Rhetorica
179 articlesJanuary 2026
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The Daimonion of Isocrates: Anti-Socratic Polemics and the Power of Politikoi Logoi in the Philippos ↗
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Abstract: This article argues that in his Philippos (Isoc. 5.149), Isocrates reinterprets the Socratic daimonion , transforming it from an inner ethical sign into a divine power legitimizing political action. Embedded in the speech's broader anti-Socratic polemic, this alteration aligns with Isocrates' conception of the politikos logos as a practical, audience-directed discourse. The daimonion passage thus exposes the philosophical foundations of Isocratean rhetoric: divine sanction for the interdependence of logos and praxis . By invoking a divine mandate that unites logos and praxis , Isocrates presents his logoi as performative texts capable of guiding Philip II of Macedon toward the common political good of Greece.
September 2025
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Abstract: Robert Herrick's central oxymoronic trope in Hesperides (1648) of diligent negligence has traditionally been understood in general aesthetic terms. This essay argues that this trope, particularly as evoked in the poem "Delight in Disorder," relates especially to the art of rhetoric and that it had special currency in the language of curiosity deployed in the rhetorical discourse of the period, especially in the area of preaching. The essay begins by situating Herrick's poem in relation to contemporary rhetorical thought distilled, from Cicero via Justus Lipsius, in John Hoskyns's Directions for Speech and Style and expressed in the sartorial metaphor of Herrick's poem. It then turns to contemporary homiletic discourse to tie these ideas into the language of curiosity as applied to questions of arrangement ( dispositio )—the central concern in the poem's examination of appeal in female "dress"—arguing that it is this rich rhetorical context that provides the energeia of Herrick's poem.
June 2024
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Standing Before God in the Hebrew Bible: Rhetorically Centering Individuals’ Petitions at the Dedication of the Temple (1 Kgs 8) ↗
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Abstract: The Hebrew Bible accords great moral agency to the collective “children of Israel.” Its discourse focuses as much on the attitudes, words and actions of the nation as on those of kings, priests, or prophets, let alone ordinary individuals. Yet key texts emphasize that God’s covenant is forged with individuals. The relative priorities of individuals vs. the nation are nowhere stated explicitly. However, a remarkable text, King Solomon’s dedicatory address for the Jerusalem Temple in 1 Kgs 8, suggests that they have equal claim on God’s attention. Solomon authorizes seven types of petitions, half for individuals and half for the nation. The importance of individuals’ petitions is heightened through four distinctive rhetorical strategies—sequence, amplitude, narrative time, and billing. Implications are sketched for understanding the Hebrew Bible’s conception of identity, agency, and moral character.
September 2023
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The First Inauguration: George Washington and the Invention of the Republic by Stephen Howard Browne (review) ↗
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Reviewed by: The First Inauguration: George Washington and the Invention of the Republic by Stephen Howard Browne Tom F. Wright Stephen Howard Browne, The First Inauguration: George Washington and the Invention of the Republic. State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020. 229 pp. ISBN: 978-0-271-08727-6. Nostalgia about early American history typically comes in a few familiar forms. At the more popular end of work on the Revolutionary Period, there is no shortage of longing glances towards the struggles and causes of that era rooted in attraction to seemingly clear-cut ideological certainties. In a different way, intellectual historians might often seem to envy a period in which men of ideas of the quality of Adams and Jefferson led the nation. In a more tragic key, chroniclers of the continent's indigenous histories are rightly elegiac for the moment before entire worlds were destroyed. Stephen Howard Browne's The First Inauguration occupies another distinct category. It is a category that for obvious reasons is flourishing in our particular political moment and is of particular relevance to a Rhetorica audience. We might call this mode that of "public sphere melancholy." His book claims to speak on behalf of "readership concerned with the tenor of political discourse in our own time … [lamenting] the passing of an age when citizens deliberated as citizens, with speeches, not tweets" (4). To that audience he offers an engaging and readable study of the circumstances and significance of George Washington's passage through the USA to delivery of his first speech as president. But this is not an escapist backward glance. For while it expresses a great deal of wistfulness for the world of the Founders, it is an optimistic book, bringing to life the rhetorical world of the early republic in order to offer readers what Browne calls "vital resources for the reanimation of civic life" (2). In a familiar procedure, his book reads an entire era through the lens of a single speech. In this case, the opening address of Washington's presidency, delivered on 30 April 1789. But what is more striking and ultimately more successful about this book is how it casts its gaze more widely, [End Page 448] devoting as much time to the ritual procession of Washington from his home in Virginia through to Manhattan. This tour is a narrative device that allows for a vivid panorama of a slice of the early republic. Browne brings a novelistic verve to this capsule history, evoking the streets, buildings and rooms and the other landscapes through which Washington moved. Memorable instances here include the political microclimates of Philadelphia and Trenton and the free Black community of New York. With clear relish, he also recreates the parades and banquets and toasts that the almost-president was forced to endure and the many speeches he reluctantly delivered. These chapters are aimed at a broad audience, involving plentiful vignettes and asides that will be of use to general readers, even if unnecessary for the book's scholarly readers. Rather than incidental, however, the context makes the case that rhetorical analysis must always be grounded in granular thick description. If only all contexts were as well-sketched as this. By the time the book turns to the rhetorical analysis of the speech itself, a lot of the key concepts have been well-established. Browne has used his account of the journey to set up the live contexts that animated the key term that he will go on to address. The argument turns on Washington's attempt to "invent" the modern republican state through his framing of its stakes and its values. As in Browne's previous works on Edmund Burke and Thomas Jefferson, he is a thoughtful and insightful theoretically informed textual analyst, drawing out the complex themes and salient ideas from what has often been dismissed as a rather forgettable speech. He also offers an interesting survey of the speech's afterlives, examining in turn the anniversary years of 1839, 1889, 1939, 1989. In all of this, the nostalgia for an eloquent and dignified form of statecraft is often justified. However, nostalgia can be as wearisome as any banquet. As the analysis...
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Reviewed by: Heritage and Hate: Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities by Stephen M. Monroe Bjørn F. Stillion Southard Stephen M. Monroe, Heritage and Hate: Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2021. 256 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8173-2093-5. How much do we know about our own university and its past? Stephen M. Monroe asks this question of his university—University of Mississippi—as well as a few other peer southeastern U. S. schools. Monroe examines how these universities "have struggled with their linguistic and [End Page 452] symbolic inheritance" (1). The controversies covered in the book are shown to have deep roots in the Lost Cause ideology that developed almost immediately after the Confederacy surrendered to the Union in the Civil War. Monroe explores how the Lost Cause formed, and continues to inform, notions of race and identity in universities of the American South and beyond. Monroe builds a conceptual frame called "confederate rhetoric." Put simply, confederate rhetoric "is historical, gathering any and all symbolic behavior that is rooted in or that recalls the Old South" (2). The concept extends beyond just Lost Cause discourse in its attention to a larger variety of texts, objects, and sources. As Monroe explains, "confederate rhetoric encompasses many modes of communication, including words, sounds, colors, statues, flags, photos, architecture, and more" (2). The widening of the communicative aperture allows Monroe to study less traditional forms of discourse, like ephemera, collegiate fight songs, and nicknames, as well as more traditional forms such as public arguments and deliberations. Heritage and Hate is composed of seven chapters, along with a preface, introduction, epilogue, and postscript. Most books do not have all of these sections preceding and proceeding the numbered chapters of a book. The various entry and exit points of the book express the recurring relationship amongst racism, identity, and tradition. Chapter one and two analyze vernacular discourses from the University of Mississippi. Chapter one traces the contested meaning of the nickname of the University, "Ole Miss." Originally the name given to the first University of Mississippi yearbook in 1897, Monroe explains that the quick uptake of the term as a nickname for the school owes to the racialized hierarchy of the late nineteenth century. The person responsible for suggesting the name noted that they often heard Black people working on southern plantations "address the lady in the 'Big House' as 'Ole Miss'" (25). Monroe builds upon this origin story to show how "'Ole Miss' has been invoked to glorify and defend the Old South and its outmoded way of life, used to punish and exclude Black people, … and served as code, container, and protector of nostalgic feelings for the Lost Cause" (20). Monroe tracks the various public debates about whether to keep the nickname, showing how appeals to unity and tradition betray a sympathy to the past rather than an effort at inclusion. Chapter two also takes up a vernacular discourse at the University of Mississippi, specifically the school cheer known as "Hotty Toddy." The central question posed in this chapter is, "how should southern university communities (and other intuitions) handle expressions or symbols less glaring than Confederate statuary but perhaps just as troubling?" Monroe makes the case for why "Hotty Toddy" rises to the same level of scrutiny by examining six moments in which the chant was "weaponized as a racial taunt" (63). Chapter three and four focus on controversies that feature an inciting event and significant discursive responses. In chapter three, Monroe analyzes a 2015 incident in which Black students at Missouri staged a peaceful protest and white spectators used the traditional M-I-Z-Z-O-U chant "to [End Page 453] drown [the protestors] out and to communicate anger and disapproval" (91). Monroe draws from newspaper articles, social media posts, and institutional responses to capture the intense emotion of the discourse from various individuals and groups. Chapter four moves back to University of Mississippi to address a controversy based on the response of students to the re-election of Barack Obama in 2012. On November 7, when the election was called in favor of Obama, many students took to public spaces and yelled racial...
June 2023
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Abstract: This paper investigates the role of rhetoric within ancient medicine by setting medical writings in dialogue with contemporary forensic texts. Reading across these two genres allows us to capture the shared ways in which early medical and forensic discourse mobilise rhetoric in response to the epistemological limits of medical and forensic practice. Both medical and forensic discourse frame factual and practical knowledge as the remedy to the slippages of words, but at the same time they need words to formulate and validate their tentative knowledge of those very facts. Select readings from the Epidemics illustrate the importance of a rhetorically structured narrative in response to uncertain scenarios. Much like the narrative of forensic texts, I argue, the case-histories of the Epidemics try to shape elusive realities through a rhetorical gesture that confers a precise meaning upon them. Rhetoric, the paper concludes, is not merely an embellishment nor a skill. It is, instead, a medium for the communication of knowledge and the negotiation of its limits, even in texts that at first glance seem, or claim, to be devoid of any rhetorical features.
March 2023
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Rhetoric and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Purity, Covenant, and Strategy at Qumran by Bruce McComiskey (review) ↗
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Reviewed by: Rhetoric and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Purity, Covenant, and Strategy at Qumran by Bruce McComiskey Robert M Royalty Jr. Bruce McComiskey, Rhetoric and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Purity, Covenant, and Strategy at Qumran. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021. 231 pp. ISBN 978-0-271-09015-3. This book is a detailed rhetorical analysis of six of the sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls discovered at Qumran. Each chapter, focusing on one or two of [End Page 204] the texts, employs a different rhetorical strategy for analysis based on what McComiskey has identified as the "rhetorical ecology" of the text, incorporating the changing material, discursive, and historical elements of the Qumran community rather than only the more static rhetorical situation of each text. The chapters proceed in a roughly historical order. The book achieves its aims of introducing rhetorical scholars to the sectarian scrolls and, with its "case study" approach, religious scholars to new strategies of rhetorical analysis. Key points are the emphasis on rhetorical ecology as an interpretive lens and the argument for hermeneutics/rhetoric in chapter 6. While McComiskey places the diachronic rhetorical development of these texts in the social and political history of the Qumran community, this is a rhetorical, not historical, study. The Introduction argues for the importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls not only for Second Temple Jewish history but also for analysis by rhetoricians, given the relative paucity of rhetorical studies of the texts and their evolving rhetorical ecologies. Chapter 1 analyzes the early epistle from the future leader of the Essene Qumran community to the high priests of the Jerusalem Temple called Miqṣat Ma'aśeh ha-Torah, "Some Precepts of the Torah" (4QMMT, following Dead Sea Scroll convention for identifying texts by cave number and site, here Qumran). 4QMMT uses the rhetorics of identification, distinction and persuasion to distinguish the two parties' positions and to try to convince the Temple priests of the validity and urgency of Essene views on the impurity of the Temple. The rhetorical ecology of the text is as important as the rhetorical situation: "only the understanding of texts as situational and ecological will further our understanding of ancient texts such as 4QMMT" (46, McComiskey's italics). The rhetorical ecology of the community shifts dramatically in the next 50 years as the letter does not achieve its persuasive goals. The Essene community, under the leadership of the "Teacher of Righteousness," the putative author of 4QMMT, dissociates from the Jerusalem hierarchy and indeed all non-Essene Jews, founding a desert community outside of Jerusalem by the Dead Sea. Drawing on the speech act theory of J. L. Austin, chapter 2 then analyzes the foundational Rule of the Community (1QS), a performative text using infelicitous speech acts to condemn the Jerusalem authorities and felicitous speech acts to form the Yahad, or congregation, as the Essene community referred to itself. The document ends with a serious of curses, which McComiskey labels as preventing infelicitous speech acts within the initiated community, although he parses the curses, treating the ones for material actions in chapter 4, weakening his analysis. Chapter 3 then analyzes the dissociative rhetoric of the Damascus Document, a text discovered in the Cairo Genizah almost 40 years before copies were found at Qumran, hence called CD. Although the origins and purposes of CD remain less clear than 1QS, the text addresses members of the community who live in "camps" or communities among non-Essene Jews away from Qumran. Using Perelman and Olbrecht-Tyteca's The New Rhetoric on "the dissociation of concepts," McComiskey shows how CD addresses the incoherence of Essenes living among Jews who [End Page 205] are not "real" Jews.1 He shows how CD divides central concepts of Jewish identity, such as humanity, Israelite, remnant, and Essene, into "real" and "apparent." This rhetorical strategy resolves incoherence for "real" Essenes living among "apparent" Israelites. Chapter 4 turns to the central theme of ritual purity at Qumran. McComiskey chooses two texts focusing on purity, the Purification Rules (4QTohorot A, B) and the Temple Scroll (11QT), which he analyzes using material rhetoric, an alternative to representational approaches to models for words. The symbolic material actions of inspiriting...
