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438 articlesJanuary 2020
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Abstract
Christoph Georg Leidl In memoriam January 10, 1960 - August 17, 2019. t came as a terrible shock for all of us when just a few weeks after the Biennial Con ference in New Orleans this past July, where we had been together with him and shared hilarious chats, drinks, and music, the news spread that our friend, colleague and fellow ISEiR member Christoph Leidl had passed away from this world at the age of only 59 years. Born in Burghausen, Upper Bavaria in 1960, from 1979 to 1986 Christoph studied Greek, Latin, and History at the Uni versity of Munich, Germany, and (during the academic year 1982-1983) at St. John's College, Oxford, UK. It was from the University of Munich that he earned his M.A. in 1987 and his PhD in Ancient History, Greek and Latin in 1991, with an edition and commentary on Appian's history of the Second Punic War in Spain, printed 1996. During the years 1987 to 1999 he was Assistant Professor at the Department of Classics in Munich, again interrupted by a stay in Oxford from 1995 to 1997 on a research grant from the German Research Fund (DFG). From 1999 to 2001 he was Assistant Professor in Classics at the University of Mannheim, until he received a tenured post as Akademischer Rat Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVIII, Issue 1, pp. 1-13. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http:/ /www. nrnress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.1 2 RHETORICA at the University of Heidelberg in 2002 (promoted to Akademischer Oberrat in 2006), where he has been working and teaching ever since. Besides a steadily growing emphasis on the theory and history of rhetoric, in which he particularly focused on the theory of metaphor and tropes, the orator's ethos, rhetorical pedagogy, and humour in oratory, Christoph also did research and published on poetics and literary criticism, on ancient historiography and on the reception of ancient drama in music. Christoph had been an ISHR member since 1995, and missed almost none of our conferences, with the sad exception precisely of the one in Tubingen in 2015, when he fell ill. He also held various offi ces in ISHR. He was a Council member from 2011 to 2015, and in 2013 also took on the chair of the membership committee, a duty he fulfilled with enormous dedication and accuracy until his last days. Everyone will remember his meticulous membership reports delivered at each Council or General Business meeting. Christoph was perfectly versed not only in ancient literature, but also in modern and contemporary literatures. He knew his Shakespeare, Moliere and Goethe just as well as his Homer, Virgil, or Horace, and he was acquainted with contemporary approaches to rhetoric just as much as with Aristotle, Cicero or Quintilian. His private library filled an entire house and might have been the envy of many a department library. One wondered when, alongside his exorbitant duties in teaching and administration, he ever found the time for reading all those books. In addition, he was also a great lover of music. He had stupendous knowledge in all things music and was able to talk in minute details about concert pianists, conduc tors or particular recordings, and he was himself an excellent piano player. He was also a passionate mountain hiker. Besides all this, he had a wonderful and subtle sense of humour, and an extremely amiable character; his big inviting smile remains unforgettable. On the other hand, Christoph was an indefatigable worker with an outstanding sense of duty. Not only was he more than thorough in his research, but he was also always available for his students whenever they needed help. He seemed to be permanently active; it appeared as if he never rested, and indeed he may well too often have burnt the candle at both ends. Only lately he talked about a change in his way of life. But it...
September 2019
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Daughters Making Sense of African American Literature in Out-of-School Zones by Melvette Melvin-Davis ↗
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This article considers the value of young adult literature in the literacy development of adolescents. Her account of an out-of-school reading group for adolescent African American girls illustrates the capacity such spaces have to provide young African American women with opportunities for self-refection, critical inquiry, and personal development, opportunities that may not exist within the… Continue reading Daughters Making Sense of African American Literature in Out-of-School Zones by Melvette Melvin-Davis
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A Prison Classroom, African American Literature, and the Pedagogy of Freedom by Patrick Elliot Alexander ↗
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This article examines Alexander’s experiences teaching literacy and African American Literature to prison inmates at the Orange County Correctional facility in Hillsborough, North Carolina. For Alexander the conversations and insights provided by these inmates about their experiences and the experiences of the writers they read were indeed emancipatory. As Alexander explains, the process of reading… Continue reading A Prison Classroom, African American Literature, and the Pedagogy of Freedom by Patrick Elliot Alexander
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Abstract
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...
August 2019
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In creating and presenting a collaborative dramatic presentation of a literary text, composition students bring "The Yellow Wallpaper" to life through close reading, literary analysis and synthesis, recursive multi-modal writing, and group performance. This assignment fosters the development of transferrable reading, writing, and creative thinking skills within an active learning environment.
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English majors generally are adept at literary criticism but tend to have less experience in conducting empirical research that draws on both qualitative and quantitative methods and engages human participants. To introduce those methods to students and to satisfy a university requirement for quantitative instruction applied to the discipline, I developed a course called Approaches to Research in English Studies. The students complete individual IRB-approved projects that result in a research report, a poster, and a lightning talk. Before undertaking the individual projects, the students engage in a whole-class research project that models the process, and this latter assignment is described here in this essay.
March 2019
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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...
October 2018
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This article dwells on the “I” who arrives in the university classroom by offering an earnest assessment of the vulnerabilities that one teacher-scholar of African American literature and culture brings with her into the classroom. Observations unfold by way of a critical, reflexive engagement with theories of haunting and Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, in order to account for some of the roots and routes, histories and inheritances, that call this I into being.
April 2018
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Students entering an introductory survey course on African American literature have uneven background knowledge on the history of slavery in the United States. Given this, one of the key challenges in teaching the slave narrative is helping students appreciate the rhetorical intervention that these narratives made in antebellum debates about the slaves’ humanity. To highlight the urgency of these humanizing claims, it is necessary for students to understand how slaveholders viewed their property. This article describes how I use eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wanted advertisements for runaway slaves to frame classroom discussions about the slave narrative. This lesson enhances skills of careful observation, critical questioning, writing to discover, and comparative analysis as it deepens students’ knowledge of African American literature.
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Composing for Affect, Audience, and Identity: Toward a Multidimensional Understanding of Adolescents’ Multimodal Composing Goals and Designs ↗
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This study examined adolescents’ perspectives on their multimodal composing goals and designs when creating digital projects in the context of an English Language Arts class. Sociocultural and social semiotics theoretical frameworks were integrated to understand six 12th grade students’ viewpoints when composing three multimodal products—a website, hypertext literary analysis, and podcast—in response to a well-known literary text. Data sources included screen capture and video observations, design interviews, written reflections, and multimodal products. Findings revealed how adolescents concurrently composed for multiple purposes and audiences during the literature analysis unit. In particular, students viewed projects as a platform to emotionally affect and entertain a broader audience, as well as a conduit through which they could represent themselves as composers. Emphasis was placed on creating cohesive compositions—ranging from close modal matching to building meaning at a thematic level and creating a multisensory experience indicative of the novel’s narrative world. These findings contribute a multidimensional understanding of adolescents’ various and interacting multimodal composing goals and have implications for leveraging modal affordances in the classroom.
December 2017
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The Counsel of the Fox. Examples of Counsel from the Commedia, Short Stories, Letters and Treatises ↗
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If the aim of argumentation is that of increasing acceptance of the orator’s thesis (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969, 49), then the ultimate goal of counsel, a widespread argumentative practice within the genres of discourse as well as literature, is indeed persuasion. The subject of this essay—that is, the rhetoric of counsel—allows us to observe the interpretative richness of this element of the “new rhetoric” through examples offered by Dante, Giovanni Boccaccio, Lucrezia Borgia and Niccolò Machiavelli, straddling the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, bridging the fi elds of literature and history.
November 2017
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There has been little scholarly work looking at the use of creative writing pedagogy within non-creative writing courses. However, ‘Outside the box: Incorporating high stakes creative writing assignments into non-major literature courses, a case study’ demonstrates promising findings when incorporating high stakes creative writing assignments into the curriculum for core English literature courses. This article gives an overview of the Progressive history of ‘creative’ writing in the academy and then outlines contemporary sources that reference the burgeoning field of Creative Writing Studies and how creative writing pedagogy may be used more broadly in classrooms in a variety of disciplines. Then the case study details the assignments and experience of teaching a high stakes creative assignment in a non-major literature course at an undergraduate liberal arts institution. Using 25 representative student responses from among 50 total students over multiple semesters, the article concludes by asserting the findings that the inclusion of a high stakes creative assignment – in this case an original short story that is workshopped by peers and then revised – results in students who note increased confidence and creativity, and who state making connections between the relevance of writing instruction and workshopping to their lives outside of the classroom. While further, more formalized study would be beneficial on this topic, this study provides a useful perspective not just to teachers within the English department but also has ramifications for interdisciplinary scholarship.
October 2017
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The military historian Yuval Noah Harari accounts for the enduring allure of war by calling attention to a change in soldiers' memoirs that occurred in the mid-eighteenth century. Soldiers began to describe how they felt rather than what they did. Harari introduces the term flesh-witnessing to distinguish inner experience from eyewitness testimony. Flesh-witnesses speak of combat as a transformative and indescribable experience comparable to the sublime. This view is often attributed to militarists, but Harari shows that it also motivates pacifists. Even antiwar arguments like those of Erich Maria Remarque are based on the authority of the flesh-witness. To test Harari's claims, I invited ROTC officers to speak to students enrolled in a course titled British Literature: The Twentieth Century about their military experience. The juxtaposition of Harari's research and the officers' comments provided a framework for teaching All Quiet on the Western Front and other texts about war. Whether war is portrayed as painful or exhilarating, degrading or ennobling, it is widely idealized as a crucible for the development of the self. This view makes war stories irresistible, whatever political views writers and readers may hold.
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This essay discusses how and why one instructor uses a wiki as a space for students in a partially online American literature survey course to construct a class time line of American literature and history. Through participation in the class wiki, students are able to engage with course content in more expansive ways and to play active roles in creating course content; as such, the wiki is a space where the traditional teacher-student hierarchy is dismantled, as students and teacher collectively share the responsibilities of developing, assessing, and revising timeline content. In discussing the learning opportunities a wiki offers in a literature survey course, the author also argues that instructional technology and online tools should not be incorporated into courses merely to follow trends in digital humanities. Instead, digital and technological components should be thoughtfully integrated into humanities courses in ways that enhance and expand learning while furthering the objectives of the particular course.
April 2017
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This essay describes a graduate course, The Nineteenth-Century Novel in Context, that I developed and taught in fall 2011 at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. The essay was developed from an oral presentation that was part of a teaching panel at the Northeast Victorian Studies Association annual conference in the spring of 2013. The course was my final effort to “go wide” in teaching Victorian literature in its larger context, a desire that grew increasingly difficult to satisfy as the canon of Victorian literature became enlarged and thus somewhat unstable. I also wanted to organize the readings so that my students might get a sense of the literary context in which Victorian readers might have experienced the individual texts when they read them in the nineteenth century. In an effort to describe how I got to the syllabus for The Nineteenth-Century Novel in Context (included as an appendix), I give a personal sense of the history of the field of Victorian literature over the last fifty years, tracing the development of the field of English literature in general and Victorian literature in particular. I end with my evaluation of the course I developed, its strengths and its weaknesses, and what I learned from it.
