff's nudging, make the collection appealing as a textbook for a graduate course. Both Baliff in her "Introduction" and Sharon Crowley in the "After­ word" recall the heady days of the 1980s and 90s when historiography inspired passionate debate, contrasting those times with the current scene. The questions debated then were of three types: (1) Political: What principles of selection led to the creation histories that were racist and sexist? (2) Formal: Should a historiography be suspicious of a narrative of a tradition with "tra­ dition's" inherent propensity to mask fissures and occlude determinative local, situational factors? (3) Generic: Should the historian attempt to recon­ struct the past in its own terms, muting the historian's voice? Or should we frankly and freely appropriate the past for our own ends? The contributors to this volume address these same issues, and if, at the philosophical level, 7This in contrast to Carruthers' assertion that the terms of rhetoric 'are less assessments of states of being or of ethical worth than of sensory affect (p. 45). 116 RHETORICA the answers to these questions seem more settled, differences in approach and emphasis are still important. All the contributors directly or implicitly welcome the expansion of the rhetorical tradition and applaud the critique of rhetoric's traditional norms as sexist, racist, heteronormative, and ethnocentric. In her chapter, Jessica Enoch helpfully divides and categorizes the critique under the rubrics of "recovery" and "re-reading," but she also complains that the current histo­ riography cannot accommodate gendered readings of the rhetoric of public memory and the gendered nature of the architecture of certain sites of typi­ cal rhetorical performance—literatures she reviews. Byron Hawk supports recovery work but seems bored with it, characterizing the effort to "retrieve the excluded" as having become a "bureaucratic mandate" (110). Hawk is impatient: the recovery work of the last twenty years has merely fit more figures into the familiar teleological narrative. He calls for more radical his­ toriographies and histories. Hawk primarily objects to teleology, and he suggests principles of a his­ toriography that would resist teleology and produce radically subjective, performative histories. A properly postmodern historiography would be compatible with the new materialism (Deleuze and Guattari) and with (non-teleological) complexity theories that have characterized recent work across humanities disciplines. Hawk finds a source of inspiration for such a historiography in the writings on improvisation of music theorist and jazz musician David Borgo. He claims his model would ultimately produce "bot­ toms up"(120) histories that would identify discrete moments...

Reviews Michael S. Kochin. Five Chapters on Rhetoric: Character, Action, Things, Nothing, and Art. University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State Univer­ sity Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-291-03455-3 The selections in this hook are best read as a series of loosely connected essays, situated within political science, informed bv scholarship in the rhetoric of Greek and Roman antiquity They build, in a leisurely way, toward a theory of rhetoric as an art of persuasive speech especially suited to the task of the politician—the construction of political advice. In his introduction, Michael Kochin proposes to use the diffusion of ideas in scientific communities as a model of political persuasion: "the politician seeks an understanding of policy through his or her operations within political institutions, just as the scientist seeks understanding through his or her operation wdthin political institutions. Scientific knowledge is thus created and distributed throughout the netw'ork: it is not merely diffused through it from center to periphery. I appeal to this clear case to explain the unclear case of public life: because the social structure of science is well studied, the rhetorical concepts I want to explicate are more clearly visible in it" (11). That w'ould have been an interesting book, but it is not the one Kochin ended up writing. Five Chapters forgets all about scientific communication for chapters on end, and the ideas that it develops about political communication are a very mixed bag. It is, for all that, an engaging and stimulating book. Kochin offers fix e topics for the investigation of political persuasion: character (or ethos), action (or stasis), things (the creation of facts), nothing (communication that maintains relationships) and art (specifically rhetoric as a means of understanding artful speech). Issues of argument and affect are dismissed in the introduction: political persuasion, according to Kochin, depends on the credibility of the speaker and the telling power of facts, and emotion is "a junk category" (15). Both the topics that Kochin has chosen and those he has left aside offer a reader fair warning that the ride ahead will not be a trot through familiar territories. The chapters on character, action, things, and nothing approach issues of political persuasion from different directions. Character takes up the Aristotelean traits of knowledge, benevolence, and virtue, treated here under the topics of competence, identification, and empathy. The chapter also Khetorica, Vol. XXXI, issue 4, pp. 445-464, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . T2013 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re­ served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.2013.31.4.445. 446 RHETORICA discusses the ways in which political leaders "empty" their personalities of idiosyncracies, the better to reflect common values (40). He critiques theories of ethos that see it as artificial, connecting Aristotle's rhetorical ethos to his political ethos. And he introduces a theme that will connect these four chapters: any program that favors "measures, not men" as the focus of political discourse fails to take into account the public's need to judge measures by the men who advocate them. The chapter on action is an extended reading of Demosthenes' "On the Crown," taken as a model for political advocacy in its orientation to the future, and to the possible. Kochin insists that the Athenian audience's approval of the speech is an extension of its judgment of Demosthenes as a competent, benevolent counselor who represents the collective interests of the Athenians. Judgments based on motives or on the results of actions are necessarily flawed, incomplete, or irrelevant. Kochin illustrates this analysis with examples from American political discourse, including the first of many positive citations of Calvin Coolidge, a president I do not ordinarily associate with rhetorical skill. The chapter on things is one of the strongest in the book. Kochin de­ velops an account of enargeia in a discussion of political speeches that deploy facts, statistics, vivid narratives, and images. The range of examples, from Begin to Coolidge (again!) is impressive; Kochin connects the persuasive force of...