January 2023
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Reviewed by: The Ethics of Persuasion: Derrida's Rhetorical Legacies by Brooke Rollins Mario Telò (bio) Brooke Rollins, The Ethics of Persuasion: Derrida's Rhetorical Legacies, Classical Memories/Modern Identities. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2020. 230 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8142-1424-4. There aren't many bold books on ancient Greek rhetoric. When I say "rhetoric," I mean specifically the corpus of speeches of the orators of the fifth and fourth centuries bce, and by "bold" I mean scholarship that does not treat these texts simply as historical documents or stylistic paradigms but as complex literary constructions that invite theoretically engaged approaches. I can think, for example, of Victoria Wohl's Law's Cosmos: Juridical Discourse in Athenian Forensic Oratory (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2010), which focuses on how the very idea of the law—conceptualized as a self-styled notion of authority—affects the arguments of judicial oratory. We should be grateful to Brooke Rollins for having produced another big, bold book on a body of work that most often receives the empiricist and historicist treatment prevalent in the field of classical studies. This book has left me with the uplifting impression that, inspired by Rollins, more work in a similar vein will soon follow and that the world of fourth-century bce orators can finally gain the attention of those outside of classics. Rollins stages a compelling encounter between Gorgias, Lysias, Isocrates, and Plato, on the one hand, and Derrida on the other, engaging with the philosopher's late period, in the 1990s, when he produced a rich set of ethically and politically oriented writings. This orientation has always been central to the project of deconstruction. Rollins relays Derrida's formulation: "the thinking of the political has always been a thinking of différance and the thinking of différance always a thinking of the political" (9). Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the Derrida we see here is more Levinasian than Heideggerian; it is a Derrida deeply attentive to the implications of alterity for hospitality, friendship, and democracy. [End Page 95] Rollins is interested precisely in how the interruptive force of alterity is thematized by oratory's constitutive reliance on the address—to judges in a courtroom, to an assembly, and to listeners gathered for a specific occasion or implied, abstract, "ghostly" readers. Her main goal is to show that "when the trace of the other interrupts identity, persuasive instrumentalism implodes" (5). This implosion is not simply the failure of the speech's argumentation, its surrender to the inevitable powers of indeterminacy. The emphasis is, rather, on the ethical affirmation that derives from the unsettling of identity brought about by the projection toward an other that is the address. As Rollins put it, "We encounter no controlling, autonomous speaking subjects here, but beings constituted (and so interrupted) in an encounter with difference" (6). The claim to authority, to a kind of indivisible, closed-off truth, is contradicted by the very opening to the outside (the speaking to) that is intrinsic to the conception of a speech. In this perspective, the speech becomes "a nontotalizable encounter, in which responsibility, negotiation and decision are owed to the other" (6). Persuasion, the alleged primary function of speech-writing, is thus complicated by an ex-cess, an ethical responsibility, emerging from "the unsettling moment of rapprochement with the unassimilable other" (37). In this way, persuasion can be regarded "not as a traditional communicative transaction, but as a possibility given only by way of our ongoing responsibility to and for the nonpresent other" (41). It becomes the staging of an aporetic moment, the opportunity for "a response in which both self and other are transformed" (45). In the chapter on Gorgias, Rollins focuses on the much-discussed Encomium of Helen, pushing against the apparent takeaway of the speech, an affirmation of logocentrism, of the affective power of logos. As Rollins observes, "Helen is marked, engraved, written by what is radically other to her" (61). The upshot is that "the subject is nothing but the effect of affirming the other's unwilled address" (63) and so is the all-encompassing, fetishized logos, another, albeit depersonalized, Über-subject, at...
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Reviewed by: The Ideology of Democratic Athens: Institutions, Orators and the Mythical Past by Matteo Barbato Christine Plastow (bio) Matteo Barbato, The Ideology of Democratic Athens: Institutions, Orators and the Mythical Past. Edinburgh, GB: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. 252 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4744-6642-4. Barbato's book offers a new analysis of Athenian ideology through the application of a New Institutionalist approach to the city's democratic institutions as demonstrated by their use of stories from the mythical past. He argues for a middle ground between Marxist and culturalist understandings, characterising Athenian ideology as value-neutral, flexible, normative, constructive, and bidirectional. This is illustrated through an analysis of the varied presentations of four myths across several institutional contexts: particularly the epitaphioi logoi, but also tragedy, Assembly and forensic speeches, and private genres. An introduction lays out the structure of the book and summarises previous approaches to Athenian ideology; there is a particular focus on the Marxist approach of Nicole Loraux and others, and the culturalist approach illustrated by the work of Josiah Ober. The second chapter explores Athenian knowledge of mythology, identifying the theatre as its main source but also noting the importance of religious festivals such as the Panathenaia, public institutional contexts, and private learning. The third chapter establishes Barbato's theoretical approach, drawing on New Institutionalism to argue that the different democratic institutions of Athens had their own discursive frameworks and that discourse within them was necessarily structured by these: the need to create an imagined community in the funeral speeches; the requirement to argue in favour of justice in the law courts; the principle of advantage for the Athenians in the Assembly, and both justice and advantage in the Council; and the ability to play with the ideological frameworks of other institutions and the need to appeal to a diverse audience at the dramatic festivals. The subsequent four chapters examine the use of four stories from the Athenian mythic past in these institutional contexts and in private genres: the concept of Athenian autochthony, the sheltering of the Heraclidae, the Amazonomachy, and the assistance provided to Adrastus against Thebes. A short conclusion summarises the book's arguments and contextualises its contributions to the study of Athenian ideology, democracy more broadly, and interactions between Classics and political science. [End Page 88] There is much to commend Barbato's book. His analysis of Athenian ideology highlights two important points that are not prominent in the work on the subject to date. First, he emphasises that Athenian ideology was not fixed but fluid and dynamic, and that the presentation of ideological material necessarily differed based on the context in which it was delivered. This is an important point to grasp to understand the Athenians' apparent tendency to contradict themselves from source to source. Barbato successfully illustrates the appropriateness of different perspectives in different institutional contexts. For example, his nuanced analysis of the various versions of the myth of Adrastus presented in Lysias' funeral oration, Euripides' Suppliant Women, and Assembly speeches convincingly shows how the emphasis on or exclusion of certain narrative features—such as the hybris of the Thebans—can be manipulated to evoke aspects of the democratic ideology suitable to the setting. Second, he is right to draw attention to the fact that ideological material not only describes the audience's viewpoint but also moulds it by demonstrating a norm to which they are expected to conform, touching implicitly on an important point regarding the cognitive effects of rhetoric. Indeed, this methodology in combination with a cognitive approach could produce a particularly strong reading: for instance, how was the ideological result affected by the movement of audience members between the institutions and their memory of the different versions they had heard in other arenas? Barbato is working within a particular school of thought in the study of Athenian oratory that proposes that strict expectations of acceptability were in place in the various contexts of public speaking. Indeed, in his conclusion he summarises that the institutionalist reading of fixed discursive parameters in the institutions "corroborates the view that Aristotle's subdivision of the discipline into three genres was based on the observation of actual oratorical practice" (219). While the...
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Reviewed by: The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk by Samuel McCormick Daniel M. Gross (bio) Samuel McCormick, The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020. 326 pp. ISBN: 978-0-226-67763-7. Implicitly McCormick's book addresses a question that is urgent in the US academic context, where current rhetoric and communication practices are in fact much studied: Why study history at all? At best, so the skeptic might offer, historical work provides some interesting background to the pressing problems of today. At worst, historical work exacerbates some of those same problems around rhetorical power by simply by spending too much time on received traditions. (I've long admired Malea Powell's sly and self-consuming conference paper title "Aristotle Is Not My Father.") At the same time a set of distinct answers to this history question has been brewing at The University of Chicago Press, thanks in large part to the late editor extraordinaire Douglas Mitchell, who had himself learned about rhetoric from the late century Chicago scene, and Richard McKeon in particular. The series Mitchell started at Chicago "Rhetoric and Communication" has published different types of concept-oriented histories by scholars including Nancy Struever, John Durham Peters, Debra Hawhee, David Marshall, and now Samuel McCormick. Taken together, this group of scholars shows how rhetoric and communication can't be studied adequately without some strong historical version of conceptual work, because that is how the very [End Page 90] things we wish to study appear as such in the first place. In what follows I discuss how McCormick's book makes the case elegantly. First of all, why for McCormick "conceptual history," especially as it would apply to "everyday talk" counterintuitively? Shouldn't we study everyday talk by recording and coding ordinary speakers in face-to-face settings? No doubt, replies McCormick, such grounded study of the first type gets at something sociological (2). But how can we study the very concept of everyday talk as it has shifted significantly online for instance, showing up as "chat," which can't be the same thing? For that sort of study, historical work on the concept is essential, because that is the only way we know what our object of study is in the first place. It is not "conversation," which McCormick calls an interpersonal modality, that achieved its highest art and greatest conceptual clarity in the Enlightenment. At the same time, it is not public sphere discourse legitimated by (again Enlightenment) institutions of oratory and journalism (291). Instead, McCormick argues with a nod to paradox, "everyday talk" is a distinct concept that rises with modernity and its industrializing momentum (4), what Kierkegaard first identifies as snak. This is where McCormick must demonstrate—and he does so beautifully—why we turn to Kierkegaard at this point of inquiry, and not only to his rich archive of wagging tongues, noise and nonsense, cliché and bombast, wordplay and witticism, tangent, reprise, gossip, gimcrack, diversion, duplicity, tedious anecdote, absurd abstraction, abrupt interjection, and endless logorrhea (44). Methodologically, McCormick's powerful point is that snak is the concept that names this verbal efflorescence, and Kierkegaard's work is where the concept appears in its sharpest and critical form. If we studied for instance only Gert Westephaler's fictional talk, or the philosophical talk of Hegel's Danish parrots (44), we would lose track of the concept snak altogether, and thus we would not really understand what we were talking about ourselves: an irony that McCormick has to dance with throughout this substantial section steeped in Kierkegaard's first language Danish, and in his vast corpus that we no longer know how to handle academically. One outstanding virtue of McCormick's book is that it will teach a new generation of scholars what Kierkegaard did besides anticipate existentialism. The next section of the book, a book that runs 326 pages in total, picks up the work of Martin Heidegger, who was himself a keen reader of Kierkegaard. Now focusing on the 1920s, which were for Heidegger both a period of tremendous intellectual ferment that includes his 1924 lecture course on Aristotle's Rhetoric and...
June 2022
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Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Approaches to Text, Tradition and Social Construction in Biblical and Second Temple Literature by Carol A. Newsom ↗
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Reviewed by: Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Approaches to Text, Tradition and Social Construction in Biblical and Second Temple Literature by Carol A. Newsom Davida Charney Carol A. Newsom. Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Approaches to Text, Tradition and Social Construction in Biblical and Second Temple Literature. Forschungen zum Alten Testament 130. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019. 382 pp. ISBN 978-3-16-157723-9. In Rhetoric and Hermeneutics, Carol A. Newsom has collected eighteen of her essays that appeared between 1989 and 2016 and one previously unpublished essay. Unlike many volumes of this sort, the whole greatly exceeds the sum of its parts. Apart from its usefulness as a survey to scholars and students, the book advances Newsom’s scholarly agenda. Newsom works with texts circulating in and around Jerusalem during the late Second Temple period. This was a time of intellectual ferment: proto-gnostic sects proliferated; established religious practices were being challenged, defended, and modified. Newsom argues persuasively that these groups were led by sophisticated readers and rhetors. The leaders grasped that the Hebrew Bible, still undergoing canonization, is polyphonic and intertextual. Further, the texts that they created deployed polyphony, enargeia, and other rhetorical techniques to shape communal identity, attract adherents, and help individuals cope with the precarity of their status. These arguments are advanced in each of the book’s four topical sections. First are six essays that explain and apply Newsom’s methods of rhetorical criticism. Second are four essays illustrating how the Qumran community—responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls—shaped communal and individual identity. Third are three essays that lay out an ethno-psychological model for mapping conceptions of self and agency across cultures. The essays apply the model to the Hebrew Bible and a variety of Second Temple texts. Last are six reception studies that examine how narratives of the period are taken up and transformed both in antiquity and in modern times. Newsom, a chaired emerita professor of theology at Emory University, has published on so many aspects of Second Temple literature over her career that she has plenty of essays on method, theory, and application to choose from. As a result, even without additional commentary, the sections build coherent arguments. Each section opens with introductory issues of [End Page 322] theory, method, and scope and develops with close textual analysis and suggestive implications. The first section on methods reveals what Newsom means by rhetorical criticism and what theorists she relies on most. Like many biblical scholars, her immediate rhetorical touchstone is George Kennedy. But he does not inspire her to read widely in the Greco-Roman tradition. She is not concerned to trace possible cross-influences during the Hellenistic period. Instead Newsom turns to Bakhtin and Burke and the more literary strand of twentieth-century rhetorical criticism. For Newsom, rhetorical strategies in scripture reflect the identities and ontologies of their compositors and shape those of readers and writers to come. Accordingly, this section accomplishes two tasks for Newsom. First, the section launches Newsom’s larger claims that Second Temple communities deployed rhetorical strategies to shape individual and communal identities with case studies of Job (chapter 2), Proverbs 1—9 (chapter 3), Jewish apocalyptic texts (chapter 5), and texts from Qumran (chapter 6). Second, for biblicists new to rhetorical approaches, it introduces concepts and methods of rhetorical criticism, including Bakhtinian polyphony and dialogism (chapters 1 and 3), genre studies (chapters 2 and 4), and a variety of basic rhetorical concepts (chapters 5 and 6) such as epideictics, arrangement, enargeia, and kairos, though she doesn’t always employ these terms. While displaying nuanced rhetorical sensibilities, Newsom would clearly benefit from additional reading in rhetorical scholarship, particularly Carolyn Miller’s classic “Genre as Social Action”1 and William FitzGerald’s Spiritual Modalities for its use of Burke’s religious terministic screen to draw Burkean implications for prayer and religious practice.2 In Section Two, Newsom argues that the Qumran community—a break-away Jewish sect that deliberately positioned itself against the practices in the Second Temple—was “intentional and explicit in the formation of the subjectivity of its members” (159). First, she argues that the Dead Sea Scrolls served as a library for the community (chapter 7), based...