March 2017
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Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue: Capitalism and Civil Society in the British Enlightenment by Mark Garrett Longaker ↗
Abstract
234 RHETORICA drawn to images from these periods - "the body's inside and outside, the heart offered on an outstretched hand" - that reveal "historically elaborated semiot ics of the self," expressing competing views of what constituted a moral bal ance of public and private (214). So, when she offers her detailed case study of irony and sincerity in the ethos of author Dave Eggers, it is grounded in a historical understanding of these terms. Historians of rhetoric may find themselves frustrated by aspects of Korthals Altes's book, a point she acknowledges as a likely effect of the wide net she casts. For example, her central term, ethos, is not as thoroughly historicized as are other framing concepts like sincerity, irony, and hermeneutics. While she traces these over centuries, her approach to ethos is to provide snapshots from ancient Greece and Rome and then to pick up the term in its modern uses in narrative analysis. This method drops at least one major thread that seems highly germaine to her project: the pre-Aristotelian sense of ethos, robustly revived in the last two decades, as location or haunt. Korthals Altes's use of topoi answers her need to flesh out the rhetorical commonplaces of ethos construction, but her discussion of the textual, virtual, and physical spaces that modem authors inhabit calls out to ethos's more ancient meaning. Further, the degree to which ethos overlaps with related terms like posture, self, persona, and implied author, are never made clear. But in placing ancient renderings of ethos within modem methods of literary criticism, Ethos and Narrative Interpretation reminds us just how fraught and complex the practice of reading others has always been. Daniel A. Cryer, Roosevelt University Mark Garrett Longaker, Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue: Capitalism and Civil Society in the British Enlightenment (RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric), University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015. 170 pp. ISBN 978-0-271-07086-5. While reading Mark Garrett Longaker's recent book, Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue: Capitalism and Civil Society in the British Enlightenment, I was struck by the author's reluctance to employ contemporary theory as a lens through which to evaluate Enlightenment perspectives on civic virtue, eco nomics, and rhetoric, for indeed, twenty-first-century rhetorical studies often marshal critical perspectives to try the past. While it is impossible to read his torical texts innocently, Longaker strives to explore his principal figures—John Locke, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, and Herbert Spencer—on their own terms. Thus, I was not surprised when in his conclusion he explicitly addresses his approach, revealing that although he is "a political socialist and a historical materialist," he adheres to the principle audite et alteram partem: "listen even to the other side" (pp. 134-35). It is this careful listening, which enables Reviews 235 Longaker to articulate his subjects significance in the British Enlightenment, that perhaps best characterizes this fine volume. In his introduction, Longaker concisely presents his "principal argument"—that "in the late seventeenth, mid-eighteenth, and mid-nineteenth centuries a British philosopher, a political economist, a rhetorical theorist, and a sociologist all tried to cultivate bourgeois virtue by teaching rhetorical style, each building on others' ideas and each addressing a unique stage of capitalist development" (p. 2). Each of the study's four chapters features one of Longaker's principal theorists, along with his key rhetorical emphasis: Locke and clarity, Smith and probity, Blair and moderation, and Spencer and economy. In chapter 1, Longaker astutely distills Locke's well-known recommenda tions concerning the abuses of language and his mistrust of disputation into "four rules to remedy language's infirmity" (p. 14). Conducting a "synthetic reading" of Locke's work, he then demonstrates how each rule elucidates dif ferent areas of the philosopher's corpus. For example, the "Rule of Propriety" describes Locke's view of both effective language and stable currency. Longaker closes the chapter by suggesting that Locke's actual prose style conforms to his rules of clarity and that his writings on education "developed a rhetorical pedagogy of clarity" (p. 37). Although most scholars of rhetoric who consider Locke tend to highlight a few of his well-worn...
January 2017
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Abstract
Those of us who teach English literature are familiar with the wide range of skills and capacities of our students. It remains a challenge, though, for English students to demonstrate the applicability of those skills beyond the academy, for instance, to prospective employers. This essay argues that creative education through experiential learning provides important opportunities for students and enhances their development as independent individuals who make their own decisions. To examine the pedagogical benefits that such learning can have in the humanities, this article draws on two extracurricular projects that we coordinate, NuSense, an undergraduate online journal, and Shakespeare after School, a community drama program for children. The skills the student volunteers draw upon to complete these projects include research, editing, writing, analysis, dramaturgy, and time management. In other words, NuSense and Shakespeare after School utilize the core skills of English studies and help students both hone and demonstrate those skills in a practical and public setting.
November 2016
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Abstract What exactly is untology? And why is it important for thinking about teaching effectively? In this article I argue that the most exciting opportunities for pursuing real change in pedagogical practices can be seen in the work of Jacques Rancière, especially in his controversial book The Ignorant Schoolmaster and (as this article traces) in his short essay “What Does It Mean to Be Un?” I argue that what is needed in educators today is an egalitarian aptitude for openness and what I am calling unlearning. Furthermore, through a close reading of Charles Baxter's short story “Gryphon,” I claim that the best teachers today are unqualified to teach. Thinking about qualification, as the current neoliberal regime would have us think about it—as a bankable phenomenon—misses the promise of education as a process of unlearning, unknowing and unbecoming. Education is untology.
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Book Review| November 01 2016 Review: Visual Rhetoric and Early Modern English Literature, by Katherine Acheson Katherine Acheson. Visual Rhetoric and Early Modern English Literature, London: Ashgate, 2013. 174+x pp. ISBN: 9780754662839 (hardback) Chris Dearner Chris Dearner Chris Dearner University of California, Irvine 2414 N.W. 32nd St, Oklahoma City, OK 73112 USA cdearner@uci.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2016) 34 (4): 458–460. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2016.34.4.458 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Chris Dearner; Review: Visual Rhetoric and Early Modern English Literature, by Katherine Acheson. Rhetorica 1 November 2016; 34 (4): 458–460. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2016.34.4.458 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2016 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Abstract
Notwithstanding its value as the earliest extant New Persian treatment of the art of rhetoric, Rādūyānī's Interpreter of Rhetoric (Tarjumān al-Balāgha) has yet to be read from the vantage point of comparative poetics. Composed in the Ferghana region of modern Central Asia between the end of the eleventh century and the beginning of the twelfth century, Rādūyānī's vernacularization of classical Arabic norms inaugurated literary theory in the New Persian language. I argue here that Rādūyānī's vernacularization is most consequential with respect to its transformation of the classical Arabic tropes of metaphor (istiʿāra) and comparison (tashbīh) to suit the new exigencies of a New Persian literary culture. In reversing the relation between metaphor and comparison enshrined in Arabic aesthetics, Rādūyānī concretized the Persian contribution to the global study of literary form.
October 2016
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Abstract
This article presents a three-stage critique of the “schools approach” to teaching literary theory at the undergraduate level. First, it demonstrates the continued dominance of this approach both in teaching programs and in the textbook literature. Second, it discusses the approach's pedagogical shortcomings. Third, it presents a teaching approach better suited to encourage active theoretical reflection.
September 2016
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Abstract
Notwithstanding its value as the earliest extant New Persian treatment of the art of rhetoric, Rādūyānī’s Interpreter of Rhetoric (Tarjnnān al-Balāgha) has yet to be read from the vantage point of comparative poetics. Composed in the Ferghana region of modern Central Asia between the end of the eleventh century and the beginning of the twelfth century Rādūyānī’s vernacularization of classical Arabic norms inaugurated literary theory in the New Persian language. I argue here that Rādūyānī’s vernacularization is most consequential with respect to its transformation of the classical Arabic tropes of metaphor (istiāra) and comparison (tashbīh) to suit the new exigencies of a New Persian literary culture. In reversing the relation between metaphor and comparison enshrined in Arabic aesthetics, Rādūyānī concretized the Persian contribution to the global study of literary form.
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Abstract
458 RHETORICA per “ UKOxpini^"; p. 212 "Luzzato" per "Luzzatto ; p. 217 (Van Elst - Wouters 2005) e p. 218 (Wouters 2007) "xAigk;" per “ xAia^". Giuseppe Arico, Milano Katherine Acheson. Visual Rhetoric and Early Modern English Literature, London: Ashgate, 2013. 174+x pp. ISBN: 9780754662839 (hardback) At first glance, the word "rhetoric" in the title of Katherine Acheson's Visual Rhetoric and Early Modern English Literature is a red herring; the book seldom mentions rhetoric explicitly, and does relatively little work with Renaissance or contemporary rhetorical theory. Instead, it focuses on the ways in which various modes of visual representation in the sixteenth and seventeenth century enabled or facilitated certain types of "brainwork," or "habituated thought, perception trained by exposure, active engagement, repetition, and extension," and how these types of brainwork condition the literature of the period (2). It is in this engagement with brainwork, however, that Visual Rhetoric takes up questions that are inherently rhetori cal in nature. Acheson's work can be understood as an investigation into the relationship between conventions of visual representation (visual rhetorics) and frameworks for the communication of human experience (cognitive rhetorics) in 16th and 17th century literature. Acheson's method and central thesis are thoroughly historicist. Each chapter begins with an extensive discussion of a particular mode of visual representation current in the English Renaissance - beginning with military and horticultural diagrams, and moving through dichotomous tables, fron tispieces and illustrations in manuals on drawing and writing, and ending by considering various modes of visually and textually representing ani mals. The historicizing work is supplemented and strengthened by the inclusion of reproduced examples of each mode being discussed. Acheson's dedication to providing thick historical context is consistent and productive, and this consistency allows the work to display a considerable sensitivity to variations within and differences across modes of visual representation. The first chapter is a particularly strong example of a productive and novel historicism. It considers shifting subject positions in Andrew Marvell's Upon Appleton House as they relate to the subject positions created and pos ited by military and horticultural diagrams common in the renaissance, modes of visual encoding which render intelligible the perspective of the speaker in Marvell's famous poem. The analysis in this chapter allows the peculiar mixture of perspectives demonstrated in Marvell's work and ana lyzed in the diagrams to serve as an excellent textual lens that not only eluci dates a famously complex poem but does so in a way that gears in nicely with existing scholarship. The second chapter discusses dichotomous tables, especially those published as genealogical guides to bibles and the wavs in which they Reviews 459 "powerfully instantiate central concepts of Protestant theology" (60), namely those having to do with the necessary and predetermined relation ship between God, Adam, and Christ. The chapter discusses three ways in which the cognitive rhetoric of the dichotomous table structures and is interrogated by Milton's Paradise Lost. And while the reading in this chapter is more expansive than in the first, it is also less complete - although an incomplete reading of Paradise Lost is a mark of honest intellectual engage ment rather than a deficiencv of method. The third chapter discusses the visual components of manuals on drawing alongside the representation of artists and writing in manuals on writing, arguing that the visual rhetoric of drawing manuals connects art with artifice, equipment, and scientific modes of knowing. In doing so, those diagrams on art exclude writing from participating in the realm of the scientific and artificial. Acheson goes on to argue that exactly this exclu sion is turned to writing's benefit in order to strengthen the traditional ekphrastic conclusion - that poetry is superior to painting - in Marvell's "Last Instructions," emphasizing the ways in which Marvell has adapted a traditional genre to deal with contemporary issues surrounding the rela tionship between painting and art. The final chapter discusses multiple modes of representing animals in late seventeenth century literature - from the natural historical and anatom ical to the fabular - and how animals are included, evaluated, and problematized by Aphra Behn's Oroonoko. Similarly to the previous chapter, the visual rhetoric of the diagrams becomes an opportunity to discuss...
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Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Travel Sketches and Samuel P. Newman’s <i>A Practical System of Rhetoric</i>: A Case of American Belletristic Theory on Praxis ↗
Abstract
ABSTRACT Historical study of teachers and students reveals how rhetorical theories influence writers (McClish 2015). This case study of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s prose considers the nineteenth-century rhetorical teachings of Samuel Phillips Newman, Hawthorne’s professor at Bowdoin College, a student of Blair, and a proponent of rhetorical taste. Using Newman’s 1827 A Practical System of Rhetoric and Hawthorne’s 1832 travel sketches, we analyze Newman’s influences on Hawthorne—particularly taste and the sublime and how these concepts challenged Hawthorne as a writer in the travel sketch genre. We consider Newman’s influences on Hawthorne as evidenced by writing practices that Newman had recommended or disapproved. In particular, we examine Newman’s explanation of taste and its complementary construct of sublimity and how these concepts challenged Hawthorne. We argue that Hawthorne both wrote within the paradigm of rhetorical taste as Newman taught it and struggled against its constraints to find his own perceptions. Furthermore, we see this struggle happening within the context of Hawthorne’s exposure to Newman’s American-inflected belletrism that emphasized both a discriminatory principle of taste and the growing body of American literature.
June 2016
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Abstract
The West India planter-master became the most vilified figure in British literature as a result of the abolitionist campaign to end the slave trade. The abolitionist primarily responsible for this shift in perception is James Ramsay, specifically in the controversy around his Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonics (1784). He argues that the tyranny of absolute mastery is inherent in African slavery. This essay re-examines the rhetoric of Ramsay’s publication and the ensuing pamphlet war for the “definitional rupture” in the term “master.” This new planter-master, configured as wholly corrupt, shifted the paradigm and created a powerful trope for abolitionists. Srividhya Swaminathan, Long Island University Brooklyn, srividhya.swaminathan@liu.edu.
