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1383 articlesFebruary 2000
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The Intended Public of Demetrius's On Style: The Place of the Treatise in the Hellenistic Educational System ↗
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Abstract: On Style, written by a certain Demetrius probably in the first century B.C., is an important witness to the rhetorical education of the third/second centuries B.C. It is a matter of long scholarly debate whether Demetrius intended his treatise to be a handbook of rhetoric or a work of literary criticism. Here it is argued that the public Demetrius writes his book for are pupils who have done the preliminary courses in rhetoric and have leamt to write progymnasmata. They now enter the final course on rhetoric and will compose the more difficult exercises, commonly termed declamationes.
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Abstract: Recent scholarship argues that Anglo-Saxon rhetorical strategies derive from an extended grammatical curriculum such as the praeexercitamina, an argument which complements the trend to rehabilitate our understanding of the Anglo-Saxons, from the romantic notion that they were bound to native conventions to one which recognizes their acquisition and application of Latin learning. This paper extends these arguments by seeking to show that elements of the progymnasmata, on which the praeexercitamina are based, seem to inform the invention and arrangement of material in the “Hunfer]) Episode” of Beowulf.
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Short Reviews: Plato's Sophist, by Martin Heidegger, Chaucer and the Trivium: The Mindsong of the Canterbury Tales, by J. Stephen Russell, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters, by Lynne Magnusson, “We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women, by Shirley Wilson Logan and Critiques of Knowing: Situated Textualities in Science, Computing, and the Arts, by Lynette Hunter ↗
Abstract
Research Article| February 01 2000 Short Reviews: Plato's Sophist, by Martin Heidegger, Chaucer and the Trivium: The Mindsong of the Canterbury Tales, by J. Stephen Russell, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters, by Lynne Magnusson, “We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women, by Shirley Wilson Logan and Critiques of Knowing: Situated Textualities in Science, Computing, and the Arts, by Lynette Hunter Martin Heidegger,Plato's Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and AndréSchuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), xxvii + 476 pp.J. Stephen Russell,Chaucer and the Trivium: The Mindsong of the Canterbury Tales (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), x + 266 pp.Lynne Magnusson,Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), x + 221 pp.Shirley Wilson Logan,“We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 255 pp.Lynette Hunter,Critiques of Knowing: Situated Textualities in Science, Computing, and the Arts (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), vi + 239 pp. Michael J. MacDonald, Michael J. MacDonald Department of English, The University of Illinois at Chicago, 601 South Morgan Street, Chicago, Illinois 60607-7120, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Anne Laskaya, Anne Laskaya Department of English, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon 97403, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Judith Rice Henderson, Judith Rice Henderson Department of English, University of Saskatchewan, 9 Campus Drive, Saskatoon SK S7N 5A5, Canada Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Jacqueline Jones Royster, Jacqueline Jones Royster Department of English, The Ohio State University, 421 Denney Hall, 164 West 17th Avenue, Columbus, Ohio 43202, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar C. Jan Swearingen C. Jan Swearingen Texas A & M University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2000) 18 (1): 103–117. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2000.18.1.103 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 Michael J. MacDonald, Anne Laskaya, Judith Rice Henderson, Jacqueline Jones Royster, C. Jan Swearingen; Short Reviews: Plato's Sophist, by Martin Heidegger, Chaucer and the Trivium: The Mindsong of the Canterbury Tales, by J. Stephen Russell, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters, by Lynne Magnusson, “We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women, by Shirley Wilson Logan and Critiques of Knowing: Situated Textualities in Science, Computing, and the Arts, by Lynette Hunter. Rhetorica 1 February 2000; 18 (1): 103–117. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2000.18.1.103 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. Copyright 2000, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric2000 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
January 2000
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Abstract
RHETORICA 106 J. Stephen Russell, Chaucer and the Trivium: The Mindsong of the Canterbury Tales (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), x + 266 pp. Although he acknowledges the veil of time hiding the exact nature and extent of Chaucer's education from us, J. Stephen Russell argues that the curriculum of late medieval grammar schools, the trivium (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric), thoroughly influenced and shaped die Canterbury Tales. Establishing his key assumptions early on, Russell claims that Chaucer usually relied on accessus, florilegia, and other scribally-mediated collections of classical and medieval authors rather than full texts, and consequently that Chaucer's citations of specific auctores, texts, and terms does not prove that he knew them well. Russell assumes the grammar school curriculum was Chaucer's only formal education and objects to some current, grander claims about Chaucer's knowledge of philosophy or theology. Chaucer, for example, "may have known Ralph Strode, but Strode did not teach Chaucer the Summa Logicae over dessert" (p. 8). Such claims raise questions about what limits we might want or need to place on Chaucer's capabilities, and they raise questions about how extensively we can argue for a culture's ability to write itself into individual texts. Russell does not, however, explore these issues; instead, he focuses on the trivium specifically and explores ways it shapes the Canterbury Tales. The primary value of his study is to reassert the crucial importance of medieval rhetoric and literacy studies for any reading of Chaucer. Russell provides an overview of the trivium in his first chapter, "A Medieval Education and Its Implications". Grounded in Latin grammar and readings, the curriculum taught children a "subliminal lesson that Latin was purity and precision, the vernacular chaos and compromise" (p. 11). Elements of the school curriculum that addressed dialectic or logic posited a basic model of human cognition: the agens intellectus "recognizes" objects perceived through the senses; the intellectus passivus "cogitates" on those objects. Students learned that a universal, "mental" language exists that is capable of perceiving truth but that our Reviews 107 language of actual communication in the world, "natural" language, is always inadequate and inferior to ideas. (Here some might object to Russell's simplifications of the models or to his use of more obscure semanticists like the Modistae.) In this chapter, Russell stresses the importance of the Tree of Porphyry, Aristotle's Categories, and supposition theory; together, these created taxonomies and produced particular kinds of thought patterns in students. Russell subsequently traces the influence of this curriculum on Chaucer's work, preferring to locate ré inscriptions rather than refusals of these models. In the General Prologue, Chaucer the pilgrim-narrator uses the Aristotle's ten categories as the groundwork for his observations. Beginning with a careful study of Chaucer's grammar, Russell develops a brilliant explication of the conceptual structure of the General Prologue: "each successive verbal act, each step in the dance of predication, involves the ubiquitous decision Quid est? and the answer to that question, Chaucer knew, is always a pas de deux between the object and the predicator, the other and the self" (p. 96). As the Chaucer the observant pilgrim "falls" into language, negotiating tensions between ideal human types and the rather motley crew before him, he cannot sustain Aristotelian formality. His own passions begin to show, and a "slippage" occurs "from natural and accidental supposition to confused determinate supposition, reflecting the narrator's fall from objectivity and reportorial responsibility" (p. 95). For Russell the Knight's Tale focuses on issues of definition, the Man of Law's Tale on "words as commerce, apostrophe (or right coinage) and...God's jurisdiction" (p. 137). The Clerk's Tale offers Russell the opportunity to explore metaphors (i.e., Walter as "the fallen creator", Griselda as a Christ-figure), rhetorical features of narrative, and the epilogue (where the Clerk explicates his own tale). For Russell, the tale is, finally, "an abstraction, a meditation on linguistic, logical, and theological arts that is almost", but not quite "abducted from complications of authorship" (p. 173). Russell does much to establish that the Canterbury Tales "explodes into life thanks to the lessons of grammar, rhetoric, and logic" (p. 202), although...
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George Campbell’s rhetorical theory is based upon a philosophical tradition that has ancient roots—common sense philosophy. Campbell’s interest in common sense emerged through his association with Scottish Enlightenment philosophers such as Thomas Reid. However, Campbell’s beliefs about the relationship between individual perception and social knowledge at the same time reveal a philosophical affinity with Aristotle and the Stoics. For Campbell, as for the ancients, common sense represents both the intuitive ability that individuals use in apprehending the reality of the external world and the shared human capacity to make necessary collective judgments. Although Campbell believes that there is objective truth that is apprehended through common sense, he at the same time perceives common sense as providing a foundation for making decisions about the contingent circumstances that people face from day to day. Campbell’s rhetoric has frequently been described as managerial, but his interest in common sense creates an epistemic function for rhetoric, as it provides the means for negotiating the principles of moral evidence in order to resolve the specific questions that arise in the life of the community.
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Recent scholarship argues that Anglo-Saxon rhetorical strategies derive from an extended grammatical curriculum such as the praeexercitamina, an argument which complements the trend to rehabilitate our understanding of the Anglo-Saxons, from the romantic notion that they were bound to native conventions to one which recognizes their acquisition and application of Latin learning. This paper extends these arguments by seeking to show that elements of the progymnasmata, on which the praeexercitamina are based, seem to inform the invention and arrangement of material in the “Hunferþ Episode” of Beowulf.
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The Intended Public of Demetrius’s On Style: The Place of the Treatise in the Hellenistic Educational System ↗
Abstract
On Style, written by a certain Demetrius probably in the first century B.C., is an important witness to the rhetorical education of the third/second centuries B.C. It is a matter of long scholarly debate whether Demetrius intended his treatise to be a handbook of rhetoric or a work of literary criticism. Here it is argued that the public Demetrius writes his book for are pupils who have done the preliminary courses in rhetoric and have learnt to write progymnasmata. They now enter the final course on rhetoric and will compose the more difficult exercises, commonly termed declamationes.