March 2022
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Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement, by Bjørn F. Stillion Southard ↗
Abstract
Reviewed by: Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement, by Bjørn F. Stillion Southard Sara C. VanderHaagen Bjørn F. Stillion Southard. Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement. Race, Rhetoric, and Media Series. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2019. 176 pp. ISBN 978-1-4968-2383-0 While often dismissed as a straightforward failure, arguments advocating the removal of free Black Americans to Africa are rhetorically significant: they continued for more than fifty years, engaged white and Black Americans alike, and powerfully shaped understandings of Blackness and Black communities into the twentieth century. As I have found when [End Page 213] teaching courses on the African American rhetorical tradition, the shadow of this discourse lurks in the words of speakers from Sojourner Truth to Marcus Garvey. Its presence—much less its rationale—can be difficult to explain. Bjørn F. Stillion Southard’s excellent book helps to address that challenge by offering a rich, complex analysis of this persistent occurrence of “peculiar rhetoric.” Beginning with speeches given at the founding of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1816, the first chapter examines what Stillion Southard calls the “peculiar argumentation” of colonization’s founding advocates. These speakers’ arguments in favor of colonization were shaped (or, more accurately, misshaped) by their effort to appeal to two diametrically opposed audiences: southern slaveholders and northern abolitionists. Attempts to meet such a strange rhetorical task left key ideas in what Stillion Southard terms “jangling relation” (33) to one another and opened the ACS to critiques from all sides. Although the ACS treated free Black Americans as “objects of the scheme, not subjects to be addressed” (25), as the author astutely notes, it is not difficult to imagine that they would have had strong opinions about the proposal. Chapter two explores a response to the founding of the ACS whose authorship was attributed to the “Free People of the District of Columbia.” Because the authorship of this text cannot be clearly identified, Stillion Southard focuses instead on its “peculiar voice” in order to demonstrate that it is “hermeneutically diasporic; it both belongs to and flees from familiar interpretive frames” (42). The analysis deftly deploys familiar rhetorical concepts, such as polysemy, in unfamiliar ways in order to draw out the text’s three voices: serious, ironic, and signifying. Each of these three voices suggests a different set of authors and distinct purposes vis-à-vis colonization. While the analysis provides solid evidence for all three voices, I found the discussion of signifying most insightful and potentially productive for scholars seeking to understand and amplify Black voices from the past. The concept of signifying used by Stillion Southard, while departing slightly from Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s variation, “signifyin’,” reveals a compelling insight: “Being black and subversive was much more difficult in public discourse than being white and ironic” (57). Further evidence of that insight appears in chapters three and four, which focus on texts produced by Black colonists. Chapter three examines the “negotiation of blackness, power, and material conditions” (66) in free Black landowner Louis Sheridan’s correspondence with the ACS and his eventual emigration to Liberia. Adapting Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s concept of planning in the face of “exclusionary forces” (66), Stillion Southard demonstrates how colonization discourse created limited possibilities for free Blacks who sought to emigrate and reveals the inventive ways in which these individuals rhetorically negotiated their severely constrained subjectivity in the face of limitations. This analysis effectively engages both Afro-Pessimist and Black optimist thought, which compellingly illustrates Sheridan’s own journey from optimism to pessimism as a result of his “peculiar planning for emigration. The focus on Black subjectivity is critical here, [End Page 214] as it helps to show how one individual Black person experienced and responded to the peculiar machinations of a colonization scheme that treated him as “neither slave nor free” (71). Chapter four turns to a more empowered settler colonist, Hilary Teage. Just before the Republic of Liberia declared independence in 1847, Teage gave two speeches that constituted “settler colonist civic identity” by outlining, respectively, their “peculiar obligation to debate” and their “peculiar obligation to commemorate” (89; emphasis in original...
January 2022
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Abstract
Reviewed by: Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire by Susan Jarratt Anna Peterson Susan Jarratt, Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. 200 pp. Coined by Philostratus in the early third century CE, the label “Second Sophistic” (c. 50-250 CE) is increasingly recognized as an imperfect periodic designation. Does it refer exclusively to the tradition of epideictic rhetoric as described by Philostratus? Or can it be expanded to include the full range of Greek literary production during the first three centuries CE? At its core the term reflects feelings of belatedness and nostalgia, such that the common narrative of the period has become one in which an elite Hellenic identity was defined above all by paideia (“education” or “culture”). While this rooting of an elite Greek identity in the classical past is well recognized as a response to Roman hegemony,1 recent scholarship has begun to expand on this conventional view, pointing to elements of continuity both with earlier Hellenistic literature and the literature of the fourth century CE.2 Jarratt’s monograph Chain of Gold consequently sets a tall task for itself in once again addressing the cultural politics of the Second Sophistic. It is an ambitious and thought-provoking work, even if in the end it does not completely succeed in what it sets out to do. At its core, it argues for a reappraisal of the “second sophistic habit of dwelling in the past” as something that was not “monologic and static” but “varied and dynamic” and that offered the writers and performers of the period “a politically protected way of ‘talking back’ to empire.” (17) For Jarratt, the obsession with the past that has come to define this period of Greek literature is not a simple matter of nostalgia but rather of critical memory, one that allowed the authors of this period to reimagine and keep alive a deliberative civic space. Jarratt’s aim in this book is not at its core an entirely new idea. That said, what makes her work so thought provoking is her desire to locate “a colonial counterdiscourse” in a broad range of works (38). Moreover, she is certainly correct that too often classicists have been overly hesitant about reading the literature of the period through the lens of postcolonial theory (3). In addition to an introductory chapter outlining the monograph’s methodology, Chain of Gold develops this argument across six case studies, covering respectively Dio Chyrsostom’s Euboean Discourse (Chapter 2), Aelius Aristides’ Roman Oration (Chapter 3), Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana [End Page 103] (Chapter 4) and Imagines (Chapter 5), Heliodorus’ Aithiopika (Chapter 6), and Libanius’ To Those Who Call Him Tiresome (Chapter 7). Generally speaking, this is a nice mixture of well-trod and often overlooked texts. Her strongest chapters are those which connect what she calls rhetorical vision to the post-colonial concerns outlined in the monograph’s first chapter. For example, her discussion in Chapter 3 of Aristides’ Roman Oration explores how “the ‘ sophist . . . draws on the resources of [Homeric] epic to enhance his powers of visualization,” providing his audience not only “a phantasm of [Rome’s] imperium but also a techne of viewing” (47). Likewise, Chapter 5 reads Philostratus’ Imagines—an intriguing collection of descriptions of works of art—as an exploration in rhetorical vision that pushes the limits of ekphrasis. Treating the text as a museum of sorts, Jarratt acts as curator, bringing out how the text handles reoccurring images of youth, women, and different ethnicities, among others. This is Jarratt’s most successful chapter, in part thanks to the inclusion of an appendix, which maps out the paintings in relation to one another. In a few instances, however, Jarratt does not make full use of the ancient evidence. The clearest example of this comes in her discussion of Dio Chrysostom’s Euboean Discourse (Or. 7). In this speech, Dio professes that he will narrate a personal experience, relating how, after being shipwrecked in Euboea, he was taken in by a huntsman, who recounted his own troubled participation in local politics. The huntsman’s tale then prompts Dio to expound on...
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Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992—2016 by Tammy R. Vigil ↗
Abstract
Reviewed by: Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992—2016 by Tammy R. Vigil Sara Hillin Tammy R. Vigil, Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992—2016. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019. 272 pp. ISBN: 9780700627486 In a thoroughly researched and timely study of women’s participation in American political life, Tammy R. Vigil explores how partners of presidential nominees have navigated the thorny territory of public and private spaces, often battling the media’s representation of their roles as wives, mothers, and public political figures in their own right. The text concerns itself in part with how presidential nominees’ partners offer insights into “the expectations of presidential partners” despite the fact that, as Vigil acknowledges, there are no established guidelines for evaluating the work of [End Page 100] the (almost always) women who fulfill that role (2). Though the book gives special emphasis to the years between 1992 (hailed as the Year of the Woman) and 2016, Vigil begins with a rich historical discussion of presidential wives’ involvement in their husbands’ campaigns, mentioning, for example, how Louisa Adams “used open house receptions to court potential supporters for her husband’s bid for the presidency” (5). Such examples, which involve women facilitating a salon type of discourse, echo suggestions from rhetoricians such as Christine de Pizan, who championed women’s ability to use influence as a rhetorical tool. Vigil’s ethos in this historical and rhetorical analysis is firmly established in the introductory chapter, where she takes readers as far back as 1808, noting that evidence of smear campaigns against presidential candidates’ wives may have begun with women such as Dolley Madison, who was in 1808 “accused of having had an affair with incumbent president Thomas Jefferson” (3). Vigil’s sharp attention to the fact that some sort of media presence has, almost from the beginning, either helped or hampered presidential nominees’ spouses, provides a corrective to any notion that such interference is a more recent phenomenon. Vigil spends much of the introductory and first chapters exploring the evolution of women’s involvement in political life, noting how, although women “were initially conceived of as apolitical beings” (34), they were actively involved in all facets of decision making in certain “public roles customarily closed to them” during men’s absence through the American Revolution (22). Noting the restrictive view of women’s ability to “function outside the home” (17) promulgated by influential writers such as David Hume, Vigil illustrates how women were indeed more than capable of rising to the challenge of political participation as more opportunities became available to them. Vigil also notes how nineteenth-century ideologies about women began to shift and how changing beliefs regarding the necessity of women’s public participation—as evidenced by texts such as John Stuart Mill’s 1869 On the Subjection of Women (23)—allowed women to go to work outside the home and, therefore, move more fluidly between the public and private sphere (24). The first chapter also introduces a concept that anchors much of the discussion of political wives/mothers in the rest of the text: republican motherhood, which Vigil notes was a “rhetorical strategy” (28) to push the notion of an “ideal female patriot” (27). The republican mother, Vigil notes, was a concept that left women “duty-bound to protect and cultivate the home” but also encouraged debates concerning “women’s appropriate concerns and actions outside the home” (28). The essential historical groundwork laid in the introductory and first chapters allows readers to much more fully appreciate both the political opportunities that have opened up for women since and the challenges that those opportunities have presented. The subsequent chapters of Moms in Chief explore more specifically how various presidential nominees’ partners have been seen to either adhere to or deviate from the republican motherhood framework. The second chapter concerns itself with Barbara Bush and Hillary Rodham Clinton, two seemingly [End Page 101] diametrically opposed figures when discussed from the terministic screen of republican motherhood. If the ideal republican mother was, as Vigil notes, “other-centric, self-sacrificing, primarily concerned with domesticity, and...
September 2021
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Abstract
Reviewed by: Nostalgic Design: Rhetoric, Memory, and Democratizing Technology by William C. Kirlinkus Logan Blizzard William C. Kirlinkus, Nostalgic Design: Rhetoric, Memory, and Democratizing Technology. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. 262 pp. ISBN: 9780822965527 William Kirlinkus’ Nostalgic Design poses a central question: “What are you nostalgic for, why, and to which ends?” (4, 21). Nostalgia has a bad reputation in contemporary discourse, central as it has been to recent conservative movements, like the propagandistic, restorative nostalgia of “Make America Great Again.” This conflation has allowed progressives and critics to dismiss nostalgia as purely regressive and/or nationalistic, which “simply relieves critics of the responsibility of understanding an ‘illogical’ group . . . [and] blinds [them] to their own nostalgic impulses” (29). But the truth is that we are all nostalgic for something, insofar as the futures we imagine are necessarily shaped by what we value from the past. What is needed, and what Kirlinkus offers throughout the book, is a means to negotiate multiple, conflicting nostalgias, and put their affective force to constructive, democratic, and inclusive ends. By reframing nostalgia, Kirlinkus articulates nostalgic design, “a perspective and method” for engaging with competing nostalgias and incorporating these into the design of technology. The inherent rhetoricity of design—defined broadly as “the methods by which expert makers create some technology to be operated by a specific user, in a specific context, in order to ‘change existing situations into preferred ones’”—has long been acknowledged by theorists like Richard Buchanan and Donald Norman, and often aligns with the future- orientation of the dominant technological paradigm (or “techno-logic”). Nostalgia, here defined as “pride and longing for lost or threatened personally or culturally experienced pasts” (6), would seem more closely aligned with another rhetorical process: memory. By recognizing that technology is far more historically-oriented than designers tend to admit (given that users tend to understand the new only through the old), nostalgic design posits nostalgia as powerful, largely-untapped resource for designers of all types, from graphic designers to medical professionals. As Kirlinkus argues, to overcome the tendency of tech design to neglect entire social groups, we must take seriously the memories, experiences, and concerns of a wide spectrum of users, and incorporate these into the very process of design. Much of the book is devoted to putting nostalgic design into practice, as a method. Kirlinkus frames the approach as a three-step process: identifying [End Page 464] exclusionary designs, mediating technological conflicts, and, ultimately, designing meaningful products (24). Perhaps due to the readily-apparent nature of exclusions in technology, the only real consideration of this first step comes in Chapter 2, which examines several cases of “critical nostos” (51), of amateurism functioning as resistance. Instead, the primary concern of Nostalgic Design is navigating the wildly divergent visions and values held by users and designers. In this way, the project runs into one of the defining questions for deliberative democracy: how to incorporate a plurality of opinions, needs, and values in a manner that is at once equitable and agonistic. The third chapter, one of the book’s strongest, engages with these concerns directly; setting four prominent theories of deliberative rhetoric—Aristotelian audience analysis, Burkean identification, Ratcliffe’s rhetorical listening, and Mouffe’s agonism—alongside corresponding models of deliberative design. This juxtaposition highlights the shortcomings of previous, well-meaning attempts at inclusive design, such as the patronizing efforts of “user-centered design,” or the tendency of “empathic design” to sideline designer expertise. Chapters 5 and 6 turn to the final step in the process, explicating meaningful design. Returning to the pseudo-oral history method from the second chapter, Kirlinkus focuses squarely on design praxis, bringing in accounts of real designers who have developed productive relationships with user nostalgia. This approach is of particular use in Chapter 5, which poses the interactions between designers and clients as a potential conflict between the designer’s expert knowledge (techne) and the client’s experience (metis). The correlation between rhetorical communication and design professions truly shines in this discussion, as the process of adapting, adopting, or refusing feedback requires careful attention to knowledge boundaries and productive opposition—in short, the skills of the rhetorician. The project culminates with a...
June 2021
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Abstract
Reviewed by: Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics by Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld William P. Weaver Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld, Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. 312 pp. ISBN: 9780823277926 The figures of speech are the subject of a reevaluation in literary scholarship of the Renaissance era. Their importance has never been entirely out of view—they are hard to ignore. Early printed editions of the classics sometimes note figures in the margins, and this was a practice emulated by one “E.K.,” the annotator of Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender who noted, among other figures, “a pretty epanorthosis” here and “an excellent and lively description” there. Evidently the figures contributed to basic literacy in academic contexts, and it is hard to imagine that all that training was confined to the schools and universities. In recent interpretative scholarship on English poetry, a productive approach has been to place one figure of speech in focus, and compare its uses in order to discover its latent meanings. The effectiveness of this approach is amply illustrated, for example, by essays collected in a 2007 publication entitled The Renaissance Figures of Speech, covering twelve figures.1 Elsewhere, groupings of figures, subject as they were to classifying instincts of humanist writers and teachers, have proven meaningful instruments for literary interpretation. In a 2012 book, Jenny C. Mann considered various unruly figures under the heading of hyperbaton, in order to trace the difficulties of translating classical rhetoric and poetics into English vernacular practices.2 In Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics, Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld takes the latter approach, collecting and examining a group of figures under the heading of the “indecorous,” namely figures that flaunt their artistry, transgress modesty, and eschew generally the gold standard of Renaissance wit: sprezzatura, the dissembling or disguising of effort and study. Three figures—simile, antithesis, and periphrasis—were selected and compared to illustrate Rosenfeld’s thesis that ostentatious figures offered a distinctive means of thinking as well as of embellishing. It is a persuasive and coherent selection. Comparing, contrasting, and “talking about” or renaming something—these are logical as well as rhetorical operations. Together, they represent a promising start on Rosenfeld’s ambitious aim: “to understand how figures of speech established the imaginative domains of early modem poetry” (13). In three chapters of Part One, Rosenfeld describes an intellectual and pedagogical landscape that gave rise to “indecorous thinking,” that is, the practices and patterns of thought afforded by ostentatious figures of speech. It’s a contentious landscape drawn along lines of Ramus’ reforms in rhetoric [End Page 350] and dialectic, as these were filtered into English discourse by means of handbooks of the figures. Rosenfeld relies on the best-known and oft-rehearsed aspect of these reforms, filling out her account with some original scholarship on reading and composition practices. In a nutshell, Ramus’ attempt to simplify rhetoric instruction by reserving inventio and dispositio for dialectic (or logic) instruction resulted in a truncated presentation of rhetoric as consisting of just elocutio and actio, or style and performance. Although it could not have been Ramus’ or his followers’ intent to imply an autonomous field of discourse, some English vernacular handbooks of rhetorical poetics, such as Abraham Fraunce’s The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588), nonetheless give the impression that rhetoric might be studied independently of logic and reduced to the study of elocutio, which itself might be reduced to the study of schemes and tropes. It is in that imagined domain of an autonomous and mutilated rhetoric that Rosenfeld argues a counter-humanist movement in English poetics of the late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-centuries. The argument for indecorum (the weaker argument) sometimes feels ponderous in Part One, but the pace picks up in Part Two. In three chapters, Rosenfeld convincingly shows the figures’ vitality and potential to structure and organize fictional thought, narrative, and speech. These are fine examples of rhetorical criticism and English literary scholarship. In Chapter 4, taking as a starting point Spenser’s portrayal of Braggadochio in The Faerie Queene, book 2, Rosenfeld compares some competing qualities of the figure simile and shows that it...