May 2016
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An Essay on Current Quintilian Studies in English, With a Select Bibliography of Items Published Since 1990 ↗
Abstract
It is important to begin this essay with a note about language. The international scope of Quintilian studies is evidenced by the number of European languages used to discuss him—German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, as well as English. Two major recent collections of studies about Quintilian are written mainly in continental languages. The larger is the three-volume Quintiliano: Historia y Actualidad de la Retórica edited by Tomás Albaladejo, Emilio del Río, and José Antonio Caballero López; it includes 123 essays mostly in Spanish but with some French and English. The work stems from an international conference held in Madrid and in Calahorra, Spain (Quintilian’s birthplace) to commemorate the 1900th anniversary of the publication of the Institutio Oratoria. Another collection is Quintilien: ancien et moderne (2012), edited by Perrine-Ferdinand Galand, Carlos Lévy and Wim Verbaal, with thirty-one essays in French. These are largely inaccessible to monophone English speakers, as are some important individual studies such as Gualtiero Calboli, Quintiliano y su Escuela; Otto Seel, Quintilian: oder, die kunst des Redners und Schweigens; or Jean Cousin, Récherches sur Quintilien.The reader of this essay, then, should be aware that the English works discussed here are but a small part of a wider international undertaking. The numbers, too, are worth noting. For example, the online Quintilian bibliography by Thorsten Burkard of Kiel University in Germany lists 847 items arranged in fourteen subject sections, while the World Catalog displays 5,179 records (of which 1,896 are in English) and the Melvyl search engine for University of California libraries finds 1,125 Quintilian entries in that system alone. The first (and only) bibliography of Quintilian published in America, in 1981, was that of Keith V. Erickson in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, listing nearly 800 books and articles alphabetized by author. Thus what we discuss here is in a sense only the tip of a scholarly iceberg.The best single short introduction to Quintilian is an essay by Jorge Fernández López, “Quintilian as Rhetorician and Teacher,” in A Companion to Roman Rhetoric. Fernández López presents a balanced view of what Quintilian has in mind in his Institutio Oratoria, with sections on biography, the meaning and structure of the Institutio, early education, the system of rhetoric, style, the orator in action, and the author’s approach to rhetoric and morals.One of the most important recent contributions to making Quintilian text accessible was the publication in 2001 of Donald A. Russell’s edition and translation of his Institutio Oratoria in a five-volume Loeb Classical Library set. The previous Loeb translation was by H. E. Butler in 1921–22 in four volumes. Russell’s smooth translation and more extensive notes make his work superior to that of Butler. Russell makes adroit use of sentence variety and punctuation to make his translation more readable than Butler’s, which tends to follow more literally Quintilian’s often periodic style with its long multi-clausal sentences. Also, Butler had provided only two short indices of “Names and Words” in the Institutio, with comparatively few notes to the text itself, while Russell supplies copious notes to virtually every page of the text; in addition he completes the whole set at the end of Volume Five with an “Index of Proper Names,” and Indexes to Books 1–12 which include a 33-page “General Index.” an “Index to Rhetorical and Grammatical Terms,” and an “Index of Authors and Passages Quoted.” Moreover, Russell provides an introduction to each of the twelve books that includes a summary of that book’s contents—a valuable resource for the reader struggling to cope with the sheer magnitude of the Institutio. It is the addition of these new notes and the 100 pages of indexes at the end that make the Russell longer than the Butler, but the value to the reader makes it worthwhile.Also new is the appearance of the first one-volume translation of the Institutio, a print version of the translation by John Selby Watson (1856) as revised and edited online by Lee Honeycutt (2007) and edited for print by Honeycutt and Curtis Dozier in 2015. The 686-page paperback is available for purchase under the title Quintilian: Institutes of Oratory, or, Education of an Orator, and is also available online. The volume includes Watson’s own “Preface” and “Life of Quintilian,” together with a twenty-five page summary of the Institutio, by book and chapter, keyed to the page numbers of the translation. (These chapter headings are then repeated throughout the volume.) There are none of Watson’s notes to the translation, Honeycutt explains, because they were omitted to save space for fitting it into the one volume; he recommends that the reader consult Russell’s notes. Despite that problem, this one-volume translation may be useful to readers for its portability and low cost compared to the five-volume Loeb Library translation of Russell.Tobias Reinhardt and Michael Winterbottom have edited Quintilian Institutio Oratoria Book 2. This volume includes not only the Latin text of Book 2 (1–34) but also an informative 50-page “Introduction” which examines Quintilian’s teaching methods, his concept of rhetoric, and his strategies in presenting his ideas. But the vast majority of the volume (35–394) offers meticulous commentaries on the 21 chapters of Book Two. A short prose summary introduces each chapter; then the editors painstakingly examine key Latin words and phrases in the text. Many of these observations are highly technical and demand some knowledge of Latin or Greek. On the other hand, many others may be illuminating to a general reader, as in the opening of chapter 11 (175–176), where the editors discuss Quintilian’s response to those who think rhetorical precepts are not necessary. Book 2 is an important one in the Institutio, for in it Quintilian ends his formal exposition of early education and begins his discussion of rhetoric.Another recent reprinting, of Book 10 of the Institutio, may seem at first glance to be of interest only to skilled classical scholars. This is William Peterson, Quintilian: Institutionis Oratoriae; Liber Decimus, originally published 1891, but now edited by Giles Lauren with a “Foreword” by James J. Murphy. It includes the Latin text of Book 10 with extensive notes mostly in English, with a full summary of the book (1–12), a useful short chapter on Quintilian’s literary criticism, and a longer one on his use of language with numerous examples in both English and Latin. Even the non-Latinate reader may find things to learn in this volume. Peterson was a child prodigy—he wrote this 290-page book at age 24—who later went on to become Principal of McGill University in Montreal, Canada.The most recent addition to the availability of Quintilian’s work is Quintilian on the Teaching of Speaking and Writing: Translations from Books One, Two and Ten of the Institutio Oratoria, second edition, edited by James J. Murphy and Cleve Weise. Part One of the introduction discusses Quintilian’s teaching methods, including verification from modern cognitive science of his views on habit (hexis), together with some possibilities for modern applications of his principles; also Part Two presents four sets of Quintilian-based exercises designed to encourage close reading of the three translations which follow.The best single book on Quintilian, George A. Kennedy’s Quintilian, was published in 1969 by Twayne Publishers as part of their World Author series but has long been out of print. It has now reappeared in a revised edition as Kennedy, Quintilian: A Roman Educator and His Quest for the Perfect Orator. This slim (117 pages) volume is divided into eight chapters, each of which begins with the identification of “important sources and special studies at the beginning of each chapter rather than combining all bibliography in a single alphabetical list at the end of the book. This avoids the use of footnotes …” (1). While the book is ostensibly divided into sections representing Quintilian’s background, educational plan, rhetoric, and the “good man” concept in Book 12, what Kennedy actually presents is a thorough summary of the Institutio coupled with a far-ranging personal critique not only of the Institutio but of the man himself. He treats both Quintilian’s aspirations and what he views as his faults, and concludes the book with a discussion of Cornelius Tacitus (55?–117 CE) and the view that the Institutio had changed nothing in Rome. But Kennedy, author of so many books on classical rhetoric and its history, is so steeped in Roman culture that he writes easily about complex events; for example his portrayal of Quintilian’s possible reasons for retirement and the composition of the Institutio (22–28) reads almost like a novel. Anyone, expert or beginner, can profit from Kennedy’s observations.(Editor’s note: the following survey does not attempt to list every recent reference to Quintilian, or every entry for him in handbooks or encyclopedias. Nor does it follow every use in textbooks where his doctrines are mingled with others, as for example in the successive editions of works like Corbett and Connors, Classical Rhetoric and the Modern Student, and Crowley and Hawhee, Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students. The emphasis here instead is on books and articles which elucidate his text or lay out directions for future research.)A useful place to start is with three collections of essays, two of which contain a mixture of languages but do offer some valuable English contributions. The first one, already mentioned, is the massive three-volume Quintiliano (1998) edited by Tomás Albaladejo et al. Eleven of its 131 essays are in English, with contributions by Adams, Albaladejo, Cockcroft, Hallsall, Harsting, Hatch, Kennedy, Murphy, Willbanks, Winterbottom, and Woods. Its 1561 pages are continuously paginated.Another, smaller gathering presents twelve essays in two special issues of Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric in 1995, under the title “The Institutio Oratoria after 1900 years.” Six of the essays are in English, by Cranz, Fantham, France, Kraus, Sussman, and Ward.The volume Quintilian and the Law: The Art of Persuasion in Law and Politics (2003), edited by Olga Tellegen-Couperus, offers 25 essays, all of them in English, covering a wider range of subjects than the title might indicate. The book stems from a conference held at Tilburg in The Netherlands in 2001 convened by the Willem Witteveen and the editor “to try and assess [sic] Quintilian’s significance for students and practitioners of the art of persuasion in antiquity and in modern times” (Preface). The authors of six chapters do cover law and jurisprudence: Lewis, Robinson, Rossi, Tellegen, Tellegen-Couperus, and Witteveen. Another five focus on the courtroom and persuasion of judges: Henket, Katula, Martín, Mastrorosa, and Tellegen-Couperus in a second essay. Two deal with reading and writing in Book 10: Murphy and Taekema. The remainder discuss a variety of topics, including emotion, language, argument, and figures. In sum, this collection should prove valuable even to readers not primarily interested in law.The first observation to be made about current research is that, with the possible exception of Kennedy’s Quintilian, there is no book-length analytic study of Quintilian in English. But while Kennedy’s charming introduction to Quintilian does provide biographical information together with a running summary of the Institutio Oratoria, it is not intended as a thorough exploration of the many issues in this complex work. It is of course not surprising that we lack such a book, given the knowledges required—rhetoricians and students of education often lack sophisticated knowledge of ancient Roman culture, while classicists sometimes fail to appreciate the nuances of Quintilian’s rhetoric and pedagogy.Understandably, then, the overwhelming majority of articles and book chapters published since 1990 deal with particular, comparatively small segments of the Quintilian corpus. They present such a kaleidoscopic array that it seems best to group them by subject areas.The largest number of these (seventeen to be exact) discuss the later history of the Institutio Oratoria, its “reception” or “influence” in various times and places. They cover a wide range of topics: Renaissance learning (Classen); Saint Jerome (Davis “Culture”); Rousseau (France); Hugh Blair (Halloran; Hatch); the nineteenth century (Johnson); women in the Renaissance (Klink); Czech thought (Kraus); Milton and Ramus (Lares); Italian Renaissance (Monfasani); the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Murphy “Quintilian’s Influence”); Obadiah Walker (O’Rourke); eloquence in Quintilian’s time (Osgood); early modern role models (Rossi); and the Middle Ages (Ward; Woods).Teaching and its psychology interest another seventeen of the authors: Bloomer (“Schooling,” “Quintilian”); Brand et al.; Briggs; Connelly; Corbeill; Fantham (“The Concept of Nature”); Furse; Ker; Montefusco; Morgan (Literate Education); Murphy (“The Key Role of Habit,” “Quintilian’s Advice,” “Roman Writing Instruction”); Richlin; Too; Van Elst and Woners; Woods.Some of Quintilian’s specific teaching methods are treated: declamation (Breij; Friend; Kasper; Kennedy “Roman Declamation”; Mendelson “Declamation”; Sussman; Wiese); Progymnasmata (Fleming; Henderson; Kennedy, Progymnasmata; Webb); and imitation (Harsting; Taoka; Terrill).The application of Quintilian’s principles to modern education is the subject for six authors: Bourelle; Corbett and Connors; Crowley and Hawhee; Kasper.Another five works discuss the Institutio Oratoria itself: Adams; Celentano; López “The Concept”); and Murphy, Katula and Hoppman.Law attracts another five: Lewis; Martín; Robinson, Tellegen; Tellegen-Couperus (Quintilian and the Law).Emotion is the subject of three essays: Cockcoft; Katula (“Emotion”; Leigh.Language, writing, and style attract another eight authors: Chico-Rico; Craig; Davis (“Quintilian on Writing”); d’Esperey; Lausberg; Murphy (“Roman Writing Instruction”); Tellegen-Couperus (“Style and Law”); Wooten.Not surprisingly, there is interest in the subject of rhetoric in eight works: Albaladejo, Gunderson (“The Rhetoric”); Heath; Kennedy, (“Rhetoric,” A New History, “Peripatetic Rhetoric”); Roochnik; Wulfing.Quintilian as a person, including his vir bonus concept, draws the attention of Cranz; Halsall; Kennedy (Quintilian); Lanham; Logie; Walzer (Quintilian’s).One final note is to remark on the appearance of four Ph.D. dissertations in this array of studies (Furse; Ker; Klink; Wiese) together with two M.A. theses (Francoz; O’Rourke). Doctoral dissertations can be located fairly easily through normal bibliographic channels, but the identification of master’s theses is much more difficult. In any case, it is hoped that their appearance marks faculty interest in Quintilian in their respective institutions.