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RHETORICA 108 General Prologue and three serious tales. Much of the comedic and fantastic is left unexplored; indeed, he writes, "I hope others will extend the discussion...I have only initiated" (p. 212). Although Russell, at times, claims rather brashly to know what Chaucer thought or didn't think, what he read or didn't read without much qualification, the edginess of his prose provokes response. His work confidently negotiates contemporary Chaucerian scholarship, solidly convincing readers that the trivium can serve as an important lens through which we can read medieval literary texts. ANNE LASKAYA University of Oregon Lynne Magnusson, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), x + 221 pp. In Shakespeare and Social Dialogue, Lynne Magnusson accepts poststructural questioning of the unity and autonomy of the literary text and the independence of its "author" and characters but argues that this critique of formalism has unnecessarily dismissed close reading of language. She seeks to restore it by applying concepts from discourse analysis to a comparison of Renaissance correspondence and Shakespeare's dialogue. Her assumption that letters and plays come close to recording actual conversation seems a little naive, and I am not always sure whether her goal is to recover Elizabethan speech or to illuminate Shakespeare, but she largely achieves both. In place of the Aristotelian categories applied to Elizabethan letters by Frank Whigham, she builds on theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and Pierre Bourdieu, and especially the empirical research of cultural anthropologists Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson. Their model describes attempts to manage risk and save face in conversation through strategies of positive politeness (identifying participants) and negative politeness (dissociating them) that take into account their social Reviews 109 distance, their relative power, and the culture-specific ranking of impositions. As an historian of rhetoric skeptical of imposing our own theories on Renaissance texts, I am startled by how well this approach explains Elizabethan language. Magnusson's study has three parts. Part One demonstrates that gender as well as class influences social dialogue. In Henry VIII, Norfolk employs positive strategies to advise Buckingham; Katherine and Wolsey address King Henry with negative strategies of deference and indirection. The correspondence of Edmund Molyneux, Sidney family secretary, reveals the complexities of Elizabethan relationships. Philip and Robert Sidney command him, while he responds to Philip's criticisms primarily with negative strategies. Lady Mary Sidney tempers her authority over Edmund with positive strategies. Shakespeare's Sonnet 58 and others deferring to his patron are best understood in the context of these conventions. Part Two focuses on letter-writing manuals and administrative correspondence, applying its examples to Shakespeare's plays. Magnusson contrasts Desiderius Erasmus' reform of the horizontal, homosocial relations of scholars in De conscribendis epistolis with Angel Day's reproduction of Elizabethan social hierarchies in The English Secretary, which nevertheless facilitates upward mobility. William Fulwood's The Enimie of Idlenesse, a translation of a French treatise, could have unwittingly supplied hints for the linguistic pretensions of Love's Labour's Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream. In the former play, the lords' linguistic excesses respond to imitation of their style by upstarts, while in the latter, Theseus appreciates his subjects' incompetence because bumbling shows deference. Elizabethan business depends on personal relationship: thus recommendations ignore job qualifications and requests for favors cement friendship. The Marchants Avizo of Bristol merchant John Browne advises the apprentice to seek aid from fellow merchants, adapting the courtly "pleasuring style" to the commerce. The Merchant of Venice shows the same patterns in the Christian community, but Shylock's speech challenges them, and in Timon of Athens they break down. In the personal letters by which Sir Henry Sidney, Sir William Cecil, and other courtiers administer 110 RHETORICA the Elizabethan regime, negative politeness to equals hints that the intended audience is the Queen, while expressions of "trouble taking" and regrets for "trouble-making" to superiors may excuse independent decisions. Positive strategies of identification present weighty requests as trivial. 1 Henry IV contrasts Hal's mastery of this social language and Hotspur's impatience with it. Part Three explores language as theme in three plays. Greenblatt's concept of self-fashioning cannot adequately explain...
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Short Reviews1 Martin Heidegger, Plato's Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), xxvii + 476 pp. Reflecting on her early years as a student of philosophy at the University of Marburg, Hannah Arendt recalls how the name of a young assistant professor, Martin Heidegger, travelled across Germany like "rumours" of a "secret king". Now, with the publication of Plato's Sophist, readers of English may judge for themselves whether these lectures confirm or dispel the rumours of Heidegger as a "subterranean" king of the realms of thinking and teaching. Plato's Sophist is a faithful and readable translation of Platons Sophist, Ingeborg Schiisslers's superb reconstruction of a lecture course on the Sophist conducted by Heidegger at Marburg in the Winter semester of 1924/25 under the deceptively simple title, Interpretation Platonischer Dialog (Sophistes). Although Heidegger claims in his preliminary remarks that the phenomenological "way of seeing" follows the "pure" and "simple" way of thinking of the early Greeks, there is nothing simple about Heidegger's magisterial interpretation of the Sophist as the first radical inquiry into the question of the "meaning of Being", the guiding thread of Heidegger's own Being and Time (1927). In order to prepare the way for an understanding of the Sophist as a "scientific" dialogue, Heidegger devotes the introduction (pp. 15-155) to a detailed exposition of the doctrine of intellectual virtues set forth by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics (VI, 2-6) and the Metaphysics (I, 1-2). Taking its point of departure in the Greek concept of truth (aletheia) as "unconcealedness" and "uncoveredness", chapter one argues that 1 The Editor and the Book Review Editor would like to apologize to Janet Atwill for the error in naming in the review of her book Rhetoric Reclaimed in Rhetorica, 17 (1999) p. 334. 103 RHETORICA 104 the intellectual virtues (episteme, techne, phronesis, sophia, and nous) represent different ways of "unconcealing" and uncovering the truth of Being. While chapter one exposes the "deficiency" of know-how (techne) and fabrication (poiesis) as ways of unveiling Being, the second and third chapters seek to establish the preeminence of sophia ("genuine insight") over phronesis ("circumspective insight") as the highest mode of "disclosive seeing". Here Heidegger argues that while phronesis concerns the "gravest" matters, the "shared world" (Mitwelt) of words and deeds in the city, sophia concerns the "highest" matters, the "ultimate principles" (archai) of Being, which reveal themselves only in the "silent speaking" of the solitary thinker. One of the most striking features of this remarkable "double preparation" for the Sophist—apart from the rigour, clarity, and sobriety of its argumentation—is the subtle process by which Heidegger purifies the concepts of practical and theoretical wisdom of any trace of sophistry. The translation of deliberation (bouleuesthai) as "circumspective self-debate", for example, seems to eliminate the plural dimension of deliberation for the Greeks: the deliberative assembly (boule), the forum of deliberative rhetoric (rhetorike symbouleutikos), becomes the "inner forum" of the call of conscience and the "silent dialogue" of the soul. Having surveyed the "thematic field" of the Sophist through an exposition of the modes of truth in the Nicomachean Ethics, Heidegger devotes the "main part" (pp. 157-422) of Plato's Sophist to a patient, almost line by line exegesis of the dialogue. Following the argument of the Eleatic Stranger "step by step", the first four chapters bring to light the inner coherence of the various apparitions of the sophist, arguing that all seven definitions converge on the art of disputation as the "unitary basic structure" of the techne sophistike. The excursus on Plato's "ambiguous" (zwiespaltige) attitude toward rhetoric in chapter three will doubtless hold the most interest for the historian of rhetoric. Here Heidegger argues that dialectics emerges from an "inner need" of Socratic philosophy to transcend the "idle chatter" of sophistry and its modes of "pretheoretical speech" (the rhetoric of the law courts, deliberative assemblies, and public festivals). Although Plato failed to achieve a "positive understanding" of rhetoric, Reviews 105 concludes Heidegger, his vision of a redeemed rhetoric as the leading of souls in the Phaedrus lays the foundation for the "concrete work" of Aristotle in the Rhetoric, the "first...
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Abstract Little attention has been paid to the often profound differences between artes praedicandi written in the Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While the sermon theorists loyal to Rome often employed classical rhetoric without any sense of disjunction, the Reformers' dedication to Scripture as a model of discourse impelled them to ratify any use of classical rhetoric in terms of Scripture and Christian commentary. In Bartholomew Keckermann's De rhetoricae ecclesiasticae utilitate, for instance, the author makes use of Aristotle's Rhetoric, but not without heavy reference to similar concerns in Augustine's De docfrina christiana and the epistles of St. Paul. Keckermann's procedures parallel those of other reformers such as Philip Melanchthon and Gerhard Andreas Hyperius, and stand in sharp contrast to the works of Erasmus and the Milanese cardinal Saint Charles Borromeo.
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Abstract In this paper I develop a speculative reading of Gorgias's Encomium on Helen that begins from several common assumptions about the work—especially its status as a “pretext” for Gorgias's hidden purposes and its character as a sort of advertisement. Beginning from these common assumptions I propose that the Encomium is appropriately read as an allegorical representation of Athenian political life. By way of this allegory Gorgias was able to advertise his conception of persuasion despite its highly controversial political implications. I refer to Gorgias as a “barbarian” due to the fundamental incompatibility of the model of political persuasion implicit in the Encomium with democratic Athenian political culture.
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(RE)Constructing Arguments: Classical Rhetoric and Roman Engineering Reflected in Vitruvius' De Architectura ↗
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Augustus is often described as the emperor who transformed Rome from a city of brick to a city of marble. When he returned victorious to Rome in BCE 29, Augustus embarked on a project to rebuild Rome with the splendor its new imperial status demanded. Despite the tranquility and prosperity enjoyed by most Romans during the Early Empire, many also felt a sense of loss. Much had changed in their social order at the end of the Republic. The nobility and the lower classes began to share more interests and Roman society took on a more egalitarian and commercial nature. Under Emperor Augustus, the function of rhetoric was stripped from legislative arenas and confined mainly to legal courts and ceremonial competitions. In the spirit of renewed patriotism and pragmatism, principles of rhetoric were also applied to writing about technical subjects, such as engineering and architecture. Both Vitruvius and Cicero used his writing to persuade Roman citizens to reclaim their heritage: of building arts in Vitruvius' case; of philosophy and meaningful public oratory in Cicero's case.