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Abstract
Reviewed by: Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom by Marjorie Curry Woods Jordan Loveridge Marjorie Curry Woods, Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. 200 pp. ISBN: 9780691170800 At the small liberal arts school where I teach, all students take a history course in which they read, among other common texts, Virgil’s Aeneid. A popular assignment for many of the professors teaching this course, myself included, is to assign students a speech where they compose in character what Aeneas might have said to Dido upon leaving Carthage, or, alternatively, the words Dido might have said to Aeneas. While each semester some students invariably choose to speak as Aeneas, my observation is that Dido is by far the more popular choice, regardless of students’ gender identity. Upon reading Marjorie Curry Woods’s Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom, I am struck by the parallels between my experience and the account of medieval pedagogy that Woods offers. Weeping for Dido explores the role that emotion, particularly women’s emotions, played within the classical texts that constituted the curriculum of the average medieval classroom. Since the medieval classroom was a space dominated by young male students, the focus of Weeping for Dido invites several [End Page 344] interesting questions about gender, identification, rhetorical delivery, and performance, all of which are taken up by Woods at various points within the text. Working with an impressive array of manuscript evidence, Woods demonstrates that “while women were overwhelming absent from [the] schoolboy classical world except in texts, their [women’s] emotions permeated and sometimes dominated the classroom experience” (10). This argument is advanced not through an analysis of the texts in medieval libraries, or through a comparison of rhetorical treatises by known figures associated with medieval education, but rather through close attention to and comparison among manuscript commentaries, glossing, notation, and other codicological elements. The results of this analysis are impressive and provide an illuminating view of medieval pedagogical practices. For instance, in the first chapter, which focuses on manuscripts of the Aencid, Woods shows how familiar elements of rhetorical terminology from sources such as Cicero De inventione and the anonymous Rhetorica ad herennium were used to help young students understand Virgil’s epic poem. One manuscript identifies Dido’s flattery of Aeneas upon his initial arrival in Carthage as a captatio benevolentiae, “the rhetorical term from letter-writing manuals for capturing the goodwill of the listener” (Woods 17); another identifies Dido’s speech to her sister Anna explaining her feelings for Aeneas as ”Oratio Insinuntiua,” “Insinuative discourse” (Woods 20). These techniques, traceable to traditions such as letter-writing manuals (ars dicta-minis) and Ciceronian commentary respectively, are placed within a classroom context, showing that such theories had pedagogical currency beyond their presumed function. While the Aeneid is central to Weeping for Dido, Woods also engages other “Troy Stories,” notably the Achilleid of Statius, which tells of Achilles’b mother stealing him away and hiding him in women’s clothes to keep him from dying in the Trojan war, and the Ilias latina, a Latin retelling of the Illiad. Both were used in elementary medieval education; “they are on almost every medieval list of what students should read, and they figure prominently in the consensus of what modern medievalists believe medieval students did read” (54). Perhaps unsurprisingly, these elementary texts exhibit completely different habits of glossing than copies of the Aeneid, revealing “what teachers thought would amuse or usefully instruct their pupils” (56). Woods shows that the elements brought to bear on the Achilleid were numerous and varied; many manuscripts, for instance, exhibit speeches that are clearly labeled with the Ciceronian partes orationis (Woods 66); others show how the unique valence of medieval Latin terms sometimes influenced the understanding of literary texts, such as in one manuscript where the Ciceronian Attributes of a Person are used to analyze a scene in which Achilles is disguised in women’s clothing. In this section, the term habitus is understood both in its original sense (as a taught manner of being, a physical disposition), but also as a manner of dress (Woods 67–8). Later...
May 2021
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Authorizing Authority: Constitutive Rhetoric and the Poetics of Re-enactment in Cicero’s <i>Pro Lege Manilia</i> ↗
Abstract
This paper studies the persuasive strategies in Pro Lege Manilia in conversation with contemporary rhetorical theory, drawing especially on the perspective of constitutive discourse and the interaction between what is in the text and what is outside. Prior receptions of Pompey by internal audiences double as sites of panegyric image construction, which was itself then instrumentalized to influence external groups. The speech self-referentially thematizes this production of authority, disclosing its rhetorical mechanisms as both performed and performative text. Cicero himself, in the process of proclaiming Pompey, crucially participates in the manufacture and mediation of the image, and in constituting ideological cohesion.
March 2021
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Authorizing Authority: Constitutive Rhetoric and the Poetics of Re-enactment in Cicero’s Pro Lege Manilla ↗
Abstract
This paper studies the persuasive strategies in Pro Lege Manilla in conversation with contemporary rhetorical theory, drawing especially on the perspective of constitutive discourse and the interaction between what is in the text and what is outside. Prior receptions of Pompey by internal audiences double as sites of panegyric image construction, which was itself then instrumentalized to influence external groups. The speech self-referentially thematizes this production of authority, disclosing its rhetorical mechanisms as both performed and performative text. Cicero himself, in the process of proclaiming Pompey, crucially participates in the manufacture and mediation of the image, and in constituting ideological cohesion.
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The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Durée of Black Voices ed. by Vershawn Ashanti Young and Michelle Bachelor Robinson ↗
Abstract
Reviewed by: The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Durée of Black Voices ed. by Vershawn Ashanti Young and Michelle Bachelor Robinson Mudiwa Pettus Young, Vershawn Ashanti, and Michelle Bachelor Robinson, eds., The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices, New York: Routledge, 2018. 894 pp. ISBN: 9780415731065 In their preface, Vershawn Ashanti Young and Michelle Bachelor Robinson herald The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices as a landmark publication in the field of rhetorical studies. The reader, they contend, is the only comprehensive rhetoric anthology to “speak directly to the artistic, cultural, economic, religious, social, and political condition of African Americans from the enslaved period in America to our present era, as well as to the Black Diaspora” (xxi). As expressed in their introduction, Young and Robinson hoped to meet two goals in undertaking their editorship of the anthology. First, they aimed to deliver a collection of “unequivocally rhetorical” texts that reveals how African Americans have sought to influence American society. Second, they intended to illustrate that African American rhetoric exists “all around us,” performed in every genre and mode of communication (xxi). In the final analysis, Young and Robinson achieved these goals marvelously. The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric is a singular pedagogical and reference text that presents African American rhetoric in all its contours, complexities, and, even, contradictions. Containing almost 900 pages of primary and critical works, the reader is wonderfully expansive. Interviews, autobiographical writings, folktales, speeches, social media posts, poetry, and theoretical treatises are among the genres showcased. Expertly, this wide-ranging content is organized into [End Page 237] four major units that are divided into sections based on themes. While Young and Robinson provide introductions to each of the major units, thirteen “expert editors,” a cohort of scholars culled from a wide range of disciplines, have provided introductions, selected readings, and crafted explanatory annotations for most of the reader’s subsections. Part 1, “African American Rhetoric—Definitions and Understanding,” presents readers with the contextual and theoretical framing for navigating the anthology. In the unit’s first half, Young and Robinson delineate the book’s purpose and codify the six elements of African American rhetoric: language, style, discourse, perspective, community, and suasion. The unit’s second half is composed of the work of Molefi Asante, Geneva Smitherman, and Keith Gilyard, foundational theorists of African American rhetoric who clarify the philosophical underpinnings, linguistic features, and the history of the systematic study of African American rhetoric, respectively. Part 2, “The Blackest Hours—Origins and Histories of African American Rhetoric,” includes texts that highlight the enduring imprint that African orature has left on African American expressive culture; the varied faith systems through which African Americans have theorized their lived experiences; Black epistemes of language, literacy, and education; and the diversity of African American political rhetoric. Part 3, “Discourses on Black Bodies,” centers the premise that considerations of gender and sexuality are essential to the study of African American rhetoric. The unit features readings on Black feminisms, Black masculinity, and Black queer/quare rhetorics. Part 4, “The New Blackness: Multiple Cultures, Multiple Modes,” is the book’s final and most eclectic unit. Potent readings that parse Caribbean intellectual thought, African American technoculture, the rhetorics of Hip Hop, and the self-reflexiveness of Black artistry are the focus. Indubitably, the anthology’s apparatus provides readers with a wealth of entry points into the study of African American rhetoric. Reinforcing the anthology’s intended pedagogical function, each section is followed by a bibliography and a set of discussion questions. Readers can use these paratextual resources to further process the anthology’s readings independently and/or within a group, in and outside of institutionalized classrooms. A companion website, containing links to recordings of public addresses, comedic performances, musical selections, and other artifacts that complement the anthology’s primary readings and critical introductions, has also been made available. The cumulative effect of these supplementary materials is that individuals with both an advanced and burgeoning knowledge of African American rhetoric can find their footing in the anthology’s vast terrain and that Young and Robinson’s contention that African American...
January 2021
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Abstract
It is a sustained concern for Aristophanes studies to assess the political commitments expressed in the comedic poet’s drama tic corpus. Though generally synoptic in describing his critique of democracy, political interpretations of Aristophanes’s plays diverge in justifying that critique as affirmative of democratic principles. This essay argues for considering the Aristophanic critique as external to democratic principles, on account of its assertion of the demos’s basic incapacity for legitimate and effective rule. The essay concludes by identifying where engagement with the Aristophanic critique of democracy may clarify and challenge theories of artful discourse and political community supported by public and counterpublic studies.
January 2020
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Abstract
Reviews 129 to rebrand old ideologies and invent new rhetorical repertoires with direct appeal to twenty-first-century audiences both at home and abroad. Reading The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong is a true delight, a delight that is made possible by Xing Lu s dispassionate and deeply engaging study of political rhetoric in modern China in general and Mao's transformative rhet oric in particular. As China continues to make its presence importantly felt on the world stage, understanding and developing a productive dialogue with its rhetoric is imperative. The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong should serve as an efficacious guide toward this urgent task confronting today's rhetori cians and politicians of all persuasions. Luming Mao University of Utah Marie Lund, An Argument on Rhetorical Style. Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2017, 220 pp. $25 (paper). ISBN 9788771844344 In An Argument on Rhetorical Style, Marie Lund builds on the work of Maurice Charland on constitutive rhetoric to advance constitutive style as an original contribution to rhetorical theory. To what extent is Lund's claim to have made an original contribution to centuries-long thought about style borne out by her argument? The first part of An Argument on Rhetorical Style is conceptual, distin guishing "constitutive style" from other ways of theorizing style. Lund draws on Wolfgang G. Muller's analysis to organize a taxonomy. In Topik des Stilbegriffs (1981), Muller identifies two tropes as dominating concep tions of style in the West: "style as dress" and "style as the man." Both have complicated histories. Style as dress would seem to see style as divorced from underlying ideas and, therefore, as decorative. But in the Renaissance, where the style as dress trope flourishes, Lund notes that ornatus was often thought of more as armament than decoration (58): for example, in John Hoskins' Directions for Speech and Style. Still, in so far as the live canons are thought of as a sequence, traditional rhetoric has fostered the idea that stylistic concerns are belated. With regard to "style is the man," this too is a complicated trope. When Comte de Buffon wrote in "Discourse on Style" that Le style c'est Thomme meme, he meant something quite different from both Quintilian who claimed that speech is commonly an index of character (Institutes, 11.1.30) and from the Romantics with their emphasis on the uniqueness of a personality as reflected in speech. Regardless of these diffe rences, Lund's claim that we have often theorized style as the formal embodiment of the speaker or writer's personality" (208) is true enough. Muller's two tropes of style serve as the ground on which Lund mounts her claim for a third topos: style as constitutive: "Wolfgang Muller is responsible for the first two topoi, while the last [constitutive] is my own invention," Lund writes (208). She reviews previous work on the figures 130 RHETORICA and on style generally to place her work in context and to shore up her claim of originality. Among scholars working on the rhetorical figures, Jeanne Fahnestock receives the most attention. Although Fahnestock does consider the figures as constitutive in her Rhetorical Figures in Science (p.22), she does not oppose constitutive to decorative, as Lund does. Instead, she distinguishes figures as functional or not—as advancing an argument or distracting from it. Fahnestock shows that even in scientific argument, figures are present and often serve a functional purpose by for mally epitomizing the structure of a scientific argument. For example, in the argument Darwin advances in the Origin that gradual change in response to natural selection turns variations from incipient species to new species, Fahnestock shows that the formal qualities of this argument are captured in the figure gradatio that characterizes Darwin's style (Fahnes tock 113-14). But it would be wrong to say that the gradatio is constitutive of the argument because gradatio, like all figures, is in itself skeletal, lacking evi dence and is not, therefore, probative. Lund also discusses Lakoff and John son on cognitive metaphor. But their point is that metaphor is a generative cognitive process—and therefore relates to invention. If a metaphor goes unnoticed, can we say it contributes to style? Lund's...
