100 RHETORICA Hui Wu, “Guiguzi," China's First Treatise on Rhetoric: A Critical Trans­ lation and Commentary, Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, xiv + 180 pp. 2016. ISBN: 9780809335268 "Guiguzi," China's First Treatise on Rhetoric: A Critical Translation and Commentary consists of Hui Wu's translation of the classical Chinese text of Guiguzi, accompanied by an introduction to the original text, notes on the translation, and a glossary of the key terms in Guigucian rhetoric. C. Jan Swearingen also contributes a concluding commentary on the similarities and differences among the rhetorics of Guiguzi, the sophists, and the PreSocrates , as well as Plato and Aristotle. This book offers the field a muchneeded direct encounter with indigenous Chinese rhetorical theories and concepts. In the past two decades, both comparative and Chinese rhetorical studies have significantly remapped our sense of "the" rhetorical tradition. Mary Garrett, Xing Lu, Arabella Lyon, LuMing Mao, and C. Jan Swearingen (to name a few) have reinterpreted key Chinese rhetorical concepts, terms, and modes of meaning-making in order not only to understand Chinese rhet­ oric in its own contexts but also to change the paradigms of rhetorical criti­ cism in the present age of globalization. However, not much scholarly attention has been paid to translations of classical Chinese treatises. Limited primary textual evidence and inaccurate translation have contributed to ori­ entalist (mis)readings of Chinese rhetorical theories, in which the Chinese tradition is held to lack rhetorical thinking. Such a deficiency narrative has spurred comparative rhetoricians to study Chinese rhetoric without the bur­ den of the Eurocentric model, and here I am thinking of Xing Lu's Rhetoric in Ancient China, Fifth to Third Century B.C.E.: A Comparison with Classical Greek Rhetoric. I am also thinking of LuMing Mao in his "Essence, Absence, Useful­ ness: Engaging Non-Euro-American Rhetorics Interologically." Being well aware of the "paucity of primary texts and inadequate trans­ lations," Hui Wu allies herself with attempts to remake the Chinese rhetorical tradition (p. 7). In particular, Wu distinguishes the Guigucian rhetoric from Confucian rhetoric. The latter expresses a strong mistrust of eloquence and stresses a strict connection between language use, action, and moral orders. In Wu's estimation, the addition of Guiguzi to the landscape of rhetoric "offers an opportunity for critical studies of an indigenous rhetorical theory and practice excluded from the rhetorical canon in both China and the West" (p. 9). By bringing Guiguzi back into conversations of non-Greco-Roman rhe­ torics, the translation and commentaries of Wu and Swearingen redefine the scope of rhetoric, innovate with Guigucian rhetorical terms and concepts, and offer us language to think outside of Eurocentric logic and rationality. In order to situate her translation in the sociopolitical context of the orig­ inal, Wu first takes her readers back to the pre-Qin Warring States period (475-221 BCE). In so doing, she reassesses Guiguzi by critiquing the dominant receptions of the book in both Chinese and Western contexts. While Guiguzi is conventionally seen as a magic book on war strategies, Wu dissociates it from issues of military deployment. According to Wu, although Guiguzi, Master Guigu, is the presumed teacher of the zong-heng practitioners (who Reviews 101 were travelling persuaders famous for eloquent military consultations), his rhetorical theory is "independent" from that of his students, because "the entire treatise [Guiguzi] hardly develops any notions or terminologies directly related to the school's [the zong-heng school's] war strategies" (p. 20). Further, instead of accepting that Guiguzi is unfathomably difficult or enigmatic, Wu portrays it as a "profound theory of rhetoric" (p. 20). Closely related, she rejects the common Western characterization of Guiguzi as a "Chinese Sophistic," as if it intends to teach manipulation and distrust. She further points out that such a Western understanding forces us to understand Guiguzzi in terms of the debate between Plato and the sophists about communi­ cative ethics. In Wu's English translation, Guiguzi is neither a magic book on military affairs nor a mysterious or deceptive anti-rhetorical doctrine. It is instead a treatise about a rhetorical theory that relies on yin-yang philoso­ phy, the Dao, and moral doctrines to develop rhetorical tactics for building human...