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Abstract Rhetoric of science has come a long way in understanding the role of analogy in scientific language and thought. Further progress is hindered, however, by the analytic and methodological limitations native to classical rhetoric. Accordingly, I turn to cognitive psychology for an adequate theory of analogy through which to remedy this stalled research program. Using Dedre Gentner's Structure Mapping theory of analogy, I investigate the role of the Saturnian analogy in Hantaro Nagaoka ‘s theory of atomic structure and show how the analogy constrained him, serving sometimes as an asset to his argument and other times as a serious liability.
December 1999
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Susan Wells’ Sweet Reason: Rhetoric and the Discourses of Modernity is an often brilliant but at times frustrating book. It undertakes a project that has been suspended by those who want to re-validate rhetoric (and rhetoricians) within hermeneutics, especially by following the laborious normalizing work involved in Richard Rorty’s anti-foundational relocation of “truth” in the play of interpretative methods. Wells would herself suspend the competitive and entirely disciplinary contest between Aristotelian classical rhetoric (on her account, modernized by Brian Vickers and Jasper Neel, for instance) and hermeneutic rhetoricians who prefer reading the Phaedrus.
November 1999
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Research Article| November 01 1999 Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period, 330 B.C. - A.D. 400 Stanley E. Porter ed. Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period, 330 B.C. - A.D. 400 (Leiden: Brill, 1997) xv + 901 pp. Laurent Pernot Laurent Pernot CARRA, Université des Scinces Humaines de Strasbourg, 14, rue René Descartes, 67804 Strasbourg Cedex, France. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1999) 17 (4): 433–437. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1999.17.4.433 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 Laurent Pernot; Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period, 330 B.C. - A.D. 400. Rhetorica 1 November 1999; 17 (4): 433–437. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1999.17.4.433 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. Copyright 1999, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1999 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
October 1999
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The redefinition of logos as an appeal to logic is a mistaken association found all too often in the technical communication classroom. Logic inheres in all three proofs of persuasion; moreover, Aristotle used logos within the context of classical rhetoric to refer to the argument or speech itself. In this light, the proofs of persuasion represent the set of all logical means whereby the speaker can lead a “right-thinking” audience to infer something. If that something is an emotion, the appeal is to pathos; if it is about the character of the speaker, the appeal is to ethos; and if it is about the argument or speech itself, the appeal is to logos. This interpretation reinstates all three proofs of persuasion as legitimate, logical means to different proximate ends and provides a coherent definition of logos, consonant with Aristotle's Rhetoric, to the next generation of technical communicators.
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Classical rhetorical theory has been used for relatively discrete, practice-oriented purposes in its application to teaching Scientific and Technical Communication. However effective these appropriations are, they isolate these resources from a comprehensive framework and from that framework's role in shaping disciplinary practice. Because these theoretical assets are integral to each student's preparation to be an effective, responsible practitioner, I have developed and taught an upper level rhetorical theory course for STC majors that is grounded in Aristotle's On Rhetoric and in his understanding that effective communication is a systematic tekhne/art.
September 1999
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Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period, 330 B.C.-A.D. 400 ed. by Stanley E. Porter ↗
Abstract
Reviews Stanley E. Porter ed., Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period, 330 B.C. - A.D. 400 (Leiden: Brill, 1997) xv + 901 pp. Ce fort volume, d'une présentation typographique impeccable, se veut un ouvrage de référence sur la rhétorique antique, destiné principalement aux lecteurs anglophones. Il réunit 29 contributions, réparties en trois groupes, et toutes munies de bibliographies détaillées. La première partie (Rhetoric Defined) commence par un survol de l'histoire de la rhétorique antique confié à G. A. Kennedy: à tout seigneur tout honneur. Puis sont étudiés les grands secteurs de la doctrine: "The Genres of Rhetoric" (G. A. Kennedy), "Arrangement" (W. Wuellner), "Invention" (M. Heath), "Style" (G. O. Rowe), "Delivery and Memory" (T. O. Olbricht). Sur chacun de ces sujets, les auteurs s'efforcent de résumer les principales indications données par les théoriciens grecs et latins. On trouvera donc ici de solides aide-mémoires consacrées aux grandes divisions et classifications de la rhétorique antique. Le chapitre sur l'invention m'a paru spécialement original et éclairant, dans la mesure où il décrit le processus de Vinventio à partir d'un exemple précis et avec un grand recul méthodologique. La deuxième partie (Rhetoric in Practice) est plus curieuse. On était en droit d'attendre une étude de la pratique oratoire, parallèle à l'étude de la théorie qui fait l'objet de la première partie. Mais en réalité on a affaire à une succession de chapitres centrés sur les principaux genres littéraires et consacrés aux rapports de ces genres avec la rhétorique: "The Epistle" (J. T. Reed), "Philosophical Prose" (D. M. Schenkeveld), "Historical Prose" (S. Rebenich), "Poetry and Rhetoric" (R. Webb), "Biography" (R. A. Burridge), "Oratory and Declamation" (D. H. Berry - M. Heath), "Homily and Panegyrical Sermon" (F. Siegert), "The Rhetoric of Romance" (R. F. Hock), "Apocalyptic and 433 434 RHETORICA Prophétie Literature" (J. M. Knight), "Drama and Rhetoric" (R. Scodel). Ceci pose un problème de fond, qui mérite qu'on s'y arrête. Il suffit de lire cette liste de chapitres pour être frappé par une anomalie: "Oratory and Déclamation" est présenté comme un secteur parmi d'autres, enfoui au milieu du livre, dont les rapports avec la rhétorique ne seraient pas plus étroits que ceux de la philosophie ou du roman. En d'autres termes, le mot "rhétorique" est pris dans ce volume au sens de: théorie rhétorique, corps de doctrine, ensemble de cadres d'invention et de procédés d'écriture dont l'influence peut s'exercer sur n'importe quel texte, et par conséquent la pratique oratoire ne se voit reconnaître aucun statut particulier. L'inconvénient de cette conception est de rompre le lien très fort qui unit, dans l'Antiquité, la théorie et la pratique du discours. Pour les Grecs et les Romains, la pratique oratoire (sous ses multiples formes d'exercice scolaire et de discours public) faisait elle-même partie de la rhétorique. Il n'est donc pas surprenant que les auteurs du chapitre sur "Oratory and Déclamation" s'avouent embarrassés. Ils reconnaissent que "rhetoric" and "oratory" ont entretenu une relation essentielle, "symbiotic", tout au long de l'Antiquité (p. 393), mais se voient forcés, faute de place, de renoncer à ce qui serait le véritable sujet (une étude de l'éloquence antique), pour se contenter de brèves illustrations. Et voilà pourquoi les historiens sont plus longuement traités que les orateurs, ou la collection des Panegyrici Latini passée sous silence alors qu'on lit des pages entières sur Bion de Borysthène et Chariton, auteurs intéressants en eux-mêmes, certes, mais dont l'importance est bien moindre pour l'histoire de la rhétorique. On remarque également que la déclamation fait l'objet d'un traitement contradictoire à deux moments du livre: dans le chapitre sur "Oratory and Déclamation" (pp. 406 sqq.), il est question des rapports de la déclamation avec la rhétorique, tandis que...
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Supporting deliberative democracy: Pedagogical arts of the contact zone of the electronic public sphere ↗
Abstract
I participate in a teaching and learning collaborative called Intercollegiate Electronic Democracy Project (IEDP). The project's goal is to enable students' participation in democratic culture through rhetoric and public writing. Using Internet and Web technology, we inhabit an electronic public sphere where both teaching and learning are collaborative, connecting teachers and students from many institutions across country, and where pedagogy, public issues, and politics intersect. From perspective of rhetoric and composition, IEDP embraces three topics important to our field: computers and writing; public discourse, especially deliberative rhetoric; and multiculturalism, specifically contact-zone theory and pedagogy. This essay elaborates some implications of this nexus. While much of pedagogy I discuss reflects strategies successfully used in IEDP, its implications extend to similar projects that engage students in electronic public sphere. Ever since Mary Louise Pratt challenged teachers to develop pedagogical arts of contact zone (40), many teachers have become more sensitive to multicultural dynamics of their classrooms, and they have begun to chart what Richard E. Miller calls the uncharted realms of teaching and studying in contact zone (407). There have been theoretical projects such as using contact zones as a basis for rethinking and reorganizing English studies (Bizzell); efforts such as those that address challenges posed by asymmetrical power relations in classroom (Miller) and differences in cultural perspectives and values (van Slyck); and investigations of specific contact-zone phenomena such as students' strategies for coping with dominant discourses (Canagarajah) and the politics of style (Lu). These developments signify our ability to respond to multicultural classroom conditions by accommodating educational needs and desires of all students. Nowadays, however, classroom per se is no longer sole site for teaching, learning, writing, and speaking. With growing interest in public discourse and civic participation among students-and with rapidly increasing
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Abstract
Cynicism is that offers the contemporary reader creative links with an ethical past as well as important legacies of rhetorical tactics.' In particular, a rereading of the Cynics provides an important but overlooked history that harbors some strategic ethical positions for rhetoric.2 In the Cynics we find the possibilities of rhetorical resistance as well as places from which speakers and writers who remain at the margins can launch critique, those minority voices that get silenced under the monolith of majority conversation. This is an important tradition of Cynic rhetoric; it operates from the margins, taking its model from their forced or chosen exile. It foregrounds the political by calling attention to the inequity in both speech and discursive situations. Cynic tactics are impolite and disruptive, for if you are a minority, you have to shout to be heard (Hodge and Mansfield 199). This disperses the centrality of logic in philosophy and by operating by a logic of its own, one that uses parody and satire to question accepted norms (Branham). Cynic uses the body and accounts for desire in constructing its ethics; it is, as Edward P. J. Corbett describes, a closed fist that is at once persuasive and potentially coercive in its ethos of action (99). What distinguishes Cynic from other, more authorized rhetorics is its physicality, its emphasis on the equation of principle, discourse and action, and its blatant disregard for community standards of decorum. The Cynic rhetoric of confrontation is a counterstatement to the of Aristotle that presuppos[es] the 'goods' of order, civility, reason, decorum, and civil... law (Scott and Smith 7). The Cynic rejects decorum by adopting incivility as a means of speaking out on issues of social and political importance to often unwilling audiences. Cynic stages kairotic moments when dissensus, rather than consensus, becomes the goal of the speaker in imploring an audience to self-scrutiny and action. The implications of this counterstatement within the rhetorical are evident in the simple fact that little is known-or left-of the Cynics,3 unless we look to the ways in which incivility and interruption are and have become an effective discursive means to an ethical or political end. Therefore, to understand the Cynics' significance, we need to suspend our support for a of reason and decorum and lend an ear to the rhetorical possibilities of noise.