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126 RHETORICA argument seems to be the subject of his next book, so perhaps we shall have to wait and see (Conversational 11). Relatedly, the exclusion of some significant studies feels puzzling. Peter Mack's 2011 A History of Renaissance Rhetoric, for instance, is nowhere to be found, while Cheryl Glenn's Rhetoric Retold would have been a useful interlocutor regarding women's place in rhetorical history. Finally, the books' sweeping arc narrating conversation's inevitable march toward the Madisonian republic may leave readers—especially ones well-versed in par ticular figures and periods—wishing for greater consideration of complicat ing biographical and cultural context. My own interest in the English Civil Wars, for instance, left me wanting greater attention throughout to the influence of theology, as religion largely disappears by the midpoint of The Conversational Enlightenment. Nonetheless, as Randall concedes, it is impossible to read (and therefore write about) everything (Conversational 16). His bibliography is long enough, and his claims about specific texts are modest. The citations point readers to internecine arguments on individ ual texts and authors. In penning a broad history of conversation that capablv finds continu ities and productive discontinuities, Randall has written two books that largely succeed in many of their aims. Though they are on conversation rather than toleration, the books share a kindred spirit with the similarly sweeping Toleration in Conflict by Rainer Forst. For historians of rhetoric, Randall provides a useful primer on the history of conversation and renders visible its ongoing tensions with oratory in ways that should open produc tive areas of inquiry. Readers who are curious about how Randall's argu ment about Habermas will conclude are advised to read both volumes, but thanks to a generous summary of The Concept of Conversation that opens The Conversational Enlightenment, scholars invested in specific periods or figures may read whichever volume is more germane to their work with lit tle trouble. In this reader's estimation, The Conversational Enlightenment is the better book if only for Randall's conceptual bravura in tracking conver sation's broader metaphorization and influence beyond obviously verbal texts and mediums. How Randall's revision of Habermas will resolve remains to be seen, but these books make a compelling case that there is still plenty more to say about conversation. James Donathan Garner University of Texas at Austin Xing Lu, The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong: Transforming China and Its Peo ple. Columbia, SC: The University of South Carolina Press, 2017, 261 pp. ISBN 978161177527 Much ink of mostly binary ilk has been spilled ox er Mao Zedong, the founder of the People's Republic of China. A revolutionarx and charismatic leader, Mao was hailed as a savior for liberating millions of Chinese people Reviews 127 from the Japanese Occupation and for ending the civil war in 1949, but he was also blamed or condemned for the social and economic turmoil he single-handedly brought about through his many political campaigns, including the disastrous Cultural Revolution. Meanwhile, not much has been written about his rhetoric, about how he deployed language and other symbolic resources to weaponize his political campaigns, to mobilize the Chinese people and to transform Chinese society. In the process, he also transformed himself into a demigod who was both greatly admired and worshiped by his people and feared and despised by his opponents. The 2017 publication of The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong: Transforming China and Its People by Xing Lu, an award-winning scholar of Chinese and comparative rhetoric, certainly has provided a much-needed response to this lack or absence. In fact, the monograph also opens a timely window onto the mak ing of political discourse in the twentieth-century China and beyond. As a first book-length study of Mao Zedong's rhetoric, Lu's mono graph has a lot to offer to rhetoric scholars and students of political rhetoric in the twenty-first century. Consisting of seven major chapters plus an intro duction and a conclusion, The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong develops a detailed and highly contextualized study of Mao's writings and speeches throughout his lifetime beginning in 1913 and ending in 1975, the year before his pass ing. Rejecting past...
September 2019
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Abstract
The aim of this paper is to show how the dialogical form is an essential structure of the Platonic texts in which the interrogative form is the very form of philosophy. According to the intentio auctoris, the dialogues can change the lives of their readers and this can only happen thanks to the readers’ internalization of the dialogical form as an interrogative structure. Like Socrates’ interlocutors in the dialogues, readers with the dialogues, can change their live making it coherent with their own thoughts examined through the philosophical discourse. This form of coherence is the only possibility of virtue, and therefore of happiness.
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Reviews 427 Davida H. Charney, Persuading God: Rhetorical Studies of First-Person Psalms. Hebrew Bible Monographs 73; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2017. xii + 156 pp. ISBN: 9781909697805. The tension within rhetorical criticism of the Bible, whether the Hebrew Bible or New Testament in Greek, is how to think of and hence to utilize the Greek and Latin rhetorical traditions. That is, do they consti tute the metalanguage for rhetorical criticism or are they exemplified instan ces of how the ancients approached rhetoric? In this volume, Charney for the most part attempts to find a middle ground, what she calls "compara tive rhetoric" (p. 12). By this she means that, even though she draws heavily upon ancient rhetoric, she does not believe that the ancient Hebrews knew or drew upon Greco-Roman rhetoric. Nevertheless, many of the categories of ancient rhetoric—such as the genres and some of the stylistic techniques, such as stasis theory—are central to the argument that she makes, while she also draws on some of the techniques of the New Rhetoric, such as "amplitude" (Perelman/Olbrechts-Tyteca) or "amplification" (Burke) and "association" or "identification." She utilizes these helpful categories, pla ced in the service of a close reading of selected first-person psalms, to offer rhetorical explications of their persuasive power. Charney is not concerned with the many historical factors that tend to mire much psalm scholarship, but she posits a rhetorical situation appropriate to each psalm and is atten tive to each text's rhetorical features. The contents of this relatively short volume include, first, an introduc tion that lays out Chamey's view of the psalms as argumentative discourse within Israelite public life, her definition of rhetoric in relationship to literary analysis, and, most importantly, her definition of rhetoric that draws upon both ancient and contemporary theory—all in service of her reading of the psalms as instances of ancient rhetoric, attempts by the first-person speaker to persuade God through various authorial stances. The rest of the chapters comprise various examples of how rhetoric is exemplified by individual psalms. Chapter 1 concerns praise of God as a form of currency used to per suade God, what she labels a form of epideictic discourse. She here treats Psalms 71,16, 26, and 131. Chapter 2 focuses upon the few psalms addressed to the speaker's opponents, drawing upon notions of amplitude and amplifi cation to establish the focus of each psalm. The psalms here are 4, 62, and 82. Chapter 3 treats psalmic lament as a form of deliberative rhetoric, with an established psalmic form that functions as a "policy argument (pp. 56-58). Charney discusses the lament Psalms 54 and 13 in relation to their lack of amplification, proposing that the speaker was confident in his innocence before God. She usefully draws upon the conversational implicatures of Paul Grice especially regarding the maxim of quantity. In contrast to chapter 3, chapter 4 focuses on psalms in which the speaker argues, sometimes at length (amplitude), for his innocence and attempts to persuade God to act on his behalf, as in Psalms 4, 22, and 17. Chapter 5 concentrates upon psalms in which the speaker draws strong opposition between himself and his oppo nents as he seeks vindication from them based upon the fairness of God. 428 RHETORICA The psalms treated here are 7, 35, and 109. Chapter 6 encompasses the few psalms in which the speaker admits to his guilt, with treatment of Psalms 130, 38, and 51. Finally, chapter 7 discusses psalms in which the speaker is involved in persuading himself rather than simply expressing his opinion regarding God or his opponents. Treated here are Psalms 77 and 73. The vol ume concludes with a bibliography and helpful indexes, including one on rhetorical terms. There are a few problems with this volume that cannot be overlooked. These include Charney's sometimes appearing to rely too heavily upon the categories of the Greeks and the Romans. These might restrict her categories in some instances where modern interpretation has expanded the resources regarding language function. The categorization of lament as deliberative seems to be forced by her attempt to equate the ancient categories with the biblical...
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Abstract
Reviews Sarah Walden, Tasteful Domesticity: Women's Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790-1940. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. 220 pp. ISBN: 0822965135 In the opening line of Tasteful Domesticity, Sarah Walden notes, "Taste is an elusive concept" (p. 1). It refers to both a physical sense and a theoret ical concept, an individual preference and a cultural standard. Taste was also central to the empiricist philosophies and belletristic rhetorics that informed nineteenth-century American rhetorical theory. Although such theoretical discussions of taste were the province of men, Walden argues that American women in the late eighteenth through early twentieth centu ries engaged publicly in discourses of taste in their cookbooks. Walden reveals an evolution of taste discourse through the long nine teenth century. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the era with which Walden's research begins, taste discourse contributed to the proj ect of nation building (p. 28). Engaging in this discourse, women cookbook authors in the early republic emphasized what they represented as distinctly American virtues such as independence and frugality. Moving into the mid nineteenth century, discourses of taste would continue to emphasize virtue while they were further linked to Christian morality and sentimental rhetoric (p. 53). Victorian-era domestic experts emphasized and performed the role of the "true woman" in teaching and maintaining the tastes and morals of the home—and, by extension, the nation. With the rise of Progressivism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prescriptions of taste would be grounded in scientific standards, and progressive-era women participating in cooking school and home economics movements sought to professionalize women's domestic work by aligning it with science. This narrative of an evolving discourse of taste, however, is not the central focus of Walden's argument. Although Tasteful Domesticity certainly offers a macrohistory of over a century of women's domestic writing, Walden's analysis reveals domestic writing as a complex and multivalent rhetorical practice that resists easy narratives. For example, readers may be surprised by Walden's inclusion of the southern antebellum cookbook The Virginia Housewife in Chapter 1: "Taste and Virtue: Domestic Citizenship and the New Republic." Unlike the other cookbook authors discussed in this chapter, Virginia Housewife author Mary Randolph refers to taste only as a sensory perception and not as a cultural standard. Walden argues that Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVII, Issue 4, pp. 422-437. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2019 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http:/ /www. ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.374.422 Reviews 423 this was common in southern antebellum cookbooks (pp. 48-49). Thus, the Virginia Housewife may seem to fit better in Chapter 3: "Taste and Region: The Constitutive Function of Southern Cookbooks," where Walden examines other antebellum southern cookbooks. However, by including Randolph's text in Chapter 1, Walden complicates her argument about early nine teenth-century female cookbook writers' engagement in taste discourse as a nation-building rhetorical activity. In antebellum southern cookbooks (and like the republican mother associated with northern states), the southern woman played a role in the civic progress of the region through her manage ment of the home (p. 49). However, in the antebellum south, management of the home also included management of slave labor. Thus, Walden concludes that Randolph's Virginia Housewife "requires one to face the difficult truth that while discourses of taste serve republican virtue, they also govern those disenfranchised by its practice" (p. 52). The inclusion of Randolph's text in Chapter 1 reveals the complicated issues of identity and power lurking within discourses of taste. Throughout her analysis, Walden examines the ways women's cookbooks contributed to ideologies of nationality, class, race, region, and gender. For example, dur ing the Victorian era, women's participation in taste discourse reified a gen der ideology that implicitly defined "true woman" as white and middle class, and these demarcations of gender, race, and class would persist throughout the nineteenth century. During the...
June 2019
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Abstract
328 RHETORICA Haixia W. Lan. Aristotle and Confucius on Rhetoric and Truth: The Form and the Way. Routledge, 2017. 228 pp. ISBN 9781472487360 At a 2013 Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute seminar on comparative rhetoric, twenty-five scholars spent a week together reading scholarship on comparative rhetoric of the recent past and charting out possible paths for the future. In their culminating statement, "A Manifesto: The What and How of Comparative Rhetoric," which appeared in Rhetoric Review in 2015 (34.3), they outlined best practices in the subfield, underscoring both the imperative to speak for and with the other and the need to cultivate self-reflexivity and accountability for such engagement. They further called on comparative rhetoric scholars to search for "simultaneity, heterogeneity, and interdependence" both within and between different rhetorical traditions and practices. Haixia Lan's Aristotle and Confucius on Rhetoric and Truth: The Form and the Way provides an example of what such best practices actually can look like and of how best to center comparative rhetorical studies on simultaneity, heterogeneity, and interdependence. Lan's monograph, consisting of five chapters together with an introduc tion and an epilogue, offers an in-depth comparative study of Aristotle (384322 BCE) and Confucius (551—479 BCE), two pivotal figures hailing from Greek and Chinese ancient cultures, respectively. While plenty of studies have focused on Aristotle and Confucius in the past, they tend to be informed by a philosophical and literary framework. Meanwhile, comparative rhetoric scholars have also studied Aristotle and Confucius, but none, in my view, has offered such a comprehensive study of these two thinkers as Lan has done, for which she must be commended. The introduction provides a succinct overview, laying out both its object of study (focusing on the similarities and differences in Aristotle and Confucius's rhetorical thinking) and its method of study (deploying a rela tional and contextualized approach that traverses disciplinary boundaries). Such a study, for Lan, not only presents comparative rhetoricians with a better opportunity to understand these two thinkers' singular contributions to the development of rhetoric but also enhances the prospect of a more felicitous exchange between the two cultures they represent and continue to influence and, better still, between East and West in the global contact zones of the twenty-first century. No less important, Lan's study also counters sticky bina ries that pit, for example, Aristotle's purported discourse of abstraction and linearity against Confucius's alleged discourse of pragmatism and circularity. It further problematizes past studies that focus exclusively on either differen ces or similarities but not both or that are long in overgeneralizations and short on contextualized or recontextualized engagements and discussions. Each of the five subsequent chapters provides a detailed and nuanced analysis of one central aspect of Aristotle and Confucius's rhetorical thinking. They together contribute to a portrait of two individuals being separated by time and space but joined by an unfailing insistence on hylomorphic thinking that Truth or tianming (the cosmic order) is enmattered in, and can be Reviews 329 actualized through, rhetorical practices; on engaging self, other, and the cos mos with an inclusive vision; and on conceptualizing ultimate realities with analogy, be it form (by Aristotle) or the way (by Confucius). For example, in Chapter One, Lan takes up rhetorical invention or the dynamic and mutually entailing relationship between language-in-use and knowledge-making. She characterizes Aristotle's views on episteme as knowledge of certainty, techne as knowledge of probability, and rhetoric as techne that intersects with episteme. In other words, Aristotle's rhetoric dwells in this in-between space where certainty and unpredictability join hands and dialectic and sophistical reasoning mingle with each other. Chapter Two, “Interpreting the Analects," takes its readers to Confucius, to the Analects, a collection of conversations between the Master and his students compiled by the latter after his death, and to the rhetorical dimension of his ways of knowing and speaking, the latter of which mani fests itself in Confucius's complex understanding of rhetorical invention, of the role language, audience, and context play in the making of probable or local knowledge. For Lan, developing an historical and interdisciplin ary understanding of rhetorical invention...