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Fostering the Hospitable Imagination through Cosmopolitan Pedagogies: Reenvisioning Literature Education in Singapore ↗
Abstract
While English literature once occupied a central position in national curricula, enrollment in the subject has undergone a continuing decline in English-speaking countries such as the United States and United Kingdom. Its marginal position may also be observed in formerly colonized countries such as Singapore, where the subject was introduced, appropriated, and reconstructed. My aim,in this paper, is to propose a reenvisioning of literature education premised on the principles of ethical cosmopolitanism. In the first part of the paper, I describe ethical cosmopolitanism by distinguishing it from strategic cosmopolitanism, which has more recently emerged in response to the pressures of economic globalization, leading to the economization of education. In the second part of the paper, I show how the principles of strategic cosmopolitanism have directed the national literature curriculum in Singapore through my analysis of the national syllabus and high-stakes examination papers from 1990 to the present. This leads to the third part of the paper, in which I use a case study of four literature teachers in Singapore secondary schools to characterize the ethical cosmopolitan pedagogies they employ to circumvent nation-centric, economic pressures of strategic cosmopolitanism operating at the national level. More importantly, I discuss how such pedagogies have the potential to foster a hospitable imagination, which constitutes the strongest defense one can give to literature education in the context of an increasingly culturally complex,connected, and contested global sphere.
April 2016
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Abstract
This article addresses the teaching of Amy Levy's “Xantippe” (1880), a poem 279 lines long, in an upper-division survey of British literature from 1800 to the present focused on life stories. Though the poem is short enough to be read in a single sitting, it is also long enough to pose the pedagogical challenges common to teaching all long poems: asking students to read both closely and at length, to discern unifying tropes or themes across manifold details or narrative episodes, to engage in sufficient discussion commensurate with the long poem's complexity, and to discover the pleasures of the long poem (deep immersion, sweep of vistas, narrative propulsion, and more). Since Levy is not anthologized in most survey textbooks, the article also concerns teaching noncanonical poetry. The methods presented include prompts posing questions and explaining the work's poetic and cultural contexts, and student reading diaries listing what students found challenging and what they learned. The article thus incorporates real-time student responses, as well as discussion of teaching strategies.
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Abstract
This article argues that the short-story cycle should be central to teaching American literature, because the genre crystallizes major tensions of American literary history: marginality and inclusion, the individual and the community, and the formation of a national literature from transnational and local materials.
November 2015
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Abstract
This article discusses findings from a three-year ethnographic study of an ethnic studies course called Native American literature, which began during the passing of legislation that banned the teaching of ethnic studies in Arizona’s public and charter schools. The data analyzed here explore the ways students use silence as a form of critical literacy “or critical silent literacies” in response to racial microaggressions enacted by their peers, their teachers, or a combination of both. This framing of silence questions common assumptions that Native American students aresilent because of their biological, inherent, and/or cultural “traits” Challenging such assumptions, Native American students in this study reveal that as they attempt to voice their ideas, they are repeatedly silenced because their knowledges counter the dominant settler knowledges taught in public schools. As a result, they discuss how their silence has been used over time as a resistancestrategy to shield themselves, their identities, and their family and community knowledges from dominant, monocultural knowledges with which they did not agree.
October 2015
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Abstract
Charlotte Hoggaa Texas Christian UniversityCharlotte Hogg is Associate Professor of English and Director of Composition at Texas Christian University. Her publications include From the Garden Club: Rural Women Writing Community (U of Nebraska P, 2006), Rural Literacies, coauthored with Kim Donehower and Eileen E. Schell (SIUP, 2007), and Reclaiming the Rural: Essays on Literacy, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy, coedited with Donehower and Schell (SIUP, 2012), and scholarly and creative work in Women and Literacy: Inquiries for a New Century, Western American Literature, Great Plains Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, The Southeast Review, and elsewhere. Her current book project is on sorority rhetorics.
May 2015
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“Out of Her Safety into His Hunger and Weakness”: Gendered Eating Spaces in Eudora Welty’s “A Wide Net” and “Flowers for Marjorie” ↗
Abstract
In “Flowers for Marjorie” and “The Wide Net,” Welty adopts masculine vantage points from which she explores denials of feminized civility. The similarities of these stories allow for a discussion of three major elements: First, the gendered eating related to a pregnancy; second, the refusal to eat in the homespace in favor of eating in spaces of homosocial bonding; and third, the partaking of liquor and the gendered alignment that signifies. Leslie Fiedler’s landmark article “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in Huck Honey!”—and many theorists who have come after him—suggests that male figures in American literature seek out spaces in which they can commune with other men and avoid the traditional responsibilities of the homespace (providing for a household, being responsible to a family, etc.). These male characters cannot avoid the home-space forever, though, and must eventually return to the realm they perceive to be primarily feminine. In light of such arguments, this article examines Welty’s male characters’ evasions of and returns to the homespace as they relate to Southern foodways.
April 2015
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Abstract
This essay, focusing on Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes’s 1930 play and infamous literary collaboration, explores the possibilities of combining new digital tools with traditional scholarly approaches to better understand how the multilayered racial discourse of African American literature in the early twentieth century informs this signal collaboration. Moreover, Christian outlines the benefits of including African American literature in digital humanities projects.
February 2015
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Abstract
Arabella Lyon's Deliberative Acts begins with a rhetorical question: “Shall we speak of Abu Ghraib and torture; shall we educate the children of illegal immigrants; shall we guarantee health care for all or for most; shall we intervene in the governance of other nations; shall we ban the hijab (head scarf), medical marijuana, and prayer in the schools; shall we find one hundred million missing women, the lost boys of Africa, and los desaparecidos (the disappeared)?” (1) With this list of violations framed as a question, Lyon suggests that through the media, popular culture, and politics, we are constantly confronted with and compelled to deliberate on issues of rights, so much so that human rights have become the grounding for the work of democracy. Thus, Lyon's major intervention is located at this intersection of human rights discourse and the political deliberation necessary in democracies. She seeks to advance a theory of “performative deliberation” (3) that conceives of deliberation within theories of performance and performativity as an activity that refocuses on the present and the constitutive moment of recognition within the specific context of each speech act. In order to do so, Lyon turns to human rights case studies as represented in the media and life stories because they, by nature, attend to radical difference and because they “require examinations of both being and situated knowledge for the many coming to action, an action potentially transformative of being and knowledge” (4).Rhetorical studies has been surprisingly late in taking up a human rights critique. Although many have been engaged in critiquing human rights from a rhetorical perspective for years, and even more have been engaged in critiquing human rights through discourse analysis and literary analysis, the lack of conversation in rhetoric prompts Erik Doxtader to question whether rhetoric should have a role in human rights discourse in the first place.1 Despite his question, the past several years has seen a renewed interest in rhetorical approaches to human rights. In fact, a special issue of RSQ coedited by Arabella Lyon and Lester Olson in 2011 (subsequently published as a book in 2012) and Wendy Hesford's book Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (2011) were among the first in this new wave of rhetorical studies to focus directly on human rights as such. Lyon's Deliberative Acts is situated within this relatively recent rhetorical turn to human rights and provides a useful and necessary theoretical grounding on rhetorical concepts and deliberation across difference as they relate to human rights case studies on which others can build. Additionally, for scholars engaged in conversations surrounding deliberative rhetorics, Lyon offers a convincing model of performative deliberation that accounts for the fluidity of poststructuralist notions of agency and subjectivity through an overdue rethinking of rhetorical concepts including identification, recognition, and performance/performativity in persuasion. However, for scholars participating in the conversation and critique directly surrounding human rights discourse, a critique that is predominantly located in the humanities and rapidly expanding out from its literary foundations, Lyon's book may be controversial, as it does not necessarily critique the discourse of rights itself, nor the amorphous “we” constructed in her first sentence. Rather, she is interested in critiquing how that “we” employs, deploys, and deliberates over human rights cases, including the claims made by Libyan woman Eman al-Obeidi's to Western journalists that she was raped and abused by Gaddafi's military, the Chinese one-child policy, Rigoberta Menchú's testimony, and women's suffrage in the United States.Lyon's introduction locates her intervention in the conversation surrounding deliberation and deliberative democracy in a global and transnational era. To begin, Lyon distinguishes deliberative democracy (a way for states to legitimize decisions) from deliberation (a rhetorical practice), a distinction that suggests that the problem with deliberative democracy is that “it finds difference disruptive rather than productively diverse” (11). This is problematic because “in responding to rights conflicts” Lyon claims, “citizens are asked to deliberate, to recognize interlocutors, to comprehend their competing claims, and weigh definitions of the issue and the consequences of their decisions on people whom they have never seen” (4). Lyon's introduction articulates three major critiques that scholars of deliberative theory might find very useful. First, she critiques its origins in procedural democracy, which engages in forensic rhetoric, rather than deliberative politics, which engages in deliberative rhetoric. Stated differently, deliberative democracy is future oriented and focuses on action and procedure rather than present context. Second, in its privileging of reason, deliberative democracy values Western notions of speech-action that delegitimize alternative and embodied strategies of persuasion. Thus, deliberative democracy ignores the contextual forces that constitute reason in the first place. Third, Lyon argues that deliberative democracy values consensus, which “creates problems for theorizing radical deliberation, because it is hard to imagine even basic norms of justice achieving practical consensus” (19).The first chapter, “Defining Deliberative Space: Rethinking Persuasion, Position, and Identification” theoretically situates the book and redefines some foundational rhetorical concepts including identification, recognition and persuasion. Lyon suggests that instead of deliberative rhetoric being a futurist discourse, it can instead be constitutive of the present, “a doing based in speech and act and not in persuasion and identification” (30). For example, identification predicated on recognition, argues Lyon, will always subsume difference and is thus inadequate for discourse across difference. Lyon critiques deliberation as a persuasive discourse on three grounds. It is inadequate for human rights and cross-cultural engagement since it is predicated upon an unequal relationship between speaker and audience (rather than an equal relationship between interlocutors); it is future rather than present oriented; and it assumes certain sets of communal knowledges that will always “seek to remove otherness” (31). In order to remedy these problems Lyon turns to “alternative rhetorics,” including feminist rhetorics and Confucian notions of remonstration, that can help scholars conceive of deliberation “as a dramatic event or a series of enactments” and as “the discursive acts responsible for altering the subjectivity of the participants, their discourses, and their beliefs” (36–37). Ultimately, Lyon proposes a conception of deliberation as a continuum of political perspectives, suggesting that if each interlocutor values the other over the outcome, then deliberation can occur. If we understand deliberation as a “regularly occurring human act” (49), she claims, then recognition does not have to occur prior to deliberation; the act of deliberation is itself an act of recognition and thus humanizing.Understanding recognition as occurring in the moment of engagement with the other seems to solve the poststructuralist problem of the fixed individual of rights, but it gets more challenging when the subject of rights is not a subject who can engage in deliberation at all, such as third generation rights of/to the environment. However, in critiquing Aristotle's notion of persuasion so as to redefine deliberation not as a discourse oriented toward the future bent on persuasion but rather as one constitutive of the present bent on recognition, Lyon opens the possibility