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Abstract
Traditionally, has played a central role in how classical rhetoric defines, conducts, and structures both its subject matter and its methods.' The subjects of [rhetorical] deliberation, writes Aristotle, such as seem to present us with alternative possibilities (1357a). These alterative possibilities, structured as opposites, precede-as well as proceed from-the study of rhetoric. For example, stasis theory assumes that people find themselves opposed, actually or potentially, to other people in their interests, desires, and motives and that they require the means, or method, to clarify this opposition even as they seek to move beyond it toward consensus. To provide these means, stasis theory posits a heuristic set of categories-of Being, Quantity, Quality, Place, for example-designed to help disputants identify and evaluate the issues in any given case, chiefly by establishing the relative merit of the oppositions underpinning the contested issues: Only those cases whose points of conflict are sufficiently clear-i.e., are well formulated and resting on sufficiently common grounds-should go forward for debate and adjudication. Equally, opposition plays a key role in structuring the canons of rhetoric and, consequently, in structuring rhetoric as both a theoretical and a practical art. Within the canon of inventio, for example, we find appeals to the advantageous paired with the disadvantageous, possibility with impossibility, guilt with innocence, praise with blame; within dispositio, we find confirmatio paired with refutatio; within elocutio, we find a whole range of figures-from epanalepsis to antimetabole to isocolon-capable of pairing terms into stylistic antitheses; and, finally, within memoria and actiopronuntiatio, we find a spectrum of normative terms marked, at either extreme, by pairs such as natural and artificial, open and closed, high and low, and the like. Clearly, opposition is one of the key terms, if not a governing principle, of classical rhetorical theory and practice. But what of its role in contemporary rhetorical theory? In the critical analysis of visual, rather than verbal or written, texts? In images that seek identification rather than overt persuasion?
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The uses and limits of rhetorical theory: Campbell, Whately, and Perelman and Olbrechts‐Tyteca on the earl of Spencer's “address to Diana”; ↗
Abstract
r he three essays that follow offer readings of one of the most popular and l widely known rhetorical performances of recent times, the Earl of Spencer's 1997 funeral eulogy for his sister Diana, Princess of Wales (text reproduced in Appendix). Each section of the paper offers a reading of the address through a critical lens derived from the rhetorical theory of a different canonical theorist, respectively (and chronologically) George Campbell, Richard Whately, and Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. Three questions animate this project. The first concerns the relationship of theory to criticism. Neither Campbell, Whately, nor the Belgians discusses the role of rhetorical criticism or offers an apparatus that facilitates it, although each of their theories includes tenets applicable to criticism. How well do their theoretical tenets work at the level of criticism; do any of these theorists introduce concepts that analysis of rhetorical practice might challenge? The second question concerns influence. The three theorists we chose are particularly interesting from this perspective because all of them, to varying degrees, are selfconscious about their debts to the rhetorical tradition. Campbell cites and affirms the contributions of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, Whately incorporates Campbell, and the Belgians incorporate Whately incorporating Campbell. What is the nature of this influence? Are the differences among these theorists differences of perspective or of emphasis? We are aware of the complexities surrounding the question of influence since it was broached by T.S. Eliot in Tradition and the Individual Talent, subsequently complicated by Harold Bloom, and more recently challenged by Michel Foucault. Our purpose is not to arbitrate these quite different views (which raise their own questions about the nature of influence) but to prompt a discussion of the nature of influence within the rhetorical tradition. The third question concerns the idea of progress in rhetorical theory. In what sense can each of the theorists be said to have made an advance over his predecessors? Does rhetorical theory progress as science typically progresses, by making obsolete that which it builds on? Or does rhetoric resemble philosophy, a discipline in which responses to a relatively constant problem set seem to benefit from their predecessors' work without replacing it?
August 1999
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Abstract
Abstract: The later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries in Italy saw a marked new interest in the study of Ciceronian rhetorical theory, in both Latin and vernacular contexts. This reflects the increasing prominence within the civic culture of the Italian communes of practices of oral and adversarial rhetoric which the dominant instrument of rhetorical instruction in this period, the ars dictaminis, was ill-equipped to teach. While the utility of the strategies of argument taught by Roman rhetorical theory was widely recognised in this period, the ethical attitudes implicit in that theory represented a challenge to prevailing Christian constructions of the moral decorum of speech. Classical rhetorical theory may thus be seen to have constituted a destabilising presence within late medieval ethical discourse: a situation which presisted, to some extent, even after the political and cultural changes of the later Trecento had displaced rhetoric in Italy from a primary to a secondary, literary and educational, role.
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Short Reviews: Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Democratic Athens, by Harvey Yunis, Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition, by Janet M. Atwill, Two Greek Rhetorical Treatises from the Roman Empire: Introduction, Text, and Translation of the Arts of Rhetoric Attributed to Anonymous Seguerianus and to Apsines of Gadara, by Mervin R. Dilts and George A. Kennedy, Language and Society in Early Modern England, by Vivian Salmon, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, by Quentin Skinner and Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, by Alan G Gross and William M. Keith ↗
Abstract
Research Article| August 01 1999 Short Reviews: Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Democratic Athens, by Harvey Yunis, Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition, by Janet M. Atwill, Two Greek Rhetorical Treatises from the Roman Empire: Introduction, Text, and Translation of the Arts of Rhetoric Attributed to Anonymous Seguerianus and to Apsines of Gadara, by Mervin R. Dilts and George A. Kennedy, Language and Society in Early Modern England, by Vivian Salmon, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, by Quentin Skinner and Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, by Alan G Gross and William M. Keith Harvey Yunis,Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Democratic Athens (Ithaca, NY: Comell University Press, 1996) xv + 316pp.Janet M. Atwill,Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998) 265pp.Mervin R. Dilts and George A. Kennedy eds. Two Greek Rhetorical Treatises from the Roman Empire: Introduction, Text, and Translation of the Arts of Rhetoric Attributed to Anonymous Seguerianus and to Apsines of Gadara, Mnemosyne Supplement 168 (Leiden: E. J. Brill 1997) xxvii + 249 pp.Vivian Salmon,Language and Society in Early Modern England (The Netherlands: John Benjamfris, 1996) 276 pp.Quentin Skinner,Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) xvi + 477 pp.Alan G Gross and William M. Keith eds. Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997) 371 pp. Michael Svoboda, Michael Svoboda C/O The Joanne Rockwell Memorial House, 1910 E. Jefferson Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21205, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar James Fredal, James Fredal Department of English, 164 W. 17th Avenue, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar John T. Kirby, John T. Kirby Program in Comparative Literature, Purdue University, SC 1354, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Linda C. Mitchell, Linda C. Mitchell Department of English, One Washington Square, San Jose State University, San Jose, California 95192-0090, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Wade Williams, Wade Williams Department of English, The University of Puget Sound, 1500 North Warner, Tacoma, Washington 98416, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Judy Z Segal Judy Z Segal Department of English, University of British Columbia, #397-1873 East Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia, V6T1Z1, Canada Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1999) 17 (3): 331–346. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1999.17.3.331 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 Michael Svoboda, James Fredal, John T. Kirby, Linda C. Mitchell, Wade Williams, Judy Z Segal; Short Reviews: Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Democratic Athens, by Harvey Yunis, Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition, by Janet M. Atwill, Two Greek Rhetorical Treatises from the Roman Empire: Introduction, Text, and Translation of the Arts of Rhetoric Attributed to Anonymous Seguerianus and to Apsines of Gadara, by Mervin R. Dilts and George A. Kennedy, Language and Society in Early Modern England, by Vivian Salmon, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, by Quentin Skinner and Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, by Alan G Gross and William M. Keith. Rhetorica 1 August 1999; 17 (3): 331–346. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1999.17.3.331 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 Copyright 1999, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1999 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
June 1999
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Abstract