March 2019
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Abstract
Reviews Wendy Dasler Johnson, Antebellum American Women's Poetry: A Rhetoric of Sentiment, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016. 265 pp. ISBN: 9780809335008 Sentimental poetry is not a common subject of rhetorical analysis. Nor is it a highly regarded literary form. However, Wendy Dasler Johnson argues that for a large number of antebellum American women, sentimental poetry served as an important rhetorical space where they could voice their opinions on social and moral issues. Specifically, Johnson presents a deep and focused analysis of the sentimental verse of antebellum America's three most popular female poets: Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Julia Ward Howe. Thanks to three decades of feminist recovery scholarship, Sigourney, Harper, and Howe are not entirely obscure figures in literary and rhetorical histories. Scholars of nineteenth-century American literature have recovered the writing of these three women, and feminist historians of rhetoric have recognized their rhetorical accomplishments as reformers in education, abo lition, temperance, and suffrage. However, their sentimental poetry remains a blind spot in both literary and rhetorical scholarship. While rhetorical scho lars do not usually consider poetry as part of these women's rhetorical oeuvre, literary scholars have struggled to analyze their verse. Johnson quotes (p. 1) the lament of literary scholar Cheryl Walker, who, upon the rediscovery of antebellum American women's sentimental poetry, said, "The problem is, we don't know how to read their poems." Johnson claims that a rhetorical framework is the solution to this problem. A literary/rhetorical divide has marginalized women's sentimental poetry in both literary and rhetorical his tory, and Johnson's study actively traverses this divide. To recover antebellum women's sentimental verse, Johnson argues that poetry, especially sentimental poetry, is a rhetorical genre. "[M]any hold to a modernist view," Johnson writes, "that literature by definition makes no arguments" (p. 4). However, nineteenth-century Americans, influenced by the belletrism and faculty psychology found in the rhetorical theory of George Campbell and Hugh Blair, understood poetry as a sub category of rhetoric, and they valued sentimentalism as part of the process of persuasion. Citing Campbell, Johnson demonstrates how eighteenthand nineteenth-century rhetorical theory linked "'sentiment to moral Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVII, Issue 2, pp. 207-212. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2019 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www. ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.2.207. 208 RHETORICA and 'sensible/ not to an excess of feeling" (p. 7). As Campbell explains, "what is addressed solely to the moral powers of the mind, is not so prop erly denominated the pathetic, as the sentimental."1 Thus, as Johnson concludes, poetry is a valid rhetorical genre, and sentimentalism is a rhetor ical appeal that "works alongside pathos or persuasion of public feeling" to "invok[e] arguments about ethics, rational values, and judgments" (p. 18). Eventually, sentimentalism "got linked to women pejoratively," alongside the rise of women's literacy and the establishment of elite, white, male English departments (pp. 7-8). This feminization of sentimental verse played no small part in the marginalization of the genre. However, as John son demonstrates, in early nineteenth-century America, poetry was a valid rhetorical genre, and sentimentalism was considered a masculine discourse, which women co-opted in order to write about public issues. True to the rhetorical nature of her project, Johnson divides her study into three main parts: "Logos" (or rhetorical aims), "Ethos" (writing perso nae), and "Pathos" (audience appeals). In each section, Johnson offers anal yses informed by literary research, eighteenth-century rhetorical theory, and postmodern theories of semiotics that work to foreground the rhetoric of sentimentalism in the verse of Sigourney, Harper, and Howe. In Part 1, which consists of one chapter, Johnson examines the "reasoning and theo ries of persuasion" that these three women use to justify their right and their duty to write (p. 12). According to Johnson, sentimental logos does not rely on syllogism but rather is found in sentimental poets' use...
November 2018
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What's in a Text?: Answers from Frame Analysis and Rhetoric for Measuring Meaning Systems and Argumentative Structures ↗
Abstract
Starting in the 1970s, frame analysis became a popular technique of textual analysis in different disciplines (communication, mass media, sociology). There is no agreed-upon definition of frame analysis or of ways of measuring its key concepts. This paper explores the relationship between frame analysis and rhetoric. The paper reviews all main concepts developed in frame analysis. Concept after concept, it maps the correspondence between frame analysis and rhetorical concepts. It shows how frame analysis stopped short of developing what was really required to measure frames: tropes and figures. The analysis of a specific text confirms the power of rhetorical analysis for teasing out meaning systems and argumentative structures.
August 2018
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Abstract
The article demonstrates how the Constitution of Medina (622 ce) is a multidimensional rhetoric of justice that countered rampant violence in the nascent city-state known as Medina. To make this argument, the article first introduces this legal-political text and explicates the rhetorical exigence that mandated Medina's inhabitants to articulate a framework for rights and obligations. Second, the article demonstrates how the constitution unified this citizenry by (1) recognizing everyone's equal standing, equality, and rights—especially to religious freedom and justice—across their religious and tribal affiliations; and (2) establishing institutional measures that realize these rights. As rhetoric of possibility, the Constitution of Medina constituted a community and modeled rights discourse.
June 2018
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Abstract
The article demonstrates how the Constitution of Medina (622 ce) is a multidimensional rhetoric of justice that countered rampant violence in the nascent city-state known as Medina. To make this argument, the article first introduces this legal-political text and explicates the rhetorical exigence that mandated Medina’s inhabitants to articulate a framework for rights and obligations. Second, the article demonstrates how the constitution unified this citizenry by (1) recognizing everyone’s equal standing, equality, and rights—especially to religious freedom and justice—across their religious and tribal affiliations; and (2) establishing institutional measures that realize these rights. As rhetoric of possibility, the Constitution of Medina constituted a community and modeled rights discourse.
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Abstract
322 RHETORIC A like to have read something more about what this approach to the Dialogus tells us about Tacitus' works, more broadly, and whether the insights that van den Berg derives from the features of Roman dialogues might shed light on Greek dialogues as well. As someone who, prior to reading this book, tended to identify Tacitus most closely with a particular speaker (Matemus) and to find a particular argument most (politically) persuasive (again, Matemus), van den Berg has shown me new and fruitful ways of approaching a challenging and important work.2 Tacitus remains elusive, but this elusiveness is productive and intentional. Daniel J. Kapust University of Wisconsin, Madison Helen Lynch, Milton and the Politics of Public Speech, Farnham, Sur rey: Ashgate, 2015. 283 pp. ISBN: 14722415205 Historians of rhetoric interested in public-sphere discussions or in the political discourse of the Renaissance may find interesting this sometimes imperfect but nevertheless suggestive study. Lynch demonstrates how the political rhetoric of John Milton (1608-1674) can be better understood in terms of the pre-Socratic polls as described by Hannah Arendt than in terms of the Continental Enlightenment as described by Jurgen Habermas. Lynch argues convincingly that "Arendt's position is more in sympathy with that of seventeenth-century classical republicans and encapsulates a key differ ence between seventeenth- and eighteenth-century perspectives on the pub lic realm" (24-25). Although there have been studies of Milton and rhetoric in the past, longer studies have tended to focus on the major poetry, as for instance Daniel Shore's excellent Milton and the Art of Rhetoric. The present text focuses throughout on republican speech in the public arena even as it culminates with a consideration of the dramatic poem Samson Agonistes. In the first chapter—to my mind, the strongest—the author traces image clusters in Milton's political texts that replicate Arendt's distinction between the free Greek citizen speaking in the polis as against the repetitive labor performed in the oikia or household by disenfranchised women, chil dren, slaves, animals, and—by extension—merchants, who were typically not citizens and could make no contribution to the important, non-repetitive work of the polis. Milton explicitly takes on the role of speaker in such a polis in his famous Areopagitica (1644), subtitled "A Speech ... for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing." Indeed, Lynch correctly reports that the authors in 2 Daniel Kapust, "Between Contumacy and Obsequiousness: Tacitus on Moral Freedom and the Historian's Task," European Journal of Political Theory 8 (2009)293 -311. Reviews 323 contemporary pamphlet wars figured themselves as speakers rather than as authors. Throughout the text, Lynch usefully points out the many reversible and polarizing binaries of that period's polemics and especially Milton's tendency to "define the good and evil versions of all observable phenom ena" (61). In chapter 2 of her study, Lynch examines linguistic theories in the period, including various efforts to establish a universal language and also the Royal Society s quest to achieve a one-to-one relation between signifier and signified. Throughout the chapter, Lynch suggests that Milton shared Arendt's concern that political language not be separated from meaning and therefore from action. Chapter 3 examines how rhetoric was gendered in the period, including a delightful discussion of how "embroidery" can refer either to the adornment of masculine speech or to the actual craft activ ity that was intended to keep women quiet. The issues of the first three chapters—public polis vs. private oikia, theories of language and action, and gendered rhetoric—help prepare for Lynch's last two chapters on Mil ton's drama Samson Agonistes, the most Greek of his poetic texts. In chapter 4, she locates the redemption of language operating in the drama through various polemical binaries and also aligns Samson's experience with the public-sphere civic-mindedness of Pericles' funeral oration as well as with Arendt's image of light for the public sphere. In chapter 5, Lynch usefully discusses Samson Agonistes as a rejection of the romance tradition, particu larly in terms of the crime of recreance, which can mean not only treachery but also refusal to act. She compares...
April 2018
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What’s in a Text?: Answers from Frame Analysis and Rhetoric for Measuring Meaning Systems and Argumentative Structures ↗
Abstract
Starting in the 1970s, frame analysis became a popular technique of textual analysis in different disciplines (communication, mass media, sociology). There is no agreed-upon definition of frame analysis or of ways of measuring its key concepts. This paper explores the relationship between frame analysis and rhetoric. The paper reviews all main concepts developed in frame analysis. Concept after concept, it maps the correspondence between frame analysis and rhetorical concepts. It shows how frame analysis stopped short of developing what was really required to measure frames: tropes and figures. The analysis of a specific text confirms the power of rhetorical analysis for teasing out meaning systems and argumentative structures.
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The Shape of Herodotean Rhetoric: A Study of the Speeches in Herodotus’ Histories with Special Attention to Books 5–9 by Vasiliki Zali ↗
Abstract
432 RHETORIC A The final topic, that of chapter eight, is lexis, "style." Enos says very lit tle about traditional features of style (e.g., pleonasm, prose rhythm), but dis cusses instead Demosthenes's "stylistic strategy," which consists primarily of what he calls "chiastic contrasting" (191). More than to chiasmus, this seems connected to antithesis, that is, the "polar" or "diametrical" opposi tion between Aeschines and himself. Enos concludes that like Lincoln, Churchill, and King, Demosthenes raised political oratory to a literary art and created a speech perfectly fitted for the political and rhetorical moment. The book could have used some good copy-editing and proof-reading; in particular, the bibliography is not easy to use. It consists of four sections; texts and translation of Demosthenes, translations and studies of Aeschines, studies of Demosthenes, and general studies. The first section is especially difficult: almost all works are under Demosthenes as author, followed by the title, so that if one is looking for X's translation, one needs to remember its exact title (some of the Texas series have the title Demosthe nes: Speeches . . ., whereas others are just Speeches . . .). Dilts's OCT is listed as a translation, as are several commentaries (e.g., Wankel's). One author is "Harris Edward Monroe." Etc. In sum, this book has much of value, especially Walker's chapter. But starting from scratch rather than revising a fifty year old publication might have improved its value. Michael Gagarin The University of Texas Vasiliki Zali. The Shape ofHerodotean Rhetoric: A Study of the Speeches in Herodotus' Histories with Special Attention to Books 5-9. Interna tional Studies in the History of Rhetoric 6. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015. VIII + 383 pp. ISBN: 9789004278967 This is a well-researched, detailed, and well-presented literary analy sis of the Histories of Herodotus that substantiates the author's claim that the Histories is an under-appreciated contributor to the development of rhetoric in the 5th century. As Zali explains, the intent of the work is "to show that in the Histories there is great interest in the rhetorical situation per se; that speakers are very well aware of the process of manipulating and adapting their arguments to suit the particular audience, and they do so systematically" (3). In this way, Herodotus can be understood as anticipat ing the rhetorical developments of Thucydides and the more theoretically oriented works of both Aristotle and the author of the Rhetoric to Alexan der. The Shape of Herodotean Rhetoric is characterized by the use of specific textual examples to illustrate claims about how the text operates. It also provides an impressive mixture of contextual information that is historical, political, and cultural in scope. These elements are trained on the larger Reviews 433 purpose of "a comprehensive study of particular modes, kinds and effects of speech, exemplified through in-depth discussions of case studies and of the ways these related to two overarching narrative themes: the GrecoPersian polarity and the problem of Greek unity" (31). The focus on these two themes, through the analysis of Herodotus' rhetorical choices, is divided into three sections. In the first section, "Allo cation of Speech," the analysis extends to the impact of the speeches both included and excluded as well as the selective use of both direct and indi rect speech. Zali takes these selections and choices by Herodotus to be rhe torical, choices that are made in order to advance his interpretive and persuasive goals. They are also shown to be empowering for the Greeks as presented in the text and disempowering for the Persians. Zali thus makes a strong case that these choices by Herodotus were not random. As a result, while Cicero and many others have viewed him as the father of history, Herodotus should also be viewed as a significant figure in the development of rhetoric. The text includes an appendix that categorizes all of the debates and conversations in books 5-9 by speaker, addressee and mode of speech (i.e., direct, indirect, and record of a speech act). In the second section of the book, Zali shows that a narrow definition of debate, as consisting only of instances reported as direct speech, yields...
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Traditions of Eloquence: The Jesuits and Modern Rhetorical Studies ed. by Cinthia Gannett, John C. Brereton ↗
Abstract
Reviews 437 dianoia (thought) in the Poetics where Aristotle assigns it to his Rhetoric, even though, Bialostosky observes, it occupies, at best, an inferred presence in that work (138). Performing a close and careful rereading of both texts, Bialos tosky concludes that Aristotle's assigning of dianoia to the Rhetoric is evidence of what Bakhtin calls a "hidden polemic" Aristotle conducts with a sophisticinspired "poetics of the utterance" that pre-dated both of these works. This line of argument ultimately leads Bialostosky to something of an unexpected reversal. Where he had earlier argued for a separate discipline, or "art of dialogics," he now perceives that art as but one of many that can be "responsive to the predisciplinary scene of action" (146). Drawing upon the architectonics of Bakhtin's early works, Bialostosky now thinks it possi ble to "refer our sometimes calcified institutionalized disciplines at least to an imagined, reconstructed common world that preceded them and still underwrites them" (147). Such a world is inaccessible, Bialostosky argues, except through the sorts of "radical inquiries" that "Bakhtin and Heidegger undertook in the 1920s" (147). Such a world is inaccessible so long as we think of disciplines as fixed, able to stay within the boundaries drawn for them. For not only does disciplinarity exceed itself in interdisciplinarity, it also discovers a surplus in its predisciplinary origins. And it is here that Bia lostosky sees a particular significance for Bakhtin, whose "dialogic field of discourse [is] broader than the modem disciplines or the ancient ones of rhetoric and dialectic" (82). Heard again as a complete utterance, what questions does Bialostosky's work pose for contemporary inquiry? Does Bakhtin and Voloshinov's inter est in intonation, for example, bear any relevance to our interest in sonic rhetorics? Does Bakhtin's regard for the historical significance of the "per son-idea" connect to recent investigations into the meanings of embodi ment? Is the shift from epistemology to ontology, as posited by the new materialism, reflected in Bialostosky's conception of Bakhtin's architecton ics as predisciplinary? These questions cannot be answered here. But if Bakhtin still speaks to us, as I believe he does, then Bialostosky's essays will serve as exemplary models of how to engage Bakhtin with care, insight, and admirable rigor, and collectively, as an invitation for future dialogues. Frank Farmer University of Kansas Cinthia Gannett and John C. Brereton, eds., Traditions of Eloquence: The Jesuits and Modern Rhetorical Studies, New York: Fordham Uni versity Press, 2016. 444 pp. ISBN: 9780823264537 This book contributes in welcome and valuable ways to the history of rhetoric, the history of education, and current rhetorical pedagogy. It is an 438 RHETORICA enriching read, with provocative and significant theoretical implications. These essays raise important questions concerning central disciplinary issues and make available to both theorists and teachers richly encompass ing and hence highly generative curricular models with wide applicability. I thoroughly enjoyed the time spent perusing these pages and have already begun to draw upon the resources herein to bolster both my own scholar ship and teaching. This Jesuit tradition brings into view a rhetorical para digm that is truly "transdisciplinary" (xv). As the editors acknowledge, the book provides the "first maps of this huge intellectual geography" (xv). Therefore, I look forward to future scholarship on Jesuit contributions to rhetorical theory and pedagogy. Following the three distinct periods of Jesuit education from its beginnings in the sixteenth-century to the present day, the book is divided into three sections: 1) studies of Jesuit rhetorical instruction from 1540, when Ignatius Loyola and friends founded the Society of Jesus, to 1773, when Jesuit education was suppressed by the pope; 2) studies of Jesuit rhetorical education from 1789, when many Jesuits moved to North Ame rica and established colleges and universities, to the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), which marked the end of the rhetoric-centered curricu lum in Jesuit institutions; and 3) studies of developments in rhetorical ins truction in United States' Jesuit higher education from the 1960s to the present. Although some description of the grammar school classroom appears in several early chapters, the primary emphasis of the book is on higher education. Each section contains a loosely...