of deliberation across difference that does not reproduce the hegemonic structures always present in discourses of persuasive deliberation.The second chapter, “Performative Deliberation and the Narratable Who,” begins with the story of Eman al-Obeidi, the Libyan woman who, according to Lyon, became a symbol of defiance against Gaddafi when she entered the Rixos Hotel in 2011 (a hotel where Western journalists covering the uprising gathered) and claimed that she had been gang-raped by Gaddafi's military. During this telling of her rape, Gaddafi's military entered the hotel and again abducted al-Obeidi despite the journalists' attempts to protect her. Lyon uses the story of al-Obeidi throughout the chapter to argue for a theory of performative deliberation as a way to account for the complexities of agency, recognition, and narratability in deliberative discourse. The chapter offers a further critique of identification and recognition through a close reading of J. L. Austin's notion of the performative, Kenneth Burke's concept of performance, and Judith Butler's notions of performativity as “a continuum of form and forming” (25) that scales outward from the individual to the structural. In an attempt to locate individual agency within structural notions of subjectivity, Lyon then provides a close reading of issues pertaining to narration and agency that she traces through Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood, and Adriana Cavarero. Through these theories and the story of al-Obeidi, Lyon proposes to extend speech act theory in four main ways. First, by analyzing “tensions between conforming and forming within speech act theories to reveal the agency inherent in discourse” (69), Lyon shows how al-Obeidi shifted the focus of her speech act from an individual act of rape when she was talking with the journalists in the restaurant of the Rixos Hotel to a violation within the normative and structural discourse of human rights when she was interviewed much later by Anderson Cooper on CNN. According to Lyon, this intentional slippage shifts blame “from the shame of the woman to the shame of the patriarchal state” (69). Second, because speech acts do not just conform to normative conventions but also maintain space for agency and can be inaugural sites themselves, then “the nature of the cultural change is visible in abnormal or infelicitous performances” (69). Therefore, she reads al-Obeidi's decision to burst in on the breakfast of Western journalists covering the war in Libya as an example of an infelicitous speech act that was able to redefine the norms of testimony. Third, Lyon seeks to find agency in the embodied performance of the speech act (69), and fourth, the chapter claims that agency is found in navigating existing norms by “using both felicitous and infelicitous acts to widen possibilities” (69), exemplified in al-Obeidi's navigation of the Western media. This chapter is one of the more compelling chapters because of its thorough critique of identification and recognition.The third chapter critiques U.S. media representations of what Lyon calls “the most major human rights crisis in the world today: missing women” (108) in Asia and China due to the one-child policy. The chapter, titled “Narrating Rights, Creating Agents: Missing Women in the U.S. Media” with an intended pun on “missing women,” suggests that if the media, like literature, could work to foster compassion, then it could initiate the kind of relationships necessary for performative deliberation. Drawing on Adriana Cavarero's account of the narratable self, Lyon modifies Arendt's view of compassion as an emotion that demands action rather than the slow movement of deliberation in order to develop a theory of deliberation that employs compassion from a distance. Her theory of compassion is the rhetorical equivalent of theories of literary witness articulated by Anne Cubilié in Women Witnessing Terror (2005) and Wendy Kozol (2011) in her essay “Complicities of Witnessing in Joe Sacco's Palestine.” All three scholars articulate a notion of witness that demands action rather than spectatorship, the latter implying passivity and consumption. Lyon argues that the media representation of China's missing women revives Cold War sentiments and the fear of China surpassing the United States as an economic and global superpower. Negating any form of cross-cultural recognition, family planning gets mapped onto the United States' own political fears and Chinese women become allegorical figures for the nation-state. The U.S. media thus misses the missing women because they are not seen as a human rights violation but rather a symptom of family planning or abject suffering, made the subject of narratives, argues Lyon, that foreclose deliberation across difference. To counteract this, Lyon calls for a kind of “global citizen” who is located in the United States but who is educated and informed and who can advocate for women's rights in other cultures. Lyon argues that literature can offer this kind of compassionate education that underwrites performative deliberations and turns to Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club as an example, thus contributing to the wealth of scholarship that suggest literature does human rights work. However, Lyon ends her chapter by backing away from the work literature can do, suggesting that “storytelling becomes a means of recognition, but not of political action” (126).Chapter 4, “The Beauty of Arendt's Lies: Menchú's Political Strategy,” analyzes the reception of Rigoberta Menchú's I, Rigoberta Menchú and U.S. scholars' attempt to explain away the inconsistencies of the controversial testimonio. In so doing, the chapter “reconceives the ethics of lies, arguing that they are examples of imaginative, performative acts in the service of (potentially new) political regimes” (27). Returning once again to Arendt, Lyon furthers Arendt's sanction of lies for diplomatic political use, particularly those told to enemies, and legitimates Menchú's inconsistencies as an expression of her political agency by which she negotiates norms. Suggesting that Menchú's lies facilitate human rights deliberation, this chapter more deeply examines issues of recognition within normative conventions of the genre of testimonio. Thus, Lyon not only provides a helpful reading of the normative conventions of the testimonio in this chapter but also critiques the ways in which narratives are frequently recognized based on their adherence to normative conventions of testimonial veracity. The chapter ends with an apologia of sorts that explains why Lyon advocates the political tactic of lying, claiming that “the state's legitimacy relies on its truthful adherence to its laws, but citizen agents must speak back to dishonest states, even with lies” (149).The final chapter of Deliberative Acts, titled “Voting like a Girl: Declarations, Paradoxes of Deliberation, and Embodied Citizens as a Difference In Kind,” moves the discussion of rights onto U.S. soil and into the past in an examination of the deliberations over women's suffrage. One of the chapter's most interesting interventions is Lyon's claim that paradoxes are generative of deliberation because they counteract consensus and because they disrupt the stability of answers. This reframing of paradox is incredibly useful for human rights because of the inherently paradoxical nature of human rights, but it should be noted that Lyon articulates a particular definition of the paradox as “indicating a set of radical claims about women that challenge traditional beliefs and doxa” rather than “an irresolvable proposition” (154). Lyon examines four particular paradoxes: the tension between old and new ideas (exemplified by competing interpretations over time of the First Amendment and free speech), the tension between the normativity of rights and the inherent (de)limitations of those norms, the chicken-or-egg dilemma regarding the political origins of rights as they relate to the formation of the citizen, and finally, the irresolvable tension between language as describing rights and constituting them as such. The chapter examines these paradoxes through a detailed reading of deliberation surrounding the First Amendment, suggesting that Susan B. Anthony's illegal performance of citizenship and the Seneca Falls Convention's rewriting of the Declaration of Independence, like al-Obeidi's testimony and Rigoberta Menchú's testimonio, are infelicitous performances that serve to negotiate and expand what was and is considered normative and thus expand the notion of “what it means to embody citizenship and rights” (172). Lyon ends her book by reiterating the performative, and nature of to the conversation surrounding rights discourse is in that she articulates how deliberation over human rights can potentially a subject of rights. In the Lyon to articulate a definition of rights, and thus a subject of rights, that is and are seen as relationships through speech acts and with the of being and situated they are as of in conversations among and out in or which them as and as through based and deliberation, and in However, seems to be a tension throughout the book on the one an of rights in their or discursive as an by a set of normative conventions and that and constantly on the an of them as political and by the critique are U.S. and the of rights are whom they have never seen” particularly in her that “performative deliberation must extend the concept of recognition from one of people visible to one of the it have understand recognition as a of being and rather than one of and or However, on recognition rather than persuasion and hegemonic discursive structures through “a agency in the present moment of seems to that all are at the and that all are as and studies has it is those who are not recognized as who rights the In other the is only human when she or is as a the Lyon this problem in chapter when she articulates the paradox of rights as the chicken-or-egg of what citizen who advocates for rights or the rights to the citizen as such. In Lyon's in chapter that al-Obeidi's to the of the violation from the individual to from the to the of the is also an analysis of the rhetoric of rights However, it could be interesting to on Lyon's by more deeply if this the norms of testimony the that the reason al-Obeidi was able to her claim and her testimony as a of rape was because she has a and had an audience the Western who both and that testimony and of it as a If the Western media had not been to the al-Obeidi's rape, and have as In other it is more through which normative cultural Libyan or al-Obeidi's speech is 4, does a account of the and problems of recognition, as in it Lyon offers a particularly reading of the norms surrounding Menchú's testimony and her of lies for political within the normative discourse of her useful critique of a an titled “The and many media in chapter Lyon out the ways in which the popular media representations of women not facilitate an space where may and initiate This chapter's critique of the popular representation across of missing women is to further Lyon's theories of performative deliberation in specific it the media for missing women and a rather view of the of U.S. Additionally, how Lyon's critique of the and other U.S. media as to a of engaged who can then in deliberation are by the on in China the one-child to to that will then to including the U.S. and the Chinese in the world of media and or what she of the recent turn to literature by human rights her that “storytelling becomes a means of recognition, but not of political action” tension between the notion of normative rights as subject and the notion of rights as a set of that to be by a Western “we” lies at the of Lyon's but does not from her theoretical notion of performative deliberation as constitutive of human rights In fact, Lyon's reading of identification and the theoretical of deliberation, particularly in the first chapter, are very useful for scholars at the of human rights discourse and rhetorical particularly those scholars interested in of global transnational rhetorics, and deliberative democracy. If rights are and made normative by narratives, whether or Lyon's examination of deliberation provides a for the of reading across reading that is potentially subject Although the first of the book is theoretical and can across as from the of rights discourse and from the of rights claims example, what does it of of rights violations to suggest that they the possibility of a relationship with their or of Lyon's critique of the discourse of deliberation as persuasion and her of performative deliberation across difference is within more practical discourses in the second of the Lyon's critique of deliberation in human rights discourse, particularly her from identification as a in persuasion across is and should be a foundational one for those of in rights discourse because it to the very on which rights claims, particularly within like the have been In one of the more of the in chapter 4, Lyon Judith in claiming that one does not as a subject of recognition, to the and to be one must or the of that telling the is also problematic if it does not recognize as For scholars in human rights discourse to expand the notions of what is this is useful as we and critique that may or may or may not or may not be recognized as or existing normative of what human rights, rights narratives, rights claims, and of rights.
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Using Translation to Drive Conceptual Development for Students Becoming Literate in English as an Additional Language ↗
Abstract
Literacy research has not yet revealed how bilingual learners develop coherent and robust theories of language. Translation, however, provides emergent bilinguals (EL students) with opportunities to develop metalinguistic awareness, which can lead to a more complete conceptual framework for thinking about language and literacy. This preliminary research study sought to formulate an instructional approach (TRANSLATE: Teaching Reading and New Strategic Language Approaches to English learners) focused on using translation to ultimately improve ELL students’ reading comprehension. Using design research methods and qualitative analytical techniques, researchers asked middle school students described as struggling readers to work collaboratively and use various strategies to translate key excerpts from their required English literature curriculum into Spanish. Analysis of students’ statements, decision making, and interaction indicated that students’ conceptual understandings about language played an important role in their learning. Students reflected on the nature of vocabulary, syntax, and the ways that different languages communicate ideas. These findings extend conversations in literacy studies concerning the unique affordances of bilingualism to increase metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness, known contributors to higher levels of reading comprehension.