Reviews 317 Peter Mack, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric 1380-1620 (OxfordWarburg Studies), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 345 pp ISBN: 978-0-19-959728-4 In A bdistoi i/ of Renaissance Rhetoric 2380—1620, Peter Mack expertly describes the fortunes of Renaissance rhetoric within its academic and textual settings. Rhetoric in the Renaissance was a school subject, mostly covered in the grammar schools, with secondary importance in the universities, and thousands of rhetorical textbooks from the period survive as testimony to its ascendancy within the liberal arts curriculum. With a dizzying command of technical detail, Mack has delved into this large and complex textual record and emerged with a synthesis that will be required reading for students of the subject. Beginning with a description of the most significant ancient treatises on rhetoric, followed by a chapter on the contributions of key fifteenth-century Italians (and one notable Cretan, George of Trebizond), Mack proceeds to a series of four chapters focused on teachers whose textbooks had an extraordinary impact on the theory and teaching of rhetoric in the sixteenth century: Rudolph Agricola, Erasmus, Melanchthon, and Ramus. The chapter on Melanchthon, the "dominant figure" of the years 1519-45 (p. 104), is filled out with sections on his chief students and followers. The chapter on Ramus (and his associate Omer Talon) gives a useful overview of the controversy and key combatants surrounding his polarizing reforms. With helpful tables outlining the contents of their principle writings on rhetoric, Mack charts their innovative and (again in the case of Ramus) agonistic adaptations of the classical program. The first half of the book is therefore devoted to the big players in the book market for Renaissance rhetoric - those whose work best adapted the classical program to the educational needs and occasions of the humanist school. Indeed, for much of the period that Mack describes, Renaissance rhetoric was a symbiosis of two types of books on rhetoric: classical (Ciceronian) treatises and humanist manuals. For most of the sixteenth century, there is a strong correlation between the numbers of editions of the Rhetorica ad Herennium (still generally attributed to Cicero in the period) and the most popular humanist treatises (pp. 30-2). Mack explains the apparent symbiosis by noting the frequent use of humanist treatises as a preliminary study, a prologue to the study of a full-length classical treatise. But after decades of steady demand, humanist manuals and classical treatises alike suffer steep declines in production after the 1560s. The cause of the sudden decline is not clear, though Mack offers a number of suggestions: the rising fortunes of Talon's rhetoric, which was not coupled to full-length treatises; new syntheses of classical and humanist rhetoric, such as found in the popular De arte rhetorica libri tres (1562) of the Jesuit educator Cyprian Soarez; the scholastic revival of the late-sixteenth century; or even the efficiency of the second-hand book market to meet continuing demand for humanist and classical rhetorics. 318 RHETORICA Renaissance rhetoric was equally tied up with the fortunes of the liberal arts, especially logic or dialectic. It is one of the virtues of HRR 1380— 1620 that it provides through the main part of the narrative a parallel account of the fortunes of both humanist rhetoric and dialectic. Melanchthon described his textbooks on rhetoric and dialectic as companion pieces, and even Ramus, who notoriously drew a sharp distinction between dialectic and rhetoric, distributing four of the five classical offices of rhetoric between them, insisted on the necessity and complementarity of both (pp. 142-5). Both rhetoric and dialectic were combined in a very influential method of critical reading, one of the uses of Renaissance rhetoric to which Mack is especially attentive. The parallel fortunes of rhetoric and dialectic in northern Europe that Mack tells in the first half of the book are complemented, in the second half, by a chapter on the fortunes of rhetoric in southern Europe in the sixteenth-century (chapter 8), and chapters on the contemporary fortunes of specialized rhetorical treatises: manuals of tropes and figures (chapter 10), letter-writing manuals (chapter 11), preaching manuals and legal di­ alectics (chapter 12), and vernacular rhetorics (chapter 13). In...

Two noteworthy and successful vernacular rhetoric manuals printed in sixteenth-century England are actually writing manuals, books on how to compose letters: William Fulwood’s The Enimie of Idlenesse (1568), and Angel Day’s The English Secretorie (1586). Both works reflected and sought to influence literacy habits in the bookreading public, and reveal a wider range of cultural engagement than has previously been thought. In particular, three aspects are likely to have stirred reader interest: a connection for vernacular learners with both the humanist and dictaminal epistolary traditions that formed the core of prestige education; a focus on practical letter exchanges that carry familial and social significance; and a large collection of model letters, in which readers would have found exemplary discourse coupled with proto-fictional and amatory elements that could be enjoyed as entertainment. Understanding the varied appeals of these two books helps us fill out the larger picture relating to how vernacular literacy was valued, developed, and applied.