Reviews 113 to emergent communities, heretical selves: mystics or Ranters, for instance. Instead, lapses into heretical selfhood are signaled by the emergence of affect, which requires subvention by the inarticulate, as if emotions had to wait for the inchoate in order to appear. For example, as both character and play, Hamlet "foregrounds" the inarticulate as a "cultural construct," as a "means by which 'feeling' could surface," and as a principle of inter-subjective vulnerability (176). Perceiving this counterintuitive pulsion at work, seeing the inarticulate in a "more positive light," requires an exploration of a Tudor "aesthetics of feeling," Mazzio contends (180). Nowhere does she offer such an aesthetics. Rather, she relies on contemporary literary theory for many of her historical arguments, and readers are frequently directed to Eve Sedgwick or Lacan, Jean-Luc Nancy or Hegel in lieu of evidence from the period. Yet The Inarticulate Renaissance succeeds: Mazzio focuses our attention on the suitability of English for worship and ceremony, scripture and poetry, on the fortunes of theatrical mumbling and print polemic, on audiences as 'assemblies,' above all on what Tomkis in Lingua calls a "tunes without sense, words inarticulate." However, in some ways, Mazzio's inquiry is reminiscent of the decline of rhetorical engagement late in the period she studies, of the ways in which past thinkers distrusted rhetoric as a guide to both speech and practice, of the ways oratio was emptied of ratio. In this ambitious, learned work, Mazzio is equally wary: a focus on the inarticulate is symptomatic of distrust. But it also signs a trend in contemporary scholarship. Boredom, ennui, anxiety, and now the inarticulate are experiencing a renaissance, in part because current perceptions of (early) modernity are conditioned by its failures, by its perils not its promises. One promise was transparency—of both method and communication—and 'words inarticulate' court opacity. But as 'feeling' rather than 'telling,' as a rhetoric that develops and refines a deepening commitment to pathos, inarticulation necessarily assumes the eloquence of the age. Stephen Pender University of Windsor Carolyn Eastman, A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. xi + 290 pp. ISBN 978-0-226-18019-9 Jeremy Engels, Enemyship: Democracy and Counter-Revolution in the Early Republic. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010. xi + 316 pp. ISBN 9780087013980-2 114 RHETORICA Sandra M. Gustafson, Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. x + 271 pp. ISBN 978-0-226-31129-6 Jennifer R. Mercieca, Founding Fictions. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010. xi + 274 pp. ISBN 978-0-8173-1690-7 In 1690, as the Enlightenment was just glimmering on the English hori­ zon, John Locke calumniated rhetoric (Essay Concerning Human Understand­ ing III.10). In 1790, as the Enlightenment's dusk settled over Koenigsberg, Immanuel Kant similarly decried the art (Critique of Pure Judgment 1.53). Though a century and a continent apart, they expressed a common disdain for rhetoric. Notably absent from this account are the American continents. Recent scholarship, however, finds that the American Enlightenment yielded a wealth of innovative rhetorical practice, placing public argument at the heart (or rather in the agora) of healthy democracy. Brian Garsten's Saving Persuasion (2009) exemplifies a now common effort to catalogue the British and European hostility to rhetoric while lauding United States thinkers, such as James Madison, who celebrated free public debate. If the Euro­ pean Enlightenment philosophically counseled, sapere aude, then the Amer­ ican Enlightenment pragmatically retorted disputare aude. Four recent books, two by historians and two by rhetoricians, more fully chronicle this prac­ tical response to the philosophical penchant, a rhetorical contrast with the philosophes' critical Enlightenment. Sandra Gustafson's Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early Amer­ ican Republic charts the course of U.S. "deliberative democracy," which "emphasizefs] the political power of language and advancejs] a commit­ ment to dialogue and persuasion as the best means to resolve conflicts and forge a progressive tradition" (220). She highlights dueling conciliatory and prophetic traditions of public address. The conciliatory tradition dominated the United States circa 1815-1835. Paying particular attention to political and pulpit oratory, Gustafson contrasts the Hellenistic William...