March 2014
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Abstract
204 RHETORICA on the value for the human sciences of "contested concepts" and the endless debate which must go on around them. This collection provides models of different ways of studying the fas cinating parallelism between medicine and rhetoric. It shows how rhetorical knowledge can enhance our understanding of early modern medical and health-related works and it offers engaging readings of some very interesting little-known texts. Peter Mack Warburg Institute, London Patricia Pender, Early Modern Women's Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty (Early Modern Literature in History, eds. Cedric C. Brown and Andrew Hadfield), New York: Palgrave/MacMillan, 2012. 218 pp., ISBN: 978-0-230-36224-6 In Early Modern Women's Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty, Patricia Pender argues that the modesty topos frequent in early modern English women's works should not be read literally, but as "the very mark of liter ariness" and "early modern women's subtle and strategic self-fashioning" (3). In the introduction, Pender surveys earlier feminist criticism on modesty topoi that used this material to explain women's lower rate of publication, and argues that these critics have read the passages too literally, and, as a consequence, that we continue "to underrate [early modern women's] con siderable rhetorical ability and agency" (6). Pender's study reviews the use of modesty topoi in prefaces and writings by English authors Anne Askew, Katherine Parr, Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer, and Anne Bradstreet, and also examines what Pender sees as a general tendency "to read women's modesty tropes autobiographically" (7). Chapter 1 surveys advice for the deployment of modesty topoi in classi cal and Renaissance rhetorics: Cicero, Quintilian, Ad Herennium, Castiglione, George Puttenham, Abraham Fraunce, and John Hoskins. Especially helpful is the summary (pp. 22-24) of the flexible and varied forms of this rhetorical strategy: disavowal of authorship, remorse, belittling the achievement, lack of time for writing, writing only at the behest of another, role of compiler not author, apology citing utility of the subject, and, in general, writers' discounting of their abilities. Pender links the use of the modesty topos to early modern understanding of figures as "dissimulation" (borrowing from Puttenham) and early modern anxiety about "women's innate duplicity" (34). Pender, whose background is English literature not history of rhetoric, convincingly argues that for women, as well as for men, avowing modesty is often not an apology, but rather a display of rhetorical proficiency. In Chapter 2 Pender quite brilliantly uses John Bale's editing of Anne Askew s Examinations as an example of the emphasis on "collaborative co- Reviews 205 authorship (al) in the early modern history of the book. However, in stead of seeing Bale as supporting Askew's purpose, Pender searches for those places where Askew's words "exceed the frame that Bale provides for them, finding that Askew offers a "profoundly confident and combative self-representation under the guise of weak and humble woman" (49). This conclusion is not news in Askew criticism, although reading Askew through the rhetoric of modesty is innovative and helpful. It is disappointing that Pender did not follow through, though, on her initial observation. For ex ample, she argues that Bale misunderstands Askew's rhetoric of modesty (complimenting judges, humble submission, quoting authority) to circum vent her accusers (60-61), that Bale himself is misled by Askew's modesty into reading her as a weak woman made strong by God's grace (59-60): "[wjhan she semed most feble, than was she most stronge. And gladly she rejoiced in that weaknesse, that Christ's power myght strongelye dwell in her" (61). Here is a missed opportunity to argue, instead, for collaborative coathorship, to see that Bale does understand Askew, recognizing her wily use of Paul's celebration of the weak and foolish made strong and wise by Christ (1 Corinthians 1:27—a celebration that Erasmus had famously deployed in The Praise of Folly). In Chapter 3, Pender suggests that focusing on modesty rhetoric in Katherine Parr's Prayers or Medytacions refines "our understanding of her development of a degendered, generically-human speaking subject" (72). But, suggests Pender, although Parr does not apologize for her sex, substi tuting the...
January 2014
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The Complete Prose Works of John Milton ed. By Don M. Wolfe, and: Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition by Raphael Lyne, and: Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England by Jenny C. Mann, and: Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion by Lynn Enterline, and: Rome and Rhetoric: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar by Garry Wills ↗
Abstract
Reviews 91 my own undergraduate teaching, especially Pallister's idea that there are master tropes for heaven, hell, and paradise and Shore's denial that Milton engages in iconoclasm, and I have recommended the full texts to my graduate students. Historians of rhetoric at any institution that regularly teaches Milton or his period would do well to order copies for their libraries and also to consider acquiring copies for themselves. Jameela Lares The University of Southern Mississippi The Complete Prose Works ofJohn Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-82); Raphael Lyne, Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 267 pp. ISBN 978-1-107-00747-5; Jenny C. Mann, Outlaw Rhetoric: Fig uring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare's England, Ithaca and Lon don: Cornell University Press, 2012. 249 pp. ISBN 978-0-8014-4965-9; Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare's Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. 202 pp. ISBN 978-0-8122-4378-9; Garry Wills, Rome and Rhetoric: Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011.186 pp. ISBN 978-0-300-15218-0 Once upon a time (or so the story goes), the study of language and rhetoric in Shakespeare and Renaissance literature was dominated by con siderations of style, and style meant especially figurative language. Since then, a generation or two of critics including Joel Altman, Marion Trousdale, Thomas Sloane, Wayne Rebhorn, Frank Whigham, Victoria Kahn, Lorna Hut son, Peter Mack, and Lynne Magnusson have shown the importance for early modern literature and culture of a richer conception of rhetoric, one which understands rhetoric as a vital contributor to a wide range of intellectual, political, and social processes and agendas. In view of this work, one could be forgiven for suspecting that the prominence of figuration in the latest crop of books on rhetoric and the literature of Shakespeare's England means that literary criticism is doing the time warp again. As we will see, however, this is not quite your grandparents' rhetorical criticism, though the intervening years have changed less than one might have expected. The first of the four books under review here, Raphael Lyne's Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition argues that rhetoric in Shakespeare is a means not only of presentation and persuasion but also of thought. By "rhetoric" Lyne means primarily tropes, or figures of thought. He grounds this argument in recent research in cognitive linguistics, which probes the relationship between language (especially metaphor) and cognitive processes in the brain, and he devotes a chapter to surveying both this work and a wide range 92 RHETORICA of studies that find similar links between rhetoric, literature, and thought. Another chapter argues that early modern rhetoric manuals implicitly tie tropes such as metaphor and synecdoche to mental processes and thus constitute a "proleptic cognitive science" (50). Lyne then illustrates his thesis in chapters on A Midsummer Night's Dream, Qymbeline, Othello, and the Sonnets, concentrating on the thought patterns found in ornate speeches delivered at stressful moments. He reads Dream as a study of how metaphor works, showing the different ways that characters and groups in the play try to make sense of their experience: "Characters think differently and therefore they speak differently" (129). His study of Cymbeline shows how its characters, faced with "secrets, revelations, and impossibilities," "struggle to find the tropes by which to understand their world" (158). Othello depicts a world debased by Iago's ability to transfer his "twisted cognitive patterns" (186) to others, causing "a kind of heuristic short-circuit, where rhetoric becomes self-fulfilling and inward-looking" (163). The Sonnets show that thought can happen outside dramatic characters, while confirming that rhetoric can bring "heuristic failure" (209) as well as success. As this summary suggests, I don't find a distinctive thesis about Shake spearean thought in this book, and in noting the many critics and rhetoricians who have connected literature and rhetoric to thought Lyne undercuts his claim to originality. Possibly Lyne means his contribution to lie less in his conclusions than in his method, for he begins the Dream chapter by claiming to have found "a different way of reading some...
April 2013
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Abstract
By incorporating the eleventh-century colloquies of Benedictine monk Ælfric Bata into first-semester British Literature survey courses, instructors can efficiently and entertainingly confront and complicate many of the preconceived and reductive views of the medieval period that students often possess (and that canonical texts can unwittingly reinforce).
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Abstract
The author discusses a Middle English literature course she centered on the array of noncanonical texts in one fifteenth-century manuscript, Ashmole 61. In reading only noncanonical texts, students acquired a broader understanding and experience of what Middle English literature is, while expanding their sense of the methods and purposes of literary research.
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Abstract
Recent scholarship has emphasized the multilingualism of the medieval British Isles, but this has yet to translate into a fully integrated teaching practice free of anachronisms or stereotypes, particularly in the treatment of Irish and Welsh literature. This article suggests both theoretical and practical responses to this situation. Appendices offer specific guidance for teaching the Celtic-language texts now in the major anthologies of English and British literature.
March 2013
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Abstract
This essay presents various perspectives about honors work among first- and second-year students as they proposed and completed independent, open-ended projects in BritishLiterature— I and British Literature— II.
January 2013
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A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution by Carolyn Eastman, and: Enemyship: Democracy and Counter-Revolution in the Early Republic by Jeremy Engels, and: Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic by Sandra M. Gustafson, and: Founding Fictions by Jennifer R. Mercieca ↗
Abstract
Reviews 113 to emergent communities, heretical selves: mystics or Ranters, for instance. Instead, lapses into heretical selfhood are signaled by the emergence of affect, which requires subvention by the inarticulate, as if emotions had to wait for the inchoate in order to appear. For example, as both character and play, Hamlet "foregrounds" the inarticulate as a "cultural construct," as a "means by which 'feeling' could surface," and as a principle of inter-subjective vulnerability (176). Perceiving this counterintuitive pulsion at work, seeing the inarticulate in a "more positive light," requires an exploration of a Tudor "aesthetics of feeling," Mazzio contends (180). Nowhere does she offer such an aesthetics. Rather, she relies on contemporary literary theory for many of her historical arguments, and readers are frequently directed to Eve Sedgwick or Lacan, Jean-Luc Nancy or Hegel in lieu of evidence from the period. Yet The Inarticulate Renaissance succeeds: Mazzio focuses our attention on the suitability of English for worship and ceremony, scripture and poetry, on the fortunes of theatrical mumbling and print polemic, on audiences as 'assemblies,' above all on what Tomkis in Lingua calls a "tunes without sense, words inarticulate." However, in some ways, Mazzio's inquiry is reminiscent of the decline of rhetorical engagement late in the period she studies, of the ways in which past thinkers distrusted rhetoric as a guide to both speech and practice, of the ways oratio was emptied of ratio. In this ambitious, learned work, Mazzio is equally wary: a focus on the inarticulate is symptomatic of distrust. But it also signs a trend in contemporary scholarship. Boredom, ennui, anxiety, and now the inarticulate are experiencing a renaissance, in part because current perceptions of (early) modernity are conditioned by its failures, by its perils not its promises. One promise was transparency—of both method and communication—and 'words inarticulate' court opacity. But as 'feeling' rather than 'telling,' as a rhetoric that develops and refines a deepening commitment to pathos, inarticulation necessarily assumes the eloquence of the age. Stephen Pender University of Windsor Carolyn Eastman, A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. xi + 290 pp. ISBN 978-0-226-18019-9 Jeremy Engels, Enemyship: Democracy and Counter-Revolution in the Early Republic. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010. xi + 316 pp. ISBN 9780087013980-2 114 RHETORICA Sandra M. Gustafson, Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. x + 271 pp. ISBN 978-0-226-31129-6 Jennifer R. Mercieca, Founding Fictions. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010. xi + 274 pp. ISBN 978-0-8173-1690-7 In 1690, as the Enlightenment was just glimmering on the English hori zon, John Locke calumniated rhetoric (Essay Concerning Human Understand ing III.10). In 1790, as the Enlightenment's dusk settled over Koenigsberg, Immanuel Kant similarly decried the art (Critique of Pure Judgment 1.53). Though a century and a continent apart, they expressed a common disdain for rhetoric. Notably absent from this account are the American continents. Recent scholarship, however, finds that the American Enlightenment yielded a wealth of innovative rhetorical practice, placing public argument at the heart (or rather in the agora) of healthy democracy. Brian Garsten's Saving Persuasion (2009) exemplifies a now common effort to catalogue the British and European hostility to rhetoric while lauding United States thinkers, such as James Madison, who celebrated free public debate. If the Euro pean Enlightenment philosophically counseled, sapere aude, then the Amer ican Enlightenment pragmatically retorted disputare aude. Four recent books, two by historians and two by rhetoricians, more fully chronicle this prac tical response to the philosophical penchant, a rhetorical contrast with the philosophes' critical Enlightenment. Sandra Gustafson's Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early Amer ican Republic charts the course of U.S. "deliberative democracy," which "emphasizefs] the political power of language and advancejs] a commit ment to dialogue and persuasion as the best means to resolve conflicts and forge a progressive tradition" (220). She highlights dueling conciliatory and prophetic traditions of public address. The conciliatory tradition dominated the United States circa 1815-1835. Paying particular attention to political and pulpit oratory, Gustafson contrasts the Hellenistic William...
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Abstract
The essay describes a pedagogical approach to the rich poetic ground of the Commedia through a sustained artistic effort on the part of the students. In daily class preparation, students craft small-book “reflectories” that combine analytical interpretation with artwork and Danteinspired poetry, whether the students’ own or authored by others. Joining a tradition of “conversations with Dante” that began, in English literature, with Chaucer, students develop creative abilities and attitudes through reflection upon and disciplined participation in the creative process. Course assignments and discussion methods foreground the mutually reinforcing integration of creativity and analytical precision.