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Abstract
Reviews James J. Murphy, ed., Demosthenes' On the Crown: Rhetorical Perspec tives, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016. 232 pp. ISBN: 9780809335107 This book has a curious history. First published in 1967 by Random House under the title, Demosthenes' On the Crown: A Critical Case Study of a Masterpiece of Ancient Oratory, the exact same work was then republished in 1983 under the same name by Hermagoras Press. The current volume is a "revised version" of the 1983 publication; the 1967 publication is not acknowledged but is mentioned by one author (201, n. 30). The revision consists of a new Introduction by Murphy, five new chap ters (out of eight), and a new half-page epilogue by Murphy. The three retained chapters (from the 1967 publication) are chapter two, a brief sum mary of Aeschines' career followed by a summary of his speech Against Ctesiphon by Donovan Ochs; chapter three, a translation of On the Crown (OTC) by John J. Keaney; and chapter four, a brief structural abstract of OTC by Francis Donnelly, first published in 1941. The five new chapters are chapter one, a background chapter on Demosthenes and his times by Lois Agnew, chapters on Aristotle's three main rhetorical divisions - includ ing chapter five on ethos by David Mirhady, chapter six on pathos by Richard Katula, and chapter seven on logos by Jeffrey Walker - and an eighth chapter on lexis by Richard Enos. The goal of the volume, according to the introduction is to make OTC "come alive"; in more modest terms, the book seems to be aiming to pro vide everything a student unacquainted with the speech might need to appreciate Demosthenes's rhetorical ability and, for more advanced stu dents and scholars, to demonstrate how the principles of Aristotle's Rheto ric can help appreciate the greatness of OTC. In my view, several chapters succeed quite well in accomplishing this latter goal, while several are less successful. In chapter one, "Demosthenes and his Times," Agnew gives a thor ough account of Demosthenes's life and career; she is particularly good at sorting out facts from legends, and she produces a more balanced assess ment than the many pro-Demosthenes accounts. I note only two minor mis takes. On page 25, the three charges Aeschines brought against Ctesiphon's decree are misstated; the first (not having completed his term in office) is Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVI, Issue 4, pp. 430-439. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2018 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.2018.36.4.430. Reviews 431 stated twice (in slightly different forms) and the second (presenting the crown in the theater) is omitted (the correct charges are on 38, 153). And in the Harpalus affair Demosthenes was not tried in the Areopagus but by a popular jury (see 29). Chapters two and three are adequate, though barely so. Ochs's account of Aeschines's career is highly oversimplified, especially after Agnew's more complex treatment, and his summary of the speech is based on the 1928 Bude edition; a few more recent studies could have been noted (espe cially Harris), which are in fact in the bibliography. I cannot see any use for Donnelley's structural abstract, chapter four, which I just find confusing. In chapter five, Mirhady uses Aristotle's view of ethos to understand Demosthenes's sustained and generally successful attempt to portray him self as a good democratic citizen, better than his rival Aeschines. Mirhady is a bit dismayed, however, by the (also successful) use of vitriolic rhetoric to portray Aeschines as a piece of scum. In his final thought, Mirhady cau tions that this "sustained invective should give readers today some uneasi ness about the tendency of democracies to fall under the sway of negative discourse" (126). Mirhadv's concern must be even greater now than it was when his chapter was written. Katula's assignment, chapter six, is pathos. Using Aristotle's theory...
March 2018
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Disability Rhetoric by Jay Timothy Dolmage, and: Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics by Shannon Walters ↗
Abstract
Reviews Jay Timothy Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2014. 349 pp. ISBN: 9780815634454 Shannon Walters, Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014. 257 pp. ISBN9781611173833 Rhetoric is an ability. So begins the blithe Englishing of Aristotle's defi nition of rhetoric. In early translations it appears as a faculty, following the European vernaculars and the Latin translation of Aristotle's dunamis with facultas. Yet even if this translation flattens the complex significance of Aristotle's original sense, it happily brings us within the orbit of pressing problems in our own moment. We may now pose new questions: If rhetoric insists it be thought of as an ability, how might we inflect this idée reçue of the field by thinking through the meaning of rhetoric from a position of disability? This is not a matter of simple inversion. Disability is not the opposite of ability but the suspension of the assumptions of ableism. In this sense, it is like disbelief. We say we are in a 'state of disbelief' precisely when we are presented with incontrovertible evidence that commands assent. Disability rhetoric, then, seeks to illuminate the unreflective assump tions and heuristics that we commonly use to make judgments concerning the conditions and abilities of others. In Disability Rhetoric and Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics, Jay Timothy Dolmage and Shannon Walters offer book-length elaborations of what such a rhetoric might be. The authors do not simply challenge rhetoric about disability or examine disability advocacy rhetorically, although both these aims are crucial to their projects. The authors argue that a thoroughgoing criticism of ableism requires a reexamination of rhetorical history and theory. The classical tradition's inability to think through bodily difference made it narrower than it otherwise might have been. Quintilian asserted that the limits of rhetorical education could be found in the body of the orator, "for assuredly no one can exhibit proper delivery if he lacks a memory for retaining what he has written or ready facility in uttering what he has to speak extempore, or if he has any incurable defect of utterance." Any such "extraordinary deformity of body ... cannot be remedied by any effort of art" (11.3.10). Unable to think of bodily difference as anything but deformity gave ancient rhetorical theory a Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVI, Issue 2, pp. 205-215. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2018 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.2018.36.2.205. 206 RHETORIC A false sense of order and precision, erected upon the assumption that audience and orator could be treated as positions within a discourse rather than approa ched within the complexity of situated and contested embodiment. These books can be taken as complementary projects. Dolmage wishes to extend and reinterpret the repertoire and vocabulary of critical rhetoric. Walters focuses on the inventional strategies of disabled persons and their circles. This is not to say that Dolmage neglects invention or Walters criti cism. Disability rhetoric shows the imbrication of criticism and invention, since both rely upon practices of sensitization. We might extract six maxims to serve as guideposts for furthering this critical-inventive program. 1. Modes of communication require invention and shape meaning. The con stitution of communication between Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller in the now famous story of their experience at the water pump (Sullivan hand spelling 'water' in Keller's palm after running water over her hand, marked by Keller as her entry into language) resulted from a pragmatic awareness of possible channels of meaning-making. Walters argues that many of these possibilities reside within touch and her book serves in part as a collection of examples showing the variety and power of haptic communication. Perhaps even more importantly, a disability rhetoric would attend to the way in which the mode of communication constitutes and affects the meaning of the communication. Rather than appealing to the sensus communis...
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Abstract
A peculiar feature of the philosophy of Georg Friedrich Meier (1718–1777) lies in its being based on rhetorical principles. We are in front of an important construct that claims for attention in the context of the growing literature on eighteenth<entury rhetoric. The syntagm ‘rhetoricised logic’ indicates a specific function of rhetoric as the basis for rethinking philosophical discourse. The paper shows that Meier’s philosophical programme is consistently based on the trivium. On top of this, the paper compares Meier and Immanuel Kant on the ancient topos of the artes liberales, thus making it clear that the position of Meier can be assessed as a model for a rhetorically founded theory of knowledge, which was transformed and overcome by Kant.
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Abstract
Reviews 213 concerned primarily with prescriptive correctness. He traces pedagogies that have used these ideas at various times in western schools, but his biggest con tribution is examining theories that challenge this paradigm. For example, feminist stylistics, he contends, challenges the rules of convention. Pointing to the works of Cixous and Kristeva, Ray shows that textual structure and organization should be challenged as points of gendering stylistic choice. The last two chapters are on researching style and teaching style. Ray's chapter on researching style shows that there are still major gaps in the research; for instance, he notes that there have been no ethnographic studies on writing styles to date. Additionally, he describes the use of quantitative methods used to describe style, and data mining to describe stylistic featu res of writing. Beyond this, there are opportunities for research in rhetorical analysis, stylistics, and discourse analysis. The concluding chapter argues for better teaching strategies in the classroom. The fear is that teaching style will not liberate a curriculum but rather enslave it to prescriptive grammar study. Ray assuages these fears with suggestions for incorporating style in the classroom to develop writing, including ways in which classical rhetoric informs writing instruction in current theory. He invites interdisciplinary work in the classroom to discuss style from the perspective of various dis course communities enabling students to see diverse approaches to compo sition. Ray ends the chapter on a hopeful note: "For those teachers who adopt them, these guiding principles bring style out of the shadows of col lege writing classes, helping to improve students' writing while also per haps increasing their satisfaction in producing academic texts required for their success" (p. 219). A significant issue with Ray's book is that it does not quite live up to its lofty claim that "an in-depth, historical, and theoretical understanding of style helps teachers make writing more satisfying and relevant to stu dents" (p. 5). This may be true, but the topic is immense, and this is a rather slim volume. At best, Style is, as the title suggests, an introduction. The chapters do establish a framework for style, but they are not genuinely indepth discussions. However, Brian Ray's Style is an invitation for scholars to fill in those gaps, and I believe this book paves the way helpfully for future research. Robert L. Lively Arizona State University A. Pennacini, Discorsi eloquenti da Ulisse a Obama e oltre, Seconda edizione riveduta e corretta, Alessandria: Edizioni dell Orso, 2017 (I ed., 2015), 592 pp. ISBN 9788862746090. Adriano Pennacini é stato uno dei precursori, nell'universitá italiana, del tentativo di intrecciare lo studio delTantica técnica retorica con gli studi classici e con le nuove discipline della comumcazione. Presidente della 214 RHETORICA International Society for the History of Rhetoric dal 1991 al 1993, ha affidato a un corposo volume un 'eloquente' saggio del suo método di analisi della comunicazione persuasiva, che spazia dalla prima 'retorica' omerica fino a quella del (penúltimo) Presidente degli Stati Uniti d'America e comprende nell'oltre del titolo un esempio della origínale eloquenza di Jorge Bergoglio, papa Francesco. Raccolte di discorsi non mancano nelle biblioteche degli studiosi di retorica. Attingendo alia rinfusa in quella personale (assolutamente parziale e selettiva), posso ricordare: F. Sallustio, Belle parole. I grandi discorsi della storia dalla Bibbia a Paperino, Milano: Bompiani 2004 (anche in questo caso, una diacronicitá quasi esaustiva); G. Pedullá (cur.), Parole al potere. Discorsi politici italiani, Milano: Rizzoli, 2011; C. Ellis, S. Drury Smith (eds.), Say it Plain. A Century of Great African American Speeches, New York-London: The New Press, 2005; C.M. Copeland, Farewell Goodspeed. The Greatest Eulogies of Our Time, New York: Harmony Books, 2003; C. Knorowski (ed.), Gettysburg Replies. The World Respond to Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, Guilford, Connecticut: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. Raccolte importanti (e ne ho elencate davvero pochissime fra le tante circolanti nelle varié parti del mondo), che offrono testi accompagnati spesso da riflessioni e inquadramenti generali, ma che difficilmente si prefiggono e realizzano lo scopo che ha avuto in mente Pennacini nel raccogliere discorsi anti chi e moderni accompagnati ciascuno da prove di analisi: quello, cioé, di«mostrare la durata...
December 2017
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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 Peri-clean 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.
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...
March 2017
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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...
February 2017
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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.
September 2016
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Abstract
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...
August 2016
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Review: The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy, by Kathy Eden, Untutored Lines: The Making of the English Epyllion, by William P. Weaver, Rhetoric and the Familiar in Francis Bacon and John Donne, by Daniel Derrin, Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance, by Catherine Nicholson and Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes, Roland Greene ↗
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Book Review| August 01 2016 Review: The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy, by Kathy Eden, Untutored Lines: The Making of the English Epyllion, by William P. Weaver, Rhetoric and the Familiar in Francis Bacon and John Donne, by Daniel Derrin, Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance, by Catherine Nicholson and Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes, Roland Greene Kathy Eden, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2012. x, 149 pp. ISBN: 9780226184623William P. Weaver, Untutored Lines: The Making of the English Epyllion (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. x, 219 pp. ISBN: 9780748644650Daniel Derrin, Rhetoric and the Familiar in Francis Bacon and John Donne, Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, with The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., 2013. xii, 197 pp. ISBN: 9781611476033.Catherine Nicholson, Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. iv, 218 pp. ISBN: 9780812245585Roland Greene, Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2013. x, 210 pp. ISBN: 9780226000633. Judith Rice Henderson Judith Rice Henderson Judith Rice Henderson University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon SK S7N 5A5 851 Temperance Street Saskatoon SK S7N 0N2 Canada Judith.Henderson@usask.ca Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2016) 34 (3): 328–335. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2016.34.3.328 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Judith Rice Henderson; Review: The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy, by Kathy Eden, Untutored Lines: The Making of the English Epyllion, by William P. Weaver, Rhetoric and the Familiar in Francis Bacon and John Donne, by Daniel Derrin, Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance, by Catherine Nicholson and Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes, Roland Greene. Rhetorica 1 August 2016; 34 (3): 328–335. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2016.34.3.328 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 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.