Short Reviews Harvey Yunis, Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Democratic Athens (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996) xv + 316pp. In methodological reflections written near the end of his career (and published in English translation as On Interpretation), the German classicist August Boeckh articulated a number of hermeneutic principles, including two very simple dicta. First, a good interpretation will explain as much of the text as possible. And, second, a good interpretation will make the text compelling on the terms of its own time. Judged on these two criteria, Taming Democracy by Harvey Yunis offers a very good interpretation of Plato on political rhetoric. Though Plato is not the only subject of Taming Democracy, he is at the center of this study of models of political rhetoric in democratic Athens: a study that runs from the theatrical responses to the Peloponnesian War of Aristophanes and Euripides, to Thucydides' self-conscious history, to Plato's evolving views, to Demosthenes' oratorical resistance to Philip of Macedon's imperial encroachments. As an interpreter of Plato on rhetoric, Yunis immediately stands out for his willingness to move beyond the two-piece puzzle posed by the Gorgias and the Phaedrus. To his interpretations of these essential dialogues Yunis adds some reflections on the Apology and the Republic and, in a nearly unprecedented move, a detailed assessment of the rhetorical theory implied by the "persuasive preambles" Plato introduces in his Laws. Looking at this larger set enables Yunis to conclude, "The philosophical distance that Plato has traveled from the bitter rejection of rhetoric in the Gorgias to the creation of a new rhetorical genre of legal-political discourse in the Laws is immense" (p. 235). Yunis then makes this philosophical journey historically compelling by setting it against the rise and fall and rise of the 331 332 RHETORICA Athenian empire. Yunis suggests that Athens' democracy depended in subtle ways on its imperial ambitions. The navy that gave the masses, the poorer classes, an important civic role to play also built for Athens an empire. And that empire brought revenues to Athens, revenues that provided the livelihoods for many of these poorer citizens. Thus, domestic harmony in Athens depended on foreign hegemony, even tyranny. Taming Democracy is an analysis of late fifth and early-mid fourth century thinkers who, like Plato, felt compelled to address the political questions raised by Athens' imperial history. "Athens' miserable defeat in the Peloponnesian War invited a réévaluation of its democracy in general and democratic rhetoric in particular" (p. 32). Their answers, according to Yunis, hinged on whether they believed that rhetoric could be instructive, whether they thought the rhetores—the most accomplished speakers in the assembly—could tame the demos, the public, by teaching it to deliberate wisely through mass political discourse. In Thucydides' work Pericles is presented as the exemplary rhetor because he had the ability and the moral will to teach the Athenians as he led them. The rhetores who arose after Pericles lacked his abilities and his character. They pandered to the Athenians' worst impulses and thus, Thucydides implies, led Athens to its ruin. The Gorgias, Yunis argues, is Plato's response to Thucydides' portrayal of Pericles. Unlike Thucydides who gloried in Athens' power, Plato regarded Athens' imperial ambitions as inherently corrupting. The Gorgias is set in Athens at its zenith; but the characters and historical references of this dialogue about rhetoric and power serve to remind the alert reader that the city will soon be led, by a speech, into the disastrous folly of the Sicilian expedition and, thereby, to the collapse of its empire. This is an extraordinarily provocative book. It is not without its weaknesses, however. First, though other scholars have acknowledged the echoes and parallels between the two authors, they have stopped short of the suggestion that Plato "read" Thucydides. Yunis needs to provide additional warrants for his more assertive position. Second, Yunis actually overlooks one supporting line of evidence in this regard: the paradoxical place of shame in Thucydides and its prominence in the Gorgias. Third, Reviews 333 Yunis distorts the Phaedrus by bending it too harshly to his thesis. The setting of the dialogue and the focal relationship of the...
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Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science ed. by Alan G Gross and William M. Keith ↗
Abstract
Reviews 343 within this conventional context. "What this means in practice", Skinner explains, "is that I treat Hobbes's claims about scientia civilis not simply as propositions but as moves in an argument. I try to indicate what traditions he reacts against, what lines of argument he takes up, what changes he introduces into existing debates" (p. 8). While Skinner's method has occasioned much debate, culminating in a collection of essays entitled Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (1988), historians of rhetoric, who themselves attempt to understand texts within larger contexts, should welcome the attention paid to questions of intention, meaning, and language. Meticulously researched, Skinner's study of Hobbes and the rhetorical culture of Tudor England is a welcome contribution to histories such as Victoria Kahn's Machiavellian Rhetoric and Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment. Together, these studies clarify the complex interplay between rhetorical and political traditions in early modem Europe. WADE WILLIAMS The University ofPuget Sound Alan G Gross and William M. Keith eds, Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997) 371 pp. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar writes "The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science", the lead essay in this volume—its "Provocations"—and the rest of Rhetorical Hermeneutics is a collection of "Dissensions", "Extensions" and "reflections", the last including a response to respondents by Gaonkar. So the book is the perfect rhetorical study. It is utterly dialogic; Gaonkar's claims are all tested on an audience of distinguished rhetorical theorists and rhetoricians of science: John Angus Campbell, Thomas Farrell, Steve Fuller, Alan Gross, James Jasinski, David Kaufer, William Keith, Andrew King, Michael Leff, Deirdre McCloskey, Carolyn Miller and Charles Willard. The book has an 344 RHETORICA excellent cast—and a sometimes argumentative one (McCloskey writes that the philosophical warrants for Gaonkar's case against a ubiquitous rhetoric themselves warrant the question, "So what?", p. 107); it also has a very worthy project. The central question of Rhetorical Hermeneutics is this: can a theory of production be usefully, and without distortion, transformed into a theory of interpretation? This question sponsors others—for example, does the "thinness" of rhetorical theory (the paucity of constraints on its terms of use) make it so easy to spread, as it were (rhetoric is the universal hermeneutic) as to weaken the plausibility of rhetoric altogether (what distinguishes rhetoric as an interpretive program?)? Gaonkar answers his own questions in part by evoking the work in rhetoric of science of John Angus Campbell, Alan Gross, and Lawrence Prelli. Campbell and Gross respond. Campbell, Gaonkar finds, is mired in a problem of agency ("refuses to let go of an image of Darwin as the rhetorical superstar", p. 49); Gross is only successful as a rhetorical critic to the extent that he does not practice the neoAristotelianism he proposes; Prelli, among other questionable practices, seems to be "probing into the 'rhetorical unconscious'" of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (p. 73). So Gaonkar describes problems in the house of rhetoric of science; he also draws attention not only to the problematic relation of rhetorical criticism to other criticisms, but also to the "embattled" relation of Rhetoric of Science—as a discipline—to both rhetorical studies and science studies. Gross and Keith's design and authoritative editing shape a volume which deserves consideration at a number of levels: What are possible answers to questions raised? What can be said about the questions qua questions? Why does rhetoric ask so many questions about itself anyway? The book not only deserves consideration at these levels; it also enables it. Fuller writes, for example, "The more that rhetoric of science looks like classical rhetoric, the less exciting its interpretations seem...[T]he more that rhetoric of science strays from classical sources, and the more provocative its readings become, the more interchangeable its methods seem with those used by sociologists and critical theorists" (p. 279). Gross writes, "The current attitude of Reviews 345 historians and philosophers oscillates between increased need to take a rhetorical point of view into consideration and an occasional hostility to the possibility of rhetorical analysis" (p. 146). With such comment, the authors invite readers to participate...
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Abstract
Reviews 341 Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) xvi + 477 pp. More than one historian has criticized the "history of ideas" approach: too many ideas and not enough history. Over the past twenty years, Quentin Skinner, along with fellow historians John Dunn and J. G. A. Pocock, has attempted to correct this methodological bias by developing a contextualist approach to history. The result has been a new approach to the history of ideas and a growing body of scholarship that foregrounds rhetoric as both an intellectual tradition and as a method by which to study ideas in history. In his first major work, the two volume The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, (1978), Skinner began his analysis with an account of how the study of rhetoric in the Italian universities gave rise to the Republican civic ideology that would be so important in the political and religious revolutions in Europe (and America) between 1500 and 1800. In his latest book, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, Skinner continues these inquiries and proposes a revisionist reading of Hobbes's civic and moral philosophy; one that positions it squarely within the humanist tradition of education in Renaissance England. Historians have previously understood Hobbes's intellectual development as paralleling the larger shift from humanism to science in seventeenth century European intellectual culture. Hobbes's earlier works, including his translations of Thucydides's Histories (1629) and his abridgment of Aristotle's Art of Rhetoric (1637), evidence his humanist phase. However, like Descartes and other philosophers looking for epistemological certainty in the seventeenth century, Hobbes loses faith in the humanistic rhetorical training of his youth and applies geometrical models to moral reasoning in his Elements ofLaw and De Give, both published in the early 1640s. Skinner argues that beginning about 1650, however, Hobbes began to doubt the possibility of constructing a science of virtue and vice. Contemplating the Leviathan, Hobbes began to ask himself, "If the findings of civil science possess no inherent power to convince, how can we hope to empower them?" (p. 351). This was, of course, the same question that 342 RHETORICA classical and Renaissance rhetoricians had addressed. Hobbes found the answer to this question, Skinner contends, in rhetoricians such as Cicero and Quintilian who had argued that the dictates of ratio, or demonstrative moral reasoning, needed to be empowered by the "moving force of eloquentia" (p. 351). Thus, in the Leviathan (1651) Hobbes returned to the humanist training of his youth, arguing that eloquence is an indispensable partner to reason in the maintenance of the commonwealth. Skinner divides his book into two parts: "Classical Eloquence in Renaissance England" and "Hobbes and the Idea of a Civil Science." The first part, which can stand on its own, exhaustively reconstructs the place of classical rhetoric in the Tudor education of Hobbes's youth. The second part situates the development of Hobbes's philosophical thought in the educational context of English humanism delineated in the first part, examining Hobbes's initial enthusiasm for, later rejection of, and ultimate return to both the values and strategies of humanist rhetoric. Even if historians are not as interested in the second half of the book, Skinner has provided a great service to those interested in both classical and Renaissance rhetoric by surveying "the teaching of rhetoric in the grammar schools...and more broadly the place of the ars rhetorica in Tudor political argument" (p. 211). Historians of rhetoric in all periods will also be interested in Skinner's historiographical approach. Along with Pocock and Dunn, Skinner's work defines a specific approach to the history of ideas, known as "Cambridge contextualism," which he summarizes as "trying to place [historical] texts within [historical] contexts...to identify what their authors were doing in writing them" (p. 7). Following the lead of Ludwig Wittengenstein and later speech act theorists like John Austin, Skinner and other Cambridge contextualists separate the locutionary (propositional) and illocutionary (rhetorical) dimensions of language. They argue that to situate a text in context and understand its historical meaning, historians need to examine not only the sense and reference of words—what the author is saying—but...