436 RHETORICA disputation plainly shows. But debate—genuine debate— may seem both alien and undesirable to those whose recent histories have been marked by verbal coercion, deception, confrontation, and the exercise of mute power. "Debate" brings to mind not a means to arrive at consensus, but a zero-sum game with one winner who seeks victory "by any means necessary." That sort of "debate" is empirically real, of course; and not only in a post-dictatorship Europe or Africa. Even when consensus seems to have been attained, it is a fragile thing that more often than not deteriorates and turns into conflict. Think of the aftermath of the selection of Havel; or of the fact that it was not very long ago that the Polish parliament saw fit explicitly to forbid its members to carry firearms in the assembly chamber. I hasten to add that the actual practices of the United States Congress—or, for that matter, the British Parliament—are hardly paragons of the "civility" that is so important a part of civic virtue. So simply extolling "debate" as the preferred method of decision-making and conflict-resolution is not enough. We seem, then, to be brought to the verge of the sort of cynicism (if that is not too strong a word) that Professor Axer and his co-contributors want to purge from contemporary politics—particularly in countries that desire to put dictatorship behind them and foster democracy. We seem also to have stumbled on the old question of whether the humanities can humanize. But the answer to that question can be learned only if all of us, in good faith, do what we can to make sure that they do, even if we suspect that the answer we get may not be the one we wanted. It is to be hoped, then, that Axer and his colleagues will continue to teach and encourage us. Thomas Conley University of Illinois, Urbana JosefKopperschmidt, ed., RhetorischeAnthropologie: Studien zum Homo rhetoricus. München: Fink, 2000. 404 pp. Stefan Metzger and Wolfgang Rapp, eds., Homo inveniens: Heuristik und Anthropologie am Modell der Rhetorik (Literatur und Anthropologie 19), Tübingen: Narr, 2003. 274 pp. Peter D. Krause, ed., Rhetorik und Anthropologie (Rhetorik: Ein inter­ nationales Jahrbuch 23), Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004. viii + 201 pp. Recent rhetorical anthropology built on the model of philosophical an­ thropology faces an inherent dilemma: what one hand wishes to deliver homo rhetoricus in terms of universal capacities, the other hand snatches away. In fact this tension shapes the three rich collections reviewed here, which in combination mark what editor extraordinaire Josef Kopperschmidt considers the real reason for current interest in rhetoric: namely its anthro­ pology (Kopperschmidt, p. 13), and especially its sophisticated treatments Reviews 437 of the whole man constituted in a culturally situated language and in the interanimation of body and mind (a long-standing strength of German scholarship and popular culture, 1 should add). After ambitiously titling his collection Rhetorische Anthropologie: Studien zum Homo rhetoricus, for instance, Kopperschmidt backpedals from the project's apparent "ontological ambi­ tions" (Kopperschmidt, pp. 22-23). Although, Kopperschmidt protests, the "homo-" formula such as "homo-faber" and "homo-ludens" might imply claims about mankind's essential nature, it does not have to. We should simply consider homo rhetoricus one useful heuristic for characterizing hu­ mankind from a particular, and in this case rhetorical, perspective (p. 22). Metzger and Rapp rightly insist that the rhetorically informed homo inveniens is a modern creature distinguished by a focus on the new and the creative (Metzger/Rapp, pp. 7-9), but they also must struggle against their essentializing rubric, as well as the contribution of someone like Peter L. Oesterreich, who has flatly argued in these two venues ("Homo rhetori­ cus (corruptus): Sieben Gesichtspunkte fundamentalrhetorischer Anthropologie ", Kopperschmidt, pp. 353-70; "Selbsterfindung: Zur rhetorischen Entstehung des Subjektes", Metzger/Rapp, pp. 45-57) and elsewhere that man is a rhetorical being ideally subject to a universal, rhetorical anthropology (Kopperschmidt, p. 355). Then the eclectic and individually interesting articles in Volume 23 of Rhetorik: Ein internationales Jahrbuch collected by Peter D. Krause under the rubric "Rhetoric and Anthropology" introduce questions of appropriate scope. Is the "rhetoric of x...