November 2012
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Abstract
Book Review| November 01 2012 Review: Chiastic Designs in English Literature from Sidney to Shakespeare, by William E. Engel William E. Engel, Chiastic Designs in English Literature from Sidney to Shakespeare, (Burlington, Ashgate Publishing, 2009), 158 pp. ISBN: 9780754666363 Rhetorica (2012) 30 (4): 448–450. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2012.30.4.448 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Review: Chiastic Designs in English Literature from Sidney to Shakespeare, by William E. Engel. Rhetorica 1 November 2012; 30 (4): 448–450. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2012.30.4.448 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. © 2012 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
September 2012
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Abstract
448 RHETORICA William E. Engel, Chiastic Designs in English Literaturefrom Sidney to Shakespeare, (Burlington, Ashgate Publishing, 2009), 158 pp. ISBN: 9780754666363 In his two previous books, Mapping Mortality (1995) and Death and Drama (2002), William Engel explored the role of memory and mnemonics in Renaissance literature. Chiastic Designs in English Literature from Sidney to Shakespeare is an extension of Engel's previous interests, but his project for this study focuses on +he "meaning underlying and motivating the persistence and transformations of chiasmus in the Renaissance" (12). Engel extends chiasmus beyond the classic crossing rhetorical structure and uses the category of "chiastic design" to talk about moments of echoing and doubling in the larger structural design of renaissance texts. In shifting the scale of chiasmus to consider the larger patterning of textual features Engel pushes the parameters of chiasmus as a rhetorical device to consider it as a larger rhetorical strategy. Engel argues that these larger chiastic patterns can be read as a technique for creating a type of intratextual reflexivity, or echoing about the action of the text, as well as prompting the reader to be reflective about their own experience encountering the text. In his second chapter Engel explores how situating mythical figures can be an example of chiastic design. One of the strongest offerings in this chapter is Engel's unpacking the figure of David within renaissance "allegorical imagination". Engel's intervention directs us to interrogate in novel ways the figure as not merely a reference, but rather a whole system of doubled meanings and crossings that are tied to David's struggles with his own imperfect humanity and sense of justice. The effect of these doubled inflections of idealized justice and human frailty prompt, according to Engel, nuanced philosophical reflection. This is achieved textually through points of conflict and consilience repeatedly being re-situated in relation to one another through echoes, crossings, and mirroring. To ground this assertion Engel offers a sustained treatment of the figure of David in Quarles's Divine Fancies as an illustration of a "poetics of interiority" that is based on moments that prompt the reader to look back on the action of the poem cycle. The effect of this doubling back is a layering of the situated complexity of David's experiences, both past and current to the action of the poem. The chiastic doubling of David's progress within the poem directly ties to the ars memorativa where mnemonics, like chiasmus, prompt the reflection necessary to create the connections between experience and knowledge. Engel also claims that the reader has a parallel meditative journey that is directly linked to the recursive consideration of the poem's action. In effect both David and the reader are guided through a reflexive understanding of justice, and their own fallibility, through Quarles's larger structural use of chiasmus. Engel dedicated the next chapter to the role of chiasmus in Sidney's Arcadia. By focusing on Sidney's use of architectonic chiasmus Engel aims to support his assertion that Sidney, and renaissance literacy circles more broadly, considered the symbolic to be explicitly connected to the principles Reviews 449 of ars memorativa. With this in mind, Engel aims to demonstrate that in Sid ney's poem chiasmus is technique that creates an ethos of loss and absence. In shifting his critical agenda regarding chiasmus away from reflective en gagement and towards the rhetorical processes of scaffolding an affective memory, Engel demonstrates the dexterity of chasimic design to achieve different rhetorical ends. Engel's treatment of Sidney's Arcadia traces out the poem's mnemonic framework and argues that Sidney's choice to restructure the poem was an authorial re-direction to structurally highlight an ethos of pervasive loss and searching that undergird the plot. Chiasmus in this context crosses back to demonstrate a perpetual lack or uncertainty, rather than the accretion of experience or knowledge as seen in Quarles. Engel argues that Sidney strategically created "echoes" between the eclogues and the main narrative to underscore the sense of searching that not only sup ports the hunt for love that the characters on all levels of the narrative are experiencing, but also prompts the reader to become psychologically...
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Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought. Cambridge: Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature by Christopher D. Johnson ↗
Abstract
Reviews 439 century (p. 517). Can we also conclude that classical early modern philos ophy did contain a (hidden) philosophy or philosophies of rhetoric in the sense of attempts to justify rhetoric? This question is important, especially with respect to Descartes and Spinoza. The answer must be negative. The results clearly show that rhetoric does not contribute to the meaning of signs in the work of these authors. Only Bacon, who grew up under nearly ideal circumstances with respect to humanist education and rhetoric, arrives at something like a philosophical theory of rhetoric. To a much lesser extend, this can still be said with respect to Hobbes, who is much more than Bacon a critic of rhetoric, but still in search of an new rhetoric. In Descartes and Spinoza we still find rhetorical education and many reflections on rhetoric (it is one of the great merits of this book to have shown this). At the same time they were convinced that rhetoric constrains the expressive power of language. The conclusion must be that the way the early modern thinkers distinguish between res and verbiuu prevents them from providing a pow erful theory of meaning which is the cornerstone of a philosophy of rhetoric. Not a prejudice against rhetoric, but the idea that language only provides a deficient expression of thought proves to be inconsistent with the very idea of a philosophy of rhetoric. In Descartes and Spinoza these effects are enforced by the rationalist assumption that thought is a sphere of reality to which the mind has access independently of linguistic expressions. This book thus proves to be a strong contribution to the literature. Rothkamm enables us to see the real limitations of early modern rationalism with respect to rhetoric much clearer than before. Temilo van Zantwijk Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena Christopher D. Johnson, Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought. Cambridge: Harvard Studies in Comparative Lit erature, 2010. 695 pp. ISBN: 9780674053335 According to Christopher Johnson the hyperbole is the "most infamous of tropes, whose name most literary criticism does not praise, and whose existence the history of philosophy largely ignores" (1). As a result of this neglect "no full-scale defense has been made of the Baroque's most Baroque figure. This book aims to remedy that lack" (16). And what a remedy it is. To say that this is a study on a grand scale is certainly not hyperbolic. In nearly 700 pages Johnson "moves from the history of rhetoric to the extravagances of lyric and then through the impossibilities of drama and the aporias of philosophy" (521). The grand scope of Hyperboles is made necessary by the protean role of hyperbole in discourse: "as a discursive figure integral to the success of classical and Renaissance epic, Shakespearian tragedy, Pascalian apology, as 440 RHETORICA well as the viability of the Cartesian method, it can be narrative, dialogic, or structural" (8). Thus hyperbole is no mere figure of speech but rather, says Johnson, following the lead of Kenneth Burke, it is "a 'master trope,' one that vies with metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony for our attention (3). Indeed, Burke's approach to the four "master tropes" in A Grammar of Motives might serve as a preview of Johnson's method in Hyperboles. Say Burke: "my primary concern with them here will not be with their purely figurative usage, but with their role in the discovery and description of 'the truth.' It is an evanescent moment that we shall deal with—for not only does the dividing line between tne figurative and the literal usages shift, but also the four trope shift into one another" (Grammar ofMotives, 503). The hyperbole, now rechristened a "master trope" supersedes the merely figurative. It is more than a stylistic device, so much more that at times it is difficult to say what a hyperbole is—or what it is not. It is a figurative element, to be sure, but hyperbole is also an argumentative tech nique, an inventional device, a philosophical critique, and ultimately a world view. In establishing the hyperbole a "master trope" Johnson begins with an examination of the place of hyperbole in the rhetorical theory of Aristotle...
April 2012
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Abstract
This article argues that teaching Asian American literature should include immeasurable and nontangible factors that accompany racial grief, such as cultural betrayal, the trauma of belonging interstitially, and the sensation of displacement. I propose that these be introduced via a gothic motif, such as the double, haunting, and possession by ghosts. Such motifs have the advantage of familiarity (or, if not, are quite easy to explain) and being psychoanalytically informed.
March 2012
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Abstract
The concurrent publication of The History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History—a collection of essays published over the span of three decades (1980–2005)—and Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity makes available and defines Nancy Struever's ongoing revision of the history of rhetoric and pioneering understanding of rhetoric as a mode of inquiry. In Struever's own idiom, the all-inclusive “thickness” of rhetorical inquiry—as opposed to the discriminating “thinness” of philosophy—requires some concern for a thinker's intellectual career. Indeed, taken together, the two books allow for a useful, incremental gloss of the later Struever by the earlier and vice versa. Struever authorizes this continuity in her introduction to History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, linking the last essay in her collection, on Hobbes and Vico, to the more sustained analysis of the two thinkers provided in her most recent monograph. As a whole, Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity aims at illustrating “rhetoric's renewed task: the critique of philosophy's unfortunate affinities for necessity, thus determinism, that weakens, damages political thinking” (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, xix). Despite this adversarial claim—and her firm awareness of the perennial quality of the quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy—Struever calls for an inside job: a rescue mission intended to liberate rhetoric by authentic rhetorical means. Among them, certainly, is a renewed intimacy between theory and practice, the “theory as practice” that Struever has called for in another work.1Struever's commitment to rhetoric as inquiry makes her wary of the academic “culture wars” that defined the linguistic turn of the late twentieth century (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, ix). One of the most fascinating aspects of Struever's career, as it emerges from these pages, is her ability to distinguish herself or, as she would prefer, to “secede” from an intellectual world whose proclivity for language hardly translated into a historical and thus profound understanding and practice of rhetoric as an investigative mode. “It is one thing to take a ‘linguistic turn’ and proclaim language as the core of politics,” Struever claims, but “it is another to proclaim the political core of language, for this generates a list of useful investigative priorities” (Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, 91).In her quest for appropriate boundaries, Struever argues against the “dysfunctional colonization of rhetoric by literary criticism,” whose adherence to Cartesian philosophy compels us to interpret metaphor “as primarily cognitive; that is, as an introspective act of a Cartesian consciousness in an isolate realm of concepts” (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, 1:73).2 This approach is particularly detrimental to the field of intellectual history, where the reduction of rhetoric to poetics, or worse, to a “poetic epistemology” (Paul De Man, Hayden White, etc.), leads to a self-referential focus “on texts, on products, not the events of process” (2:67). Even a “philosopher's rhetoric” such as Ernesto Grassi's, in Struever's view, remains bogged down by external “definitions” and “judgments” that often turn rhetoric into just “a techne, with some epistemic pretensions and an easy relation to theoretical axioms” (1:70). Rhetorical pragmatism should forbid “professional interference,” appeals to “empty formal relations” or to “the essentialist premises of the logical categories.” According to Struever, rather, what we need is a “rhetorician's rhetoric” devoted to restoring the discipline to its civil domain through an “account of the rhetorical premises and procedures investing specific historical initiatives and their reception” (75).So much for the pars destruens of this venture. One could argue that Struever emerges unscathed from what she views as the “fractured status of contemporary rhetorical theory” by paying heed to Vico's educational ideal. Struever's inclusive humanistic education gives her scholarship a fine edge: an equal mastery of the tools and concerns of Renaissance scholarship, intellectual history, political theory, and ancient as well as modern philosophy. More to the point, Struever shows that actual knowledge of Renaissance thought and practices can revise our fascination for Continental philosophy and protect against the pitfalls of contemporary theory's misplaced prejudice against the beginnings of modernity. A sympathetic reader of her work is bound to view the Renaissance and early modernity with the same new eyes Heidegger's unique approach to Greek antiquity afforded his students in the study of Plato and Aristotle. However, it would barely suffice to claim that Struever allows for an uncommon experience of the postmodern moment. Rather, her work thoroughly and successfully rewrites the future agenda of intellectual history and rhetorical inquiry.Struever fondly acknowledges the intellectual debts incurred to C. S. Pierce and Heidegger, from whose works she extrapolates insights that form her notions of “inquiry” and “rhetoric.” Pierce's antinecessitarian pragmatism