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Two Greek Rhetorical Treatises from the Roman Empire: Introduction, Text, and Translation of the Arts of Rhetoric Attributed to Anonymous Seguerianus and to Apsines of Gadara ed. by Mervin R. Dilts and George A. Kennedy ↗
Abstract
Reviews 335 begins. And she never fully answers the question posed by the structure of the book. How does a revised understanding of rhetoric as an "art of intervention" help us to rethink current humanities institutions, canons, or curricula? The title and structure of the work invite us to expect some lines of inquiry that don't appear. Anyone looking for specific applications of rhetoric as techne to an emancipatory or interventionist pedagogy might be disappointed. But those looking for careful readings, particularly of Aristotle—in the Rhetoric and other works like the Analytics and the Nicomachean Ethics—that bear upon the relations between theoretical, practical and productive arts will be well repaid. Atwill shows the incommensurability in Aristotle between theory, whose end is static contemplation, and rhetoric (like all techne) whose end is realized only in the exchange between rhetor and audience. She is careful not to overstate the emancipatory goals of Protagoras or Isocrates, who were no more interested in redistributing political power or cultural capital than was Plato. And her focus on this ancient debate between theoria and techne helps us to see current debates within the humanities, as well as well-known ancient texts, in a new light. JAMES FREDAL The Ohio State University Mervin R. Dilts and George A. Kennedy eds, Two Greek Rhetorical Treatises from the Roman Empire: Introduction, Text, and Translation of the Arts of Rhetoric Attributed to Anonymous Seguerianus and to Apsines of Gadara, Mnemosyne Supplement 168 (Leiden: E. J. Brill 1997) xxvii + 249 pp. Prior to this new book by Dilts & Kennedy (hereafter DK), the most satisfactory scholarly edition of either the Anonymous Seguerianus (AS) or Apsines was to be found in the Rhetores Graeci of Spengel/Hammer (Leipzig: Teubner 1894). What we have now is a superb presentation of both treatises, in a carefully edited 336 RHETORICA Greek text furnished with critical apparatus, an accurate en face translation, and a running commentary. DK also provide historical and textual introductions and a bibliography. There is something for everyone here: the philologist will spend many happy hours burrowing into the extensive apparatus criticus; the Greekless reader may read the treatises in modern English translations; and the rhetorical theorist will find much to ponder, in both text and comments. Readers of Kennedy's earlier work will already know about these ancient treatises. Kennedy had signaled the importance of both, as early as The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World (1972), and again in Greek Rhetoric under Christian Emperors (1983) and A New History of Classical Rhetoric (1994). These late-antique Greek treatises form part of the didactic tradition of declamation cultivated in the Second Sophistic. Both begin by demonstrating allegiance to what Solmsen labeled the moria logou tradition; that is, their disposition of the material is based on the parts of the oration: proem, narration, pisteis or proofs, and epilogue.1 This in fact is a fair skeletal outline of the AS, which does, however, show some Aristotelian and Stoic influence as well. The treatise is especially valuable as a compendium of the work of various theorists of the period, including Alexander son of Numenius, [?Aelius] Harpocration, the followers of Apollodorus of Pergamum, and one Neocles. The AS is of course anonymous, but we know2 something more about the author of the second treatise in DK. Valerius Apsines of Gadara is praised by Philostratus (2.628), and may be dated to the late second/early third century CE. His treatise, more than the AS, is intended specifically for the instruction of declamation. His list of the moria logou is more elaborate than that in the AS, as it includes proem, prokatastasis (preparation for the proof), narration, enthymemes, kephalaia ("headings"), and epilogue. The Greek texts in DK are superbly careful and accurate. It is an apt adjudication of their quality, in fact, to say that they are a Friedrich Solmsen, The Aristotelian Tradition in Ancient Rhetoric", American Journal ofPhilology 62 (1941) pp. 35-50,169-190. Or thought we knew: for a dissenting voice see Malcolm Heath, "Apsines and Pseudo-Apsines", American Journal ofPhilology 119 (1998) pp. 89-111. Reviews 337 significant improvement over the already good texts of Spengel/Hammer. Fresh manuscript...
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Abstract
The later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries in Italy saw a marked new interest in the study of Ciceronian rhetorical theory, in both Latin and vernacular contexts. This reflects the increasing prominence within the civic culture of the Italian communes of practices of oral and adversarial rhetoric which the dominant instrument of rhetorical instruction in this period, the ars dictaminis, was ill-equipped to teach. While the utility of the strategies of argument taught by Roman rhetorical theory was widely recognised in this period, the ethical attitudes implicit in that theory represented a challenge to prevailing Christian constructions of the moral decorum of speech. Classical rhetorical theory may thus be seen to have constituted a destabilising presence within late medieval ethical discourse: a situation which presisted, to some extent, even after the political and cultural changes of the later Trecento had displaced rhetoric in Italy from a primary to a secondary, literary and educational, role.
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Abstract
Reviews 333 Yunis distorts the Phaedrus by bending it too harshly to his thesis. The setting of the dialogue and the focal relationship of the lovers both argue, in my view, against an endorsement of political discourse. Yunis' suggestion that the demos can be treated as having a single soul and, thus, as subject to the dialogue's rhetorical psychology strikes me as akin to pious efforts to allegorize The Song of Solomon. Nevertheless, by interpreting Plato in the dramatic political context of his time, Yunis succeeds in making Plato's dialogues on rhetoric more compelling objects of study for our time. I recommend the book highly. MICHAEL SVOBODA The Pennsylvania State University Janet M. Atwill, Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998) 265pp. Following Achilles' death near the end of the Trojan War, the chieftains held a debate to determine whether Odysseus or Ajax should win his armor. Ajax claimed the armor based not only on his legendary strength, but on his strength of character, his steadfast loyalty, bravery and self-control in battle. He was governed by a proper sense of shame and honor, corresponding to a code of behavior that guaranteed the propriety of his actions. Odysseus, by contrast, used shameless tricks and deceptions to defeat his enemies, even allowing his slaves to beat him so that, dressed in rags, he could sneak behind the walls of Troy, accomplishing in one night what the entire Achaean army couldn't accomplish in ten years. He makes the weaker appear to be the stronger. Odysseus wins the armor, for good or ill, but the contest represented by constant Ajax and wily Odysseus would continue to saturate ancient Greek public discourse. Are skills at trickery, deception and craft to be valued for their effectiveness, or despised for their dangers? Ought rhetoric to reproduce stable, normative subjects governed by traditional conventions of 334 RHETORICA conduct (like Ajax)? Or does it rather teach crafty arts of social intervention through cunning self-reformation answerable only to the specific exigencies of context and advantage (like Odysseus)? In Rhetoric Reclaimed, Margaret Atwill challenges us to rethink the question of techne, not only in terms of Greek rhetoric, but in terms of contemporary liberal arts education. For Atwill, the liberal arts tradition has long been committed to reproducing normative subjects defined in terms of a universal human "nature", in terms of a foundationalist faith in objective knowledge, and of a reductive scale of value whose end is the acquisition of knowledge. These models of subjectivity, knowledge and value, argues Atwill, coalesce to form what is now termed "the humanities", whose business "is not so much the dissemination of knowledge or competencies as it is the production of a particular 'kind' of subject" (p. 18). This educational paradigm naturalizes the contingent, universalizes the particular, and privatizes the public: claims by now familiar to students of various current postmoderisms. But despite its deformation into a theoretical discipline by scholars like Plato and, later, Grimaldi and Cope, rhetoric was always more than just a tool for normative subject formation. It was in the hands of Protagoras, Isocrates and Aristotle a productive art (a techne) of "seizing the advantage", of social and political intervention, of creating possibilities and transforming existing social structures (a la Odysseus). Atwill's goal is to rethink current classroom goals and methods within the humanities by "reclaiming" rhetoric; to ask "What forums are available and what must be invented to enable the kind of political agency that was once the primary aim of rhetorical instruction?" (p. 210). In her approach to this question, Atwill discusses a wide variety of texts, from Hesiod to Aristotle, unpacking the meaning of techne and rhetoric's place as productive art within that tradition. Atwill develops terms like techne in important ways, but avoids connecting the discussion to related terms (like metis—cunning intelligence, hexis, or habitus all terms used by Bourdieu, upon whom she relies). She does not pursue the important subjectivity/knowledge/value equation with which she Reviews 335 begins. And she never fully answers the question posed by the structure of the book. How does a revised understanding of rhetoric as an...
May 1999
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Abstract
Abstract: The understanding of free speech was, from fifth century Athens onwards, rhetorically coloured, and Greek uses of parrhesia and the definitions of licentia later set out in Roman handbooks are highly influential to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English works on rhetoric and political advice. Consequently, discussions of liberty of speech in Elizabethan and Jacobean England can often be understood best if read with an eye to the conditions of deliberative rhetoric. Authors of rhetorical works in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were engaged in a complicated relationship of negotiation with sometimes apparentiy contradictory traditions when they defined parrhesia. Both traditions were used by speakers and writers concerned find ways of offering frank counsel to their superiors in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
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Contextualizes the rhetorical archive and moves beyond composition to the traditions of civic discourse, classical rhetorical theory, and moral philosophy. Wonders what kind of archive of actual historical practices would enable rhetoricians to confirm or qualify the existence of a genuine tradition of civic discourse.