June 2016
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The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy by Kathy Eden, and: Untutored Lines: The Making of the English Epyllion by William P. Weaver, and: Rhetoric and the Familiar in Francis Bacon and John Donne by Daniel Derrin, and: Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance by Catherine Nicholson, and: Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes by Roland Greene ↗
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328 RHETORICA that Fitzgerald is correct in predicting that future rhetorical study does indeed have a prayer. Steven Mailloux Loyola Marymount University Kathy Eden, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2012. x, 149 pp. ISBN: 9780226184623 William P. Weaver, Untutored Lines: The Making of the English Epyllion (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. x, 219 pp. ISBN: 9780748644650 Daniel Derrin, Rhetoric and the Familiar in Francis Bacon and John Donne, Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, with The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., 2013. xii, 197 pp. ISBN: 9781611476033. Catherine Nicholson, Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. iv, 218 pp. ISBN: 9780812245585 Roland Greene, Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2013. x, 210 pp. ISBN: 9780226000633. Of the five monographs on Renaissance literature reviewed here, the three by Kathy Eden, William P. Weaver, and Daniel Derrin offer learned applications of the history of rhetoric to significant authors and genres of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while the two by Catherine Nicholson and Roland Greene touch on rhetoric in examining early modem complexities of language as indicators of cultural tensions and changes. Eden's The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy makes a significant contri bution to the long-standing but frequently contested scholarly project of defin ing the Renaissance by the development of individualism. She reexamines the influence of classical authors on Petrarch, Erasmus, and Montaigne to trace their lineage in the rediscovery of what she calls throughout "a rhetoric and hermeneutics of intimacy," that is, a style of intimate writing and reading, activities that Eden, following Hans-Georg Gadamer, sees as inseparable. Focusing on familiar letters, Eden asserts that Petrarch's "letter reading is rooted in the intimacy associated with friendship" (p. 67). Guided by the Senecan model, he transforms Cicero's "rhetoric of intimacy" into "a hermeJ neutics of intimacy" by using the familiar letter to overcome not only physical distance (its chief function according to many ancient letter writers), but also temporal distance, in an effort "to understand his favorite ancient authors, whom he figures in epistolary terms as absent friends" (p. 69). Thus Petrarch, not Montaigne, was "individuality's founding father" (p. 120). The emphasis Reviews 329 Montaigne gives to writing, to friendship, and to frank self-revelation to his reader demonstrates that letter writing is foundational to his devel opment of the essay. His famous self-expression is grounded in friendly conversation, almost epistolary senno, between writer and reader. More over Montaigne foregrounds style in a legal and proprietary sense that Eden has traced from classical through humanist discussions of familiar ity, based in Roman and Greek concepts of the family and of property. Chapter 1 has surveyed the ancient "rhetoric of intimacy" from Aristotle to Demetrius and Quintilian. Erasmus's thoroughly rhetorical textbook on letter writing, De conscribendis epistolis, would seeni to fit awkwardly between Petrarch and Montaigne in Eden's genealogy of a rhetoric and hermeneutics of intimacy, as she acknow ledges, but she finds intimate writing in his correspondence, discussions of epistolary exercises in his pedagogical works De ratione studii and De copia, and praise of intimacv in the section on handwriting in De recta pronuntiatione. In its companion dialogue on stvle, Ciceronianus, Bulephorus emphasizes intimate reading as well as writing, both exemplified by the letter. As editor, Erasmus approaches Jerome's works as an intimate reader and describes style as ethos in his preface. Jerome's own editing of Scripture depends on a careful studv of stvle for evidence of forgerv and other corruption. As New Testament editor, Erasmus urges readers to experience Christ by approaching the Gospels as thev would a letter from a friend, while in his Paraphrase on Romans he attempts to capture St. Paul's ethos and use of multiple masks to reach diverse audiences. Eden's rich analysis of Erasmus's interest in intimate writing and reading in a wide range of works pioneers an exciting new scholarly direction in Erasmus studies that goes beyond the epistolary rhetoric he teaches to boys as an exercise...
January 2016
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108 RHETORICA numbering is still useful; Behr edited orations 1—16 in 1968 and Keil in 1898 (reprinted) edited 17-52. In addition Behr in 1981-86 translated all the works of Aristides in 2 volumes. Raffaella Cribiore, New York Richard Leo Enos, Greek Rhetoric Before Aristotle. Revised and Expanded Edition. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2012. 272 pp. Cloth: $60. Paper: $32. Adobe ebook: $20. ISBN-13: 978-1-60235-212-4. When Greek Rhetoric Before Aristotle's first edition was released in 1993, the reviews were not flattering. Carol Poster's review in Rhetoric Society Quar terly (26.3) called the book, "quite disappointing, containing little information that is not readily available in the libraries of most research universities." Similarly, William W. Fortenbaugh, writing in Philosophy and Rhetoric (28.2) notes that "Enos's discussion of Homer and the rhapsodes disappointed me, despite the fact that I am no expert in Homeric questions." The early cri ticisms of the book seem unduly harsh considering the territory Enos is exploring. Fortenbaugh, for instance, sums it up nicely as "for it [Enos's book] confronted me with material either long forgotten or rarely considered," but then drops this consideration from his critique. What Poster and Fortenbaugh did not recognize at the time was that Richard Leo Enos was planting the seeds of his theory of Archaeological Rhetoric. Enos begins his theory in the first edition of Greek Rhetoric Before Aristotle and expands this idea in several iterations leading to the expanded and revised second edition. In his 2002 article in RSQ (32.1), "The Archae ology of Women in Rhetoric: Rhetorical Sequencing as a Research Method for Historical Scholarship," Enos argues that research needs to cut through "pedantic refinery, exhibiting two traits essential to research: a passion for discovering primary sources and the cavalier, but resourceful, methods by which they go about solving their research problems." It is in this spirit that the Revised and Expanded edition attempts to reinterpret early Greek rhetorical tradition through archaeological and epigraphical evidence—and in cultural context. This is exactly what the Revised and Expanded edition addresses. In the nineteen years since the original edition was published, Enos refined his theory of Archaeological Rhetoric. The new edition is almost twice the length of the original and attempts to answer the criticisms of the earlier edition. What early critics misunderstood was that Enos was not attempting to be comprehensive in his chapters, he was attempting to redefine method in rhetorical inquiry. Expanded from the original five, Greek Rhetoric Before Aristotle's nine chapters are loosely chronological following his theory of Archaeological Rhetoric, including a strong bibliography developed since the initial volume. It is, of course, impossible to fully represent every aspect of Enos's arguments and examples here, but several high points are worth noting. Reviews 109 The first two chapters consider the development Homeric literature as a discourse genie spread by the Greek rhapsodes. Enos explains that once this body of knowledge was created, the discourse modes of heuristic, eris tic, and protreptic were needed to expand and recite the hymns. His discus sion of the rhapsodes better explains the shift in Greek culture from true orality to a written medium. Using archaeological examples, Enos examines inscriptions that explicit archaeological evidence, predating Homer by sev eral hundred years, reveals that this early form of paragraph was already being standardized within an oral culture" (49). These examples of written text were actually attempts to quantify elements already deduced in speech. Chapters III through V explore the problem in studying Hellenic rhetoric: scholars often assume that rhetorical acts were practiced only by the educated few. Professor Enos argues that during this era craft and functional literacy was widespread. Given the emerging development of alphabetic systems, the ability to decode was readilv available. His archaeological evidence is intrigu ing to the growing functional literacy among the tradesmen of the polis, such as the recording of votes bv citizens on potsherds, or ostraca. Chapter IV and V are perhaps the most interesting chapters in the volume. Sicily's "rhetorical climate" (97) is important because it frames the contributions of Corax and Tisias, and the importance of Gorgias to the...
September 2015
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Reviews 437 proposta d identificazione dell autore di questa declamazione con uno dei piu importanti maestri di retorica del tempo: Mario Vittorino. Conformemente ai criteri delle Edizioni dell'Universita di Cassino, entrambi i volumi propongono delle traduzioni che combinano felicemente limpidezza espressiva e riproduzione delle peculiaritá dello stile declamato rio, spesso aspro ed ellittico. Entrambi propongono poi un apparato biblio gráfico ricco e di grande ntilita, aggiornato al 2013. Si tratta nel complesso di due opere che riescono a coniugare con grande armonía la ricchezza e profonditá del commento filológico con una puntúale trattazione e contestualizzazione anche di problematiche di carattere piu generale. L'argomentazione e sempre esaustiva e di grande chiarezza . Grazie a queste doti tanto il Matheniaticus curato da Stramaglia, quanto il Sepulcnini incantation curato da Schneider risultano al tempo stesso un prezioso strumento di lavoro per gli specialisti e un valido mezzo di diffusione delle declamazioni presso un pubblico studentesco purtroppo ancora raramente sensibilizzato verso questo tipo di testi. Ai i ssandra Rolle, Université de Lausanne James Crosswhite, Deep Rhetoric: Philosophy, Reason, Violence, Justice, Wisdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. 424. Cloth $105.00, paper $35.00 ISBhf(paper) 9780226016481 There is a narrative that portrays rhetoric as an often-maligned theory of human discourse, educational regime, and practice. It is a superficial narra tive that has been under increasing assault since the new rhetoric's birth dur ing the 1920s and 30s. I. A. Richards and Kenneth Burke began the revision with novel conceptions of rhetoric as a social practice; Richard McKeon, Henry W. Johnstone, Ch. Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, and Ernesto Grassi advanced it in mid-century with reflections on rhetoric as at the core of philosophy (or philosophy of a certain sort); by late century John Poulakos and Takis Poulakos, among others, were rebuffing the subjugation of rhetoric to philosophy with an aesthetic interpretation based on a recuperation of the elder sophists' vision; and in this century scholars such as Diane Davis and Thomas Rickert continue the assault with formulations that carry rhetoric beyond the human and into such domains as the ambience of materiality. Although these thinkers conceptualize the new rhetoric from divergent start ing points and in different frames, they share a common desire to disclose what lies beneath a facile rendition of rhetoric as mere persuasion, namely its abiding centrality to what makes us human. This is the animus of James Crosswhite's Deep Rhetoric. Beginning with the observation that "we are rhe torical beings, and through rhetoric we give ways of being to each other and receive them from each other" (p. 17), Crosswhite seeks to understand how ordinary rhetoric, whereby we seek to influence and provide direction, assu mes a world with "dimensions of rhetoric that allow individuals, societies, 438 RHETORICA human activities, and the world itself to take place—and so brings the very possibility of philosophy and science into its realm" (p. 17). This is the realm of deep rhetoric, a realm that plumbs the depth of what makes us human and aligns with a transcendent aspiration of the new rhetoricians that by striving to understand rhetoric as an intellectual, educational, political, and social pur suit we will come to better understand the human condition. Deep Rhetoric has as its subtitle a list of terms that serve as its organizing discussions: Philosophy, Reason, Violence, Justice, Wisdom. These are not ran dom choices. At its core, Crosswhite's book is concerned with the central problem that has been to the fore of rhetorical thought since World War I: overcoming through public argument the quest by power to gain a monopoly on violence and to use its monopoly to dominate others. Deep Rhetoric seeks a worldly stance open to and that opens the possibihty for transcending the narrow logoi of instrumental rationality, logoi constituting the calculus of a system logic that dehumanizes others by excluding those dimensions of pathos and ethos that make humanity and community possible. The book opens with a consideration of what deep rhetoric means. Crosswhite draws contrasts between historicist views that position rhetoric in terms of its origins at a specific time and under specific conditions, such as...
June 2015
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322 RHETORICA differently in theology, mathematics, natural science, politics, ethics, poetics, and-Isocrates's home turf-rhetoric. Aristotle's Rhetoric, for example, focuses on enthymematic forms of syllogismos as appropriate responses to contin gent situations. It thereby contrasts with Isocrates's tendency, as Aristotle sees it, to heighten emotions by assimilating deliberative and forensic forms of public address to panoramic epideictic displays (Rhetoric I.9.1368a20-33). I trust it is not just because I am less familiar than Wareh with the fortunes of Academics and Isocrateans in the mid 340s, when Philip began to exercise hegemony over Greek poleis, that I was effortlessly drawn along by his discus sion of this subject in the second half of his book. I have no trouble believing that the rise of a courtly style of politics with the Macedonian ascendency had, being Macedonian, its vulgar side. Still, the translation Wareh includes of a remark ably sycophantic letter Plato's successor Speusippus wrote to Phillip urging him to purge his court of Isocrateans and give the Academy an exclusive lock on knowledge viewed as cultural capital makes for pretty depressing reading. Wareh sees the same tangle of intrigue in Aristotle's ties to Hermias, the tyrant of Atarnea near Lesbos. Isocrates's pleas for influence were no less attuned to court life. In fact, in the forms of address that emerged when philosophers were first turned into courtiers, Wareh concludes by showing, was born the mirror-of-princes rhetoric that gave Isocrates a rebirth in the Renaissance. David Depew University of Iowa Rachel Ahern Knudsen, Homeric Speech and the Origins of Rhetoric, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. 230 pp. ISBN 9781421412269 Rachel Ahem Knudsen's Homeric Speech and the Origins of Rhetoric (hereafter Homeric Speech) provides a new, detailed perspective on an old debate: how ought we to regard the works of Homer when considering the beginnings of rhetoric in ancient Greece? The standard accounts of rhe toric's origins are represented by the traditional scholarship of George Kennedy (The Art of Persuasion in Greece, 1963) and Laurent Pemot (Rhetoric in Antiquity, 2005). These works offer the received view that, while rhetori cal techniques are evident in the earliest forms of extant Greek literature, the formalization of rhetoric as a disciplinary art (techne) began in the Fifth Century BCE when it was "invented" by Corax and Tisias on the island of Sicily. Current scholarship by historians of rhetoric—represented by the works of Thomas Cole (The Origins of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece, 1991) and Edward Schiappa (The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece, 1999)—have challenged traditional views on the origins of rhetoric. Cole argues that the actual founders of rhetoric are Plato and Aristotle, while Schiappa argues that the term rhetorike did not even exist until Plato created Reviews 323 the term in his dialogue Goryias (pp. 18, 19). Additionally, the traditional distinctions separating rhetoric and poetry have been reconsidered because of such excellent research as Jeffrey Walker's Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity (2000), a work that Knudsen "has affinities with" in support of her own views (p. 20). Knudsen's objective is clearly stated: The contention of this book is ... that Homer not only demonstrates rhetorical practice in the speech of his characters, but that the patterns of persuasion that he depicts embody, in very specific ways, the rheto ric identified in theoretical treatises from the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, and that reached its fullest expression in Aristotle's Rhetoric" (pp. 3-4). Knudsen presents impressive scholarship in support of her position, but the merits of her contributions have some qualifications. Knudsen presents a detailed examination of the formal speeches of the Iliad in which she reveals systematic patterns of discourse using the following rhetorical concepts: enthymeme, diathesis, ethos, gnome, paradeigma, and topics. Her findings, appearing in both her criticism and also the frequencycharts citing the use of concepts and speakers, make it clear that the formal speech passages in the Iliad demonstrate the employment of rhetorical techni ques throughout the work (pp. 78, 80, 82). The obvious counter-argument to Knudsen's position is that rhetoric can and is employed without a conscious application but rather...