204 RHETORICA trattandoli come fígli. Gli viene proposto, come figlio di Dio, di imitare la condotta di quest'ultimo. É «la legge della liberta» . Liberta per il servizio di Dio, sancito nell'alleanza, espresso nella vita e nel culto. Dall'esodo trae origine anche il rito pasquale. Nelle epoche successive, i figli di Israele avrebbero via via composto e cantato i sette salmi della «lode di Pasqua» (Sal 113-118) e della «grande lode» (Sal 136), poi ripresi nella celebrazione famillare della festa. Attraverso «gli inni alia liberta» la parola delLuomo e quella di Dio entraño in un reciproco scambio, costitutivo del rito. E' utilmente premesso al volume un essenziale Lexique des termes techniques (pp. 17-19), sulla terminología retorica piú frequentemente utilizzata dall'A. Sommario Prefazione. I. II dono della liberta. 1. II passaggio del mare (Es 14). 2. II Canto del mare (Es 15). II. La legge di liberta. 3. II Decálogo del libro delLEsodo (Es 20,2-17). 4. II Decálogo del libro del Deuteronomio (Dt 5,621 ). 5. Perché due Decaloghi? III. Inni alia liberta. 6. «Chi é come il Signore nostro Dio?» (Sal 113). 7. «Che hai tu, mare, per fuggire?» (Sal 114). 8. «Israele, confida nel Signore!» (Sal 115). 9. «lo credo» (Sal 116). 10. «Lodate il Signore, tutti i popoli!» (Sal 117). 11. «La destra del Signore é esaltata!» (Sal 118). 12.«Si, per sempre la sua fedeltá» (Sal 136). Francesco Pieri Facoltd Teológica dell'Emilia-Romagna, Bologna Olmsted, Wendy. The Imperfect Friend. Emotion and Rhetoric in Sidney, Milton, and Their Contexts, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. xi+293 pp. ISBN 978-0-8020-9136-9 Interdisciplinary interest in emotion as a critical category of thought has led to a range of scholarship discussing the ways in which affect permeates all discourse, shaping identity and behavior within private, professional, and public spheres. Wendy Olmsted's book, The Imperfect Friend, contributes to this conversation by exploring the rhetorical management of emotion evident in early modern texts. Focusing on the attempts of friends to persuade each other, Olmsted's exploration of the "gentle strand in the history of emotional persuasion" provides insight both into the organization of early modern affect as well as the role of emotion in rhetoric generally (p. 20). Like her other historical work, it is characterized by close attention to the textual basis for her claims about the practice of rhetoric and about early modern identity and culture. Olmsted traces a general distrust of strong emotion among early modern writers, as well as a distrust of the use of force or coercion to impose Reviews 205 agreement. Against the backdrop of these doubts and the powerful hope among Renaissance rhetoricians that public "eloquence could compel people to follow the laws" (p. 20), Olmsted identifies friendship as an alternative space where eloquence is used to gain assent and build emotional stability without the threat of coercion. Olmsted commits chapters to legal and religious discourse, poetry, justice, honor, and, finally, marriage. Tracing the rhetorical means of persuading emotion in these contexts reveals how, for instance, Protestant writers could envision "friendship ... as a model for ideal marriage" in order to promote marital harmony (p. 176). Olmsted finds social relationships represented in early modern literary texts and prose treatises as "nearly utopian site[s] where one friend appeals reasonably to the heart of the other" (p. 5). According to Olmsted, these texts display "historically and culturally specific topoi for producing [and regulating] emotion" (p. 6). Hospitality, for instance, emerges as one of the central topoi in Sidney's texts through which discourse on emotion is reproduced. Expecting an individual to be a good host no matter the context or guest, for instance, promoted the regulation of extremes of love, anger, and grief. Each era, Olmsted suggests, has its own cultural resources through which emotion is managed, resources that are an understudied aspect of rhetoric. As other scholars have concluded as well, emotion, far from being irrational, is open to persuasion. What Olmsted adds to our understanding of emotion is the way in which early modern culture made it possible for individuals to effect such persuasion through temperate means. Olmsted looks primarily...