March 1999
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Abstract
Reviews 227 political pessimism of Cicero's late letters is rhetorically defined, I would argue, as a failure in the discourse of the courts and the senate; thus it is not simply the melancholy of the collapse of the Roman republic, but Cicero's description, rhetorically sensitive, that Vico has appropriated. Finally, Goetsch's book should, perhaps, not be judged as a contribution to the history of rhetoric, but as an idiosyncratic use of the history of rhetoric to give an account of a major Early Modem figure who has fared badly in the standard histories of philosophy, dominated by the philosophical dévotion to methods of logical rigor. It is to Goetsch's credit as a historian of philosophy that he regards a sympathetic reading of the rhetorical tradition as essential to his task. And, to his great credit, Goetsch did not take the "rhetorical turn" of much contemporary inquiry, which tends, using the mantra "form is content", to ignore the "content" of the rhetorical tradition in favor if identifying piecemeal formal figurative tactics, a reading of the text reduced to a list of tropes. Nancy S. Struever Johns Hopkins University Pascal Quignard, Rhétorique spéculative (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1995) 218pp. Ce livre fort savant n'est pas un "ouvrage à caractère scientifique": au lieu de bibliographie, notes et index, on n'y trouvera qu'allusions, sous-entendus et masques. Cela ne veut pas direqu'il n'intéresse pas l'historien de la rhétorique. Au Contraire, cet ouvrage à caractère littéraire—mais pour Pascal Quignard le littéraire n'est autre que la rhétorique écrite—intéresse à la fois l'histoire, la philosophie et la modernité de la rhétorique. Car c'est à la fois l'inventaire, la Défense et l'Illustration de cette "tradition lettrée anti-philosophique qui court sur toute l'histoire occidentale dès l'invention de la philosophie", "tradition ancienne, marginale, récalcitrante, persécutée, pour laquelle la lettre du langage doit 228 RHETORICA être prise à la littera" et que l'auteur nomme "rhétorique spéculative". Philosophe de formation, Pascal Quignard (né en 1948) n'est pas un universitaire, mais un musicien, un romancier et un essayiste, d'une grande originalité dans les trois domaines, surtout les deux derniers, en sorte qu'il est le plus difficile à classer des auteurs français contemporains; la meilleure approximation serait de l'inclure dans la mouvance post moderne, comme le fait une thèse récente.3 Certainement, il préférerait être considéré comme ante-moderne: n'a-t-il pas un jour, inversant le mot de Stendhal, souhaité être lu au XVIIe siècle? Violoncelliste et spécialiste de musique baroque, il est aussi l'auteur de plusieurs romans—dont Tous les Matins du Monde, que le cinéma a rendu particulièrement célèbre. Ayant "toujours aimé les choses désavouées", il a traduit YAlexandra de Lycophron et écrit une étude sur la Délie de Maurice Scève,4 deux œuvres réputées particulièrement hermétiques. C'est peut-être ce goût pour les temps et les œuvres restés en marge de l'Histoire qui l'a conduit d'abord à évoquer l'atmosphère de l'Antiquité tardive dans une œuvre de fiction, Les Tablettes de buis d'Apronenia Avitia, puis à traduire et à étudier l'étonnant rhéteur du Ier siècle Albusius Silus,5 enfin à inventer le courant qui donne son titre à l'ouvrage dont nous rendons compte ici. Rhétorique spéculative forme avec La haine de la musique, paru ultétieurement, un nouvel ensemble de Petits Traités, genre de prédilection imaginé par Pascal Quignard: il en avait précédemment publié cinquante-six,6 beaucoup (par exemple Un lipogramme d'Appius Claudius ou Longin) sinon tous relevant déjà de la rhétorique spéculative. L'ouvrage dont nous rendons compte comprend, outre un Minuscule traité sur les Petits traités d'un intérêt anecdotique, cinq Traités: Fronton, La langue latine, De deo abscondito, Sur Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Gradus. Les trois premiers seront les plus intéressants pour...
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Abstract
The understanding of free speech was, from fifth century Athens onwards, rhetorically coloured, and Greek uses of parrhesia and the definitions of licentia later set out in Roman handbooks are highly influential to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English works on rhetoric and political advice. Consequently, discussions of liberty of speech in Elizabethan and Jacobean England can often be understood best if read with an eye to the conditions of deliberative rhetoric. Authors of rhetorical works in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were engaged in a complicated relationship of negotiation with sometimes apparently contradictory traditions when they defined parrhesia. Both traditions were used by speakers and writers concerned find ways of offering frank counsel to their superiors in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
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RHETORICA 216 in. Dubel explores the background and presuppositions of the theory of ecphrasis in the Greek progymnasmata and also stresses the close links with memory and topoi. The remaining papers deal with equally important aspects of évidence, but now in specific authors, like Vergil, Ovid, Horace, or in Junius' De pictura veterum. In all, an interesting collection. One of the authors deplores the absence of a detailed history of the notion of évidence. Now this gap is being filled to some extent by A. Kemmann in his lemma Evidentia, Evidenz in Ueding's Historisches Wdrterbuch der Rhetorik, vol. 3 (1996), coll. 3347 . DIRK M. SCHENKEVELD Amsterdam Guido Oldrini, La disputa del método nel Rinascimento. Indagini su Ramo e sul ramismo (Firenze: Le Lettere, 1997) 331 pp. El autor presenta en este libro una recopilación de trabajos publicados con anterioridad en distintas revistas, junto a algunas aportaciones novedosas. La puesta al día y la integración y unificación de una serie de estudios relativos al mismo tema, así como su difusión conjunta, justifican la edición del libro. Se trata de un interesante estudio en el que se intenta esclarecer la posición e influencia del ramismo en la cuestión relativa al status de la autonomía de las disciplinas en la Europa del siglo XVI y principios del XVII. Una de las cuestiones más atractivas del trabajo es la relativa a la relación entre el pensamiento sobre las disciplinas del conocimiento y las características históricas y sociales del periodo económico precapitalista en que se produce. En una época de transición en la que comienza a desarrollarse el mercantilismo de la naciente clase burguesa, y en la que se produce la formación de los estados europeos modernos, la enseñanza de las disciplinas debía adquirir necesariamente un carácter práctico (en contraposición al predominio de la teoría en los estados anteriores Reviews 217 de la cultura), capaz de suministrar los conocimientos necesarios para mantener el nuevo mercado económico y para formar adecuadamente a los funcionarios estatales. En el siglo XVI comienza a desarrollarse un proceso de definición y delimitación de las distintas disciplinas del conocimiento, que se prolongaría hasta el siglo XVIII, en el que se acaban por sentar los fundamentos de la ciencia moderna. La época estudiada por el autor, por lo tanto, no sólo representa un periodo de transición desde el punto de vista socioeconómico, sino también desde la perspectiva de la filosofia.de la ciencia. En este cuadro sociocultural se enmarca la propuesta de Ramus de elaborar un "método" único, capaz de ser aplicado a todas las disciplinas. El autor muestra claramente cómo la clase burguesa, a medida que se fue afianzando, desarrolló su propia ideología, que, por lo que concierne a la cuestión de la delimitación de las disciplinas, se basó en gran parte en el pensamiento de Ramus. En la primera parte de la obra, el autor expone y comenta los aspectos relativos a la metodología ramista. Para ello, tiene muy en cuenta la lenta transformación que se produce en las relaciones sociales y económicas hacia un estado de precapitalismo, de especial importancia en Francia e Inglaterra, donde se instauran monarquías absolutistas y se producen transvases fluidos entre las clases sociales. La nueva situación requiere nuevos instrumentos de transmisión de la ideología y un nuevo ordenamiento del saber. Ésta es la razón por la que la reflexión sobre la, metodología se convierte en la cuestión esencial de la reflexión filosófica en general. Según la concepción de la mayoría de los autores de la época, todas las disciplinas científicas y humanísticas necesitan de un método para ser investigadas, enseñadas y transmitidas. En este sentido, el ramismo representa el movimiento culminante de un proceso de reflexión teórico y pedagógico, iniciado por Erasmo y los humanistas, que había prestado gran atención a la ratio studiorum. La nota distintiva del ramismo consiste en que...