defines the communal and temporal “constraints” of the logic of inquiry for our epoch: thought creates communal beliefs, which in turn tend to the establishment of “habits of action,” including inquiry. These premises “resonate with rhetoric's topical concerns: its engagement with a community's belief, shared opinions (endoxa) and with rhetoric's inveterate habits of activity, persuasion, as practice and goal” (Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, 2–3). Working at a “supraindividualist” level, Pierce restores epistemology's dependence on community, the too often forsaken “locus of investigative action.” Inquiry is pragmatic: its subtilitas applicandi prevails over the correlated subtleties in knowing and interpreting (see History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, 3:217–20).As for Heidegger, rhetoricians may yet learn how much they owe him. The neglected summer semester lectures of 1924 (Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie) remain, “arguably, the best twentieth-century reading of Aristotle's Rhetoric” (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, 6:127). These lectures offer an “extraordinary opportunity” for those willing to share in Heidegger's recovery of the unity of “discourse” (Miteinanderreden) and “political life” (Miteinandersein) according to the originary Hellenic initiative: the “authentic life” as “political life” (106). Among the moderns, only the early Heidegger allows rhetoric to reside squarely “inside politics.” The consequences of this recovery are momentous: Heidegger aids in bypassing the “inauthentic” Platonic definition of rhetoric as a trivial art and rescues this mode of inquiry from its own “bookish retreat” as an academic discipline divested of a “precise sense of duty to action” (Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, 133). In hindsight, one cannot but regret that Heidegger's interest in rhetoric was short lived and gave way to poetic concerns akin to those of the literary critics (to say nothing, of course, of his nefarious political allegiance).By endorsing Heidegger's prominence in “modern revivals of rhetoric” and assimilating his interpretation, Struever takes pride of place in the now long and crowded history of his reception. Yet she sits askew with respect to many other like-minded students. Like those of, for example, Gadamer or Grassi, her reading of Heidegger resonates with Vico, rhetoric, humanism, and the Italian Renaissance and early modernity. Unlike them, however, Struever does not ground her sought-for reconciliation of Heideggerianism and Romanitas in a refutation of Heidegger's anti-Platonism. Indeed, Plato seems to hold no interest for Struever.Confident of Heidegger's restoration of rhetoric to its proper domain (in the civil operations of political life), Struever embarks on an actualization of its nature as inquiry. Despite its co-originality with philosophy (for some, like Heidegger, rhetoric even takes chronological precedence) and Struever's internalist ambitions, rhetoric's vital fear of solitude asks that this discipline be defined, at least preliminarily, in confrontation. In other words, rhetoric's quarrel with philosophy is both inescapable and generative, if only the true nature of such opposition is revealed as neither a “contest of faculties” nor as an “academic rivalry” but rather as a vivifying “confrontation of two major investigative initiatives,” each characterized by its own modal allegiance: “necessity” for philosophy and “possibility” for rhetoric. Struever promotes rhetorical inquiry's kairotic infiltration and colonization of that breathing space left open by Aristotle “between partial and complete actualization,” the space of “unrealized possibilities” (Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, 6).Released into its element, rhetoric's “modal proclivity” and “revisionary capacities” are given full rein to create “counterfactual narratives of the past used as unrealized possibilities to illumine a still inadequately defined past, as well as to project future policy” (125). While this task may seem daunting, Struever's point is that it should not appear impossible. The rhetorical inquirer is not asked to rewrite history from scratch but rather to reveal “what might have been otherwise,” to indulge in exploring the “possible worlds” that open up by placing “actuality in a range of possibilities” (6). If we persist, past, present, and future may look different though strangely familiar: “The modal interest perhaps replicates defamiliarization as a critical gesture” (127).In conclusion to Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, Struever poses a pertinent question: “Where do we begin our tactics of rephrasing?” As a matter of fact, once a three-dimensional view of “possibility” is conquered and inhabited, the “where” and “when”—temporal and spatial coordinates—matter less than the “how”: that is, the appropriate attitude and strategy. In this context, the formation of strong alliances becomes of paramount importance. Thus Struever's admiration for Hobbes and Vico, who, although rarely as officially and tightly allied as in her reading, team up against political theory's dependence on the universal moral truths generated in timeless solitude by Greek philosophy. As both “topics” and “practitioners” of rhetorical inquiry, Hobbes and Vico have a lesson to teach in academic disobedience that could promote the overhaul of a political philosophy that to this day remains “fraught with fashion” and “susceptible to the quick exchange of deadening theoretical conformities” (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, 19:80). “Politics demands novelty,” and Hobbes and Vico put their rhetorical “inventiveness” to the service of a “life science” that contests the “philosophical confections of ‘oughts’” (76). In this reading, the “early modernity” of Hobbes and Vico comes closer than some of these pages would suggest to the “Renaissance” of their best humanist predecessors: creative imitation, congenial alliances, and strategies of secession remain salient features of this subsequent alternative project.At the outset, the “case for the modernity of Early Modernity” rests on Hobbes's subtle appropriation of Aristotle, an appropriation that, in Struever's view, certainly glosses Heidegger's own. In this case, too, Struever's reading draws heavily on selected sources, including, the “generous frame for Renaissance inquiry” proffered by Wilhelm Dilthey's neglected Weltanschauung und Analyse. His merit is twofold. First, Dilthey manages to keep the “issues and tactics” proper to the history of rhetoric apart from those of the history of philosophy. Coming from Dilthey, the approach could only be sympathetic: humanists “are to be read as pyschologues and anthropologues” rather than as (failed) epistemologists and metaphysicians (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, 4:2). Moreover, it is to Dilthey's credit to have emphasized the Renaissance revival of Romanitas—that is, the mutually constraining relationship of individual and sovereign will (imperium).Hobbes's “roman orientation” and concern for the res publica endows his Ciceronian reading of Aristotle's Rhetoric with a pragmatic slant (Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, 12). Hobbes secedes by reaching over Cartesian dualism and appropriating the “Aristotelian continuum of faculties and actions” and “definition of the soul as principle (archē) of life”: “Soul is life” (13). The interaction and continuum of faculties (sensation, perception, imagination, passion, memory, and reason) inhibit a misguided distinction between “sensitive” and “cognitive” elements and “accommodate biology” in political life. “Nature as motion, as alteration,” restlessly seeks what it lacks: “If life, then motion, if motion, then passions, if passions, then differences, if differences, then politics” (22). The goal of rhetoric as “life science” should be to guarantee movement and endlessly postpone the end products of the “rational will.” The “therapeutic” freedom of open-ended deliberation, Struever claims, has greater value than the hit-or-miss liberty of action. This is how “Hobbes follows Aristotle … in the total politicisation of rhetoric” (17). In this frame, “rhetorical pessimism”—its concern for “process” not “end”—turns into a “competence” apt to produce “not so much a list of solutions” as “an ever-expanding account of the possibilities of multiple dysfunctions.” On this point, Struever is perhaps too unflustered in admitting that “the ambitions that try to assert complete consensus” are bound to be a casualty of this new rhetorical campaign (124).Struever's sophisticated reading of Hobbes cannot be fully recounted here. It is clear, however, that the author enjoys partaking in the rowdy liberation of rhetoric her work promotes. Rhetoric's liberation in politics focuses on the motus animi that “fuels political behavior” and “drives political action” in a creatio continua insisting on “complication” (24) and “fluidity” (33). Struever's decision to read early modernity under the rubric of Dilthey's “impetuous subjectivity”—as opposed, for example, to Burckhardt's stiff “individualism”—is a productive one. But should one allow things to spin out of control? Hobbes and Vico offer a solution not by transcending the political but by extending its purview to the community and its sensus communis. A more precise sense of civil “wholeness”—not to be mistaken for philosophical “plenitude”—can be recovered in Vico's commitment to the “impersonal.” In Struever's narrative, Vico delivers what Hobbes promises: “If Hobbes is critical, Vico is hypercritical of the moralistic initiative” (49).Struever notes that Vico declares his secession at the outset of the New Science with an emphasis on “civil things” (cose civili) rather than “moral” (morali). At once, the private moral inquiry of political philosophy is forsaken together with “narratives of personal decision and heroic interventions” (42). Vico's historiography opts for an “impersonal agency”—“Achilles,” for example, “is not a proper name but a possibility of role”—that “tempers, corrects individualism as our sense of Struever's reading of and its to as a gesture” may be her in community as the place where knowledge is and Moreover, emphasis on community corrects the and of philosophy and its political At a closer if “necessity” is our only we might our will to be tightly emphasis on on the and on up to but to the of beliefs, that the range of civil actions” However, if to and it by which to that same that rhetoric or In other words, space is to the that political philosophy out of be Hobbes in Vico and still it of their for they as unrealized possibilities in Modernity” establishment and of rhetoric's true nature as inquiry the recovery of an authentic However, Struever is that her has its a author with so much of rhetoric and politics with her Struever this in her of the “academic or investigative of the most rhetorical of (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, Vico's well as those of thinkers such as and and thus interest in inquiry only its practice” In other words, comes up against as the is to own possibilities” (Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, Struever may be these are not as or for yet how much should a like-minded reader from a creative of and practices of Struever would an of rhetorical initiatives as opposed to of a Struever's own she is more on this If her work is a to critical the of Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, a early modernity is with late modernity and the At this a of rhetorical in Hobbes and Struever on of and some affinities with Vico however, as as the of Indeed, is the only unrealized possibility in Struever's a casualty of a agenda that is a with on the of or, its of and the of rhetoric's “political the of Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, as a with to Struever in a fine of intended to up the emphasis on in inquiry and the nature of the philosophy a point that the of the and as and a shared a of Heidegger's is now closer at Struever her of “possibility” in contemporary inquiry with a of the best and most recent rhetorical initiatives in and much the is that a rhetoric in in our of and our solitude of and of like those of Hobbes and Vico, of their A revision is bound to an of its This is even if such a as in the of Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, is as a point in the of a and career. One that History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History is not more inclusive not of Struever's past As it is, it for how Struever's could be to of its as inquiry” is critical of or persuasion, and the The of an reader can be for of its with Struever's rhetoric study or in which to be are that her work will like a literary to those to the of what Struever calls a more defined concerns as a Renaissance still this of The Renaissance early she has been a in One would not to Struever's as a to that of the her work that the is to this its Yet we a are the Renaissance and early modernity or This is a in Struever's work her in of be Struever's recent for “early modernity” less to Hobbes's and Vico's historical than to her to place herself in res and historical The of early modernity certainly more unrealized than the of the In case, a less of the should be an those who, including Struever in her own are still in the of the to this point is Struever's in Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity with respect to another Yet the she calls for one can of that to which she her The continuity and of between the humanism, and Vico's early modernity to that Struever would be on a reader of Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity has not read of her other many essays in History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History the “Renaissance” of and some may Struever's to up to the to rhetoric's to It is true that this approach has more often than not to a and definition of rhetoric as a rather than different of be clear, it is not the of that one but rather the that is in the a that, with Struever's and Gadamer to this vital in from which Struever is as she is from by her of of rhetoric as inquiry shows what our discipline would look like if from matter how this may its and are bound to appear just as “therapeutic” as Struever to be in to the moral from the civil rather than the other way The of by Struever to one of the most contemporary in of both its civil and Struever shows that we can the past more lesson for the
November 2011
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Review: The Ancient Critic at Work. Terms and Concepts of Literary Criticism in Greek Scholia, by She René Nünlist ↗
Abstract
Book Review| November 01 2011 Review: The Ancient Critic at Work. Terms and Concepts of Literary Criticism in Greek Scholia, by She René Nünlist She René NünlistThe Ancient Critic at Work. Terms and Concepts of Literary Criticism in Greek Scholia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ix + 447 pp. ISBN 1107403049 Rhetorica (2011) 29 (4): 434–436. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2011.29.4.434 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 Review: The Ancient Critic at Work. Terms and Concepts of Literary Criticism in Greek Scholia, by She René Nünlist. Rhetorica 1 November 2011; 29 (4): 434–436. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2011.29.4.434 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. © 2011 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.