Scholars agree that a connection existed between the early sophists and democracy, usually in theoretical terms or in the association of sophists with the Athens of Pericles. However, to discuss the sophists and demokratia exclusively in the context of Athens makes little sense, given that the earliest sophists came from outside Athens and thus began to develop the ideas and practices that made them famous in other contexts. This paper considers what political experiences or background the early sophists may have had outside Athens. Examining the backgrounds of Protagoras, Gorgias, Thrasymachus, Prodicus, and Hippias, one can build a case for clear democratic associations beyond Athens. This may affect our understanding of the causes—and possibly the consequences— of the so-called "sophistic movement" with respect to democracies in Greece.

AbstractIndirect discourse presents problems in that it is speech that has been altered from the oral strategy that is deployed in direct discourse. Most particularly, references to actio seem to be irrelevant since indirect discourse is not a constituent of the context to which it refers. It appears, nevertheless, to be placed in context by references to words and gestures which are derived directly from actio. The gestures that reinforce speech arise from a veritable rhetoric of seduction, especially in respect of their theatricality, and vocal characteristics can be sensed even at the level of phrasing in indirect discourse. This too, therefore, is part of the rhetoric of speech.

Le discours indirect pose le problème d'une parole déviée de sa stratégie orale telle qu'on la conçoit dans le discours direct. En particulier, les références à l'actio semblent totalement effacées, puisque le discours indirect ne constitue pas une parole en situation. Et pourtant, il apparaît que la mise en situation du discours indirect s'appuie sur des verbes et des gestes relevant directement de l'actio. Car les gestes qui renforcent le discours procèdent d'une véritable rhétorique de séduction, notamment par leur aspect théâtral, et les caractéristiques de la voix se laissent percevoir même au niveau de la phrase du discours indirect. Ce dernier se rattache ainsi à une rhétorique de la parole.

Abstract: Contemporary scholars have focused on two concepts in Vico's tkinking: the imaginative universal and the sensus communis. For Vico these concepts emerge from the human race's first experience of religion. For over a century Vico scholarship has been divided over how to view this experience. This division falls along Aristotelian lines: that is, the primitive religious experience can be seen either as poetic—God and religion are made by the human imagination—or it can be viewed as rhetorical—God and religion are discovered. Vico derives his idea of natural law from the concepts of the imaginative imiversal and the sensus communis, and their relation to religion will affect decisively the status of Vico's theory of natural law. As a matter of fact, Vico's thinking on this issue is better understood, first, within the context of Rudolph Otto's The Idea of the Body, and second, in the context of the Baroque rather than in the context of Aristotelian categories of religion and poetic. Viewed within these contexts, the origin of religion is a theophany that is neither made nor discovered but witnessed, and the development of natural law is an historical process only understood in retrospect. Vico thus differs radically from other Enlightenment thinkers, especially Hume, in his account of primitive religion and provides a basis for natural law that is neither superstitious nor rationalistic, but religious.

Contemporary scholars have focused on two concepts in Vico’s thinking: the imaginative universal and the sensus communis. For Vico these concepts emerge from the human race’s first experience of religion. For over a century Vico scholarship has been divided over how to view this experience. This division falls along Aristotelian lines: that is, the primitive religious experience can be seen either as poetic—God and religion are made by the human imagination—or it can be viewed as rhetorical—God and religion are discovered. Vico derives his idea of natural law from the concepts of the imaginative universal and the sensus communis, and their relation to religion will affect decisively the status of Vico’s theory of natural law. As a matter of fact, Vico’s thinking on this issue is better understood, first, within the context of Rudolph Otto’s The Idea of the Body, and second, in the context of the Baroque rather than in the context of Aristotelian categories of religion and poetic. Viewed within these contexts, the origin of religion is a theophany that is neither made nor discovered but witnessed, and the development of natural law is an historical process only understood in retrospect. Vico thus differs radically from other Enlightenment thinkers, especially Hume, in his account of primitive religion and provides a basis for natural law that is neither superstitious nor rationalistic, but religious.