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Eloges grecs de Rome: Discours traduits et commentés éd. par Laurent Pernot, and: Dire l’évidence: Philosophie et rhétorique antiques éd. par Carlos Lévy et Laurent Pernot ↗
Abstract
Reviews Laurent Pemot ed., Eloges grecs de Rome: Discours traduits et commentés (Paris: Les Belles Lettres 1997) pp. 198. Carlos Lévy et Laurent Pemot eds, Dire l'évidence: Philosophie et rhétorique antiques (Paris: Ed. L'Harmattan, 1997) pp. 448. The first book contains in translation two epideictic orations: the famous speech To Rome, (Eis ‘Ρώμην, en l'honneur de Rome, Or. xxvi) delivered in 144 by the then still young and unknown sophist Aelius Aristides when sojourning in Rome, and an oration written by an unknown sophist about 247 in honour of Philippus Arabs and transmitted under Aristides' name, Praise of the Emperor, (Eis Βασιλέα, En l'honneur de l'empereur, Or.xxxv). Both speeches belong to the genre of encomium, concern the Roman empire, especially its centre, the city of Rome and its emperor. Hence the part éloges...de Rome in the title, whereas the word grecs refers to the source language but also, at the same time, to the fact that these praise-speeches are written from a Greek point of view. The two speeches are published here for the first time in a French translation. It is a pleasure to read this version but I must leave a verdict on its Frenchness to others. The strongest point of this book, I think, is its introduction. It shows Pemot as an accomplished critic of the scholarly discussions on these speeches as well as—and this is more important—as a master in analyzing and discussing them. Of course, much of what Pemot says here, is already known from his Rhétorique de l'éloge dans le monde grécoromain (Paris 1993), where one may also find detailed comparisons with other speeches by Aristides, something which would be out of place in an introduction meant for a larger public. But it is very pleasing to have a thorough discussion of these speeches by themselves. It was also a good idea for Pemot to take two orations both concerning Roman power which at the same time are different© The International Society for the History of Rhetoric, Rhetorica, Volume XVII, Number 2 (Spring 1999) 213 RHETORICA 214 from a rhetorical point of view: Aristides is, although (probably) about 26 years old, a talented speaker, who knows how to play with the rules of the genre, whereas the author of the second speech closely follows these rules. It has been suggested, therefore, that this oration is just a school exercise but Pemot finds many reasons not to accept this suggestion. So the author must have been a mediocre orator who was not able to transcend the rules of his art. Thus one can apply the scheme of the basilikos logos from the handbook of Menander Rhetor to explain almost every feature of this oration. Aristides, however, also knows the rules of the genre and Pemot duly annotates many occasions on which what Aristides says and the topoi he uses can be compared with the theory known from rhetorical handbooks and the practice of older orations. But, to take one example, whereas when praising a city it is almost obligatory to deal with its history, Aristides ignores this aspect. The second publication under discussion concerns 21 contributions to a 1995 colloquium organised by the French branch of our Society under the theme of Dire l'évidence. Already its subtitle, Philosophie et rhétorique antiques, shows that a part of this collection is of an immediate interest to readers of this journal but other articles also offer important insights. The volume contains four sections, évidence et argumentation, l'évidence, obstacle ou accès à la connaissance?, images, imagination^ and l'ineffable. The connotations of the word évidence are manifold and those of its Latin source, evidentia, also, or even more, because it is a Ciceronian translation of the Greek enargeia. In the very first paper Barbara Cassin discusses the differences between the philosophical use of enargeia as an notion "liée à la vision, critère de soi, index sui, liée au vrai et au nécessairement vrai", whereas "l'évidence des orateurs est ï'energeia comme...un effet de logos,..liée au 'comme si' de la vision, à la vision comme fiction". It will...
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222 RHETORICA substitute aux mots orator ou poeta celui de pictor et applique à la peinture des analyses rhétorico-poétiques" (pp. 19-20). The result amounts to a digest of everything in classical rhetoric relevant to the visual arts. The full extent of Junius's re-elaboration of rhetorical theory can be partly gauged by the subjects treated in the editor's invaluable commentary section, reduced to key terms: imitatio, ars, phantasia, ratio imitandi ("une problématique cicéronienne"), ut pictura poesis (including the roles of inspiration, enthusiasm, imitation, illusion, emotion), and contemplatio (the function of the spectator, aesthetic and moral). Every self-respecting historian of rhetoric should make sure his departmental library buys this remarkable edition. And we keenly look forward to its completion. Brian Vickers ETH Zurich James Robert Goetsch Jr, Vico's Axioms: The Geometry of the Human World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) xiv + 173pp. Goetsch undertakes a defense of Vico against his "friends", such as Isaiah Berlin, who are mainstream historians of philosophy; he is concerned to give Vico credit for a solid, systemic mode of inquiry, rather than the wildly eclectic mass of detail, chaotically presented, attributed to Vico by Berlin, (p. xi). His defense of Vico becomes a defense of rhetoric, for Goetsch insists on the significance of fundamental rhetorical assumptions and strategies of analysis of language structure and process as they frame an investigation. Vico's hermeneutics are, for Goetsch, a rhetorical hermeneutics. The defense of rhetoric is also an abandonment of the hegemonous strategies of definition and the standard issues of history of philosophy. To give a perspicuous, inclusive account of Vico's project, it is necessary to focus on the axioms, the key structuring principles, Vico lists in his New Science (p. 106); Axioms 1-22, 106 are common (koinoi), Axioms 33-144 particular Reviews 223 topics (p. 128). But, in Goetsch's rhetorical reading, the Vichian axioms, or elementi, or degnita (things worth thinking), are peculiarly rhetorical uses of the topoi,of the topical connections of the general and the particular (p. 108). The commonplace tradition illumines Vichian method (p. 104), because "topical storehouses" provide the arguments, enthymemes, motivating the most basic civil operations. The topoi, as both bins, spaces, organising argument and the contents of the bins represent a mode of connection in which both source and goal are in the domain of the communis. "Common sense", as a body of beliefs and dispositions held by a historical community, is a primary interest for Vico (p. 96), as the origin of the principles which illumine human history; Vico reads the axioms as "causes of customs" (p. 108). The description of common sense, as the summary of the common practices and values of the communities, is the goal of all historical initiatives and arguments. Moreover, when Vico claims that Providence, "like the queen she is", works only through civil institutions and practices, he selects irony as primary trope; history is not simply the product of self-conscious personal impulses; rather, particular institutional effects and strategies are often the unintended consequences of radically different, earlier dispositions and practices. Goetsch claims Vico's strategy represents a "recovery of an authentic Aristotelian rhetoric" (p. 106), a more "dynamic" Aristotle (pp. 54, 114). Goetsch reads the opening statement in the Rhetoric, that rhetoric is the antistrophe of dialectic, as pointing to the peculiarly heavy engagement with civic consciousness and civil effect of rhetoric (p. 108). Goetsch thus claims to recontextualise Vico in an Aristotelian tradition which is not that of a purely abstract, logical systematicity, the dominant reading of Aristotle in history of philosophy, but of a rhetorical, topical systematicity; a "rhetorical" reading of Aristotle, he claims, "corrects" the "scholastic" tendencies of Aristotle's logical interests (p. 77). Thus Goetsch asserts he may place Vico in a history of ideas aligned with the peculiar interests in philosophy of language and the philosophy of psychology represented in such twentieth-century figures as Ernst Cassirer, Ernesto Grassi, and Owen Barfield, to name three of the mentors frequently invoked by Goetsch.. At all times, Goetsch privileges, and claims Vico 224 RHETORICA privileges, "organic" wholeness (p. 116), valuing the image, imagination, ingenium, temporicity, historicity—a...
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De Pictura Veterum Libri Tres (Roterodami 1694): Edition, traduction et commentaire du livre I per Franciscus Junius ↗
Abstract
220 RHETORICA la religión. El estudio ofrece un minucioso análisis de las obras más importantes de la época, en el que queda de manifiesto la notable influencia del ramismo en Inglaterra. Por último, se realiza una reflexión sobre el supuesto carácter ramista de la Methodica adumbratio Ethicae, de William Temple (1555—1627), mostrando que el autor inglés, influido por la intransigencia metodológica del ramismo, desarrolla un esquema sobre la ética que responde a las instancias de claridad y concisión típicas de la metodología ramista, por lo que se separa en mayor medida que sus contemporáneos del modelo aristotélico, pero no llega a desarrollar plenamente su intento de realizar una ética ramista alejada del pensamiento tradicional. Estamos ante un trabajo interesante, en definitiva, que explica con claridad el papel que tuvo el ramismo en el desarrollo de la cultura de la sociedad burguesa moderna. En este sentido, y pesar de su fugacidad, las teorías de Ramus representan el reflejo de una época de transición entre el antiguo feudalismo y el naciente sistema capitalista. A mi modo de ver, el mérito del trabajo no sólo reside en ayudar a esclarecer las particularidades del método ramista, sino también en relacionar la aparición y evolución del ramismo con las circunstancias históricas y sociales que lo determinan, así como en ofrecer un detallado panorama del pensamiento ramista en Inglaterra. ALFONSO MARTÍN JIMÉNEZ Universidad de Valladolid Franciscus Junius, De Pictura Veterum Libri Très (Roterodami 1694): Edition, traduction et commentaire du livre I, par Colette Nativel (Genève: Librairie Droz, 1996) pp. 725; ill. Franciscus Junius (1571-1677), son of the distinguished Protestant theologian Franciscus Junius (1545-1602), has been fortunate in recent years. His De Pictura veterum, first published in 1637, was given a sumptuous and expensive edition ($240.00) in 1991 for the University of California Press by Keith Aldrich, Reviews 221 Philipp Fehl, and Raina Fehl. Their two handsomely produced volumes (418 and 611 pages, respectively) included Junius's slightly revised text of The Painting of the Ancients in his own English translation (1638), together with the Catalogus Architectorum and other artificers from the second, expanded Latin edition (1694) in Aldrich's translation. With ample notes and extensive indices, this editorial trio set standards which one imagined could hardly be excelled. But now Colette Nativel has started to produce an even more elaborate edition. Her first volume, running to over 700 pages, is devoted to Book One, which constitutes about a quarter of Junius's text. She gives a brief introduction (8 pages), situating De pictura veterum in the tradition of classical rhetoric: then follows a detailed and lavishly illustrated biography of Junius (61 pages), and an illuminating account the book's evolution and reception (24 pages). The text itself is presented on facing pages, French and Latin (292 pages), with an extraordinary amount of annotation. For the Latin text notes indicate the hundreds of additional passages (many of them quotations from classical treatises) added in the 1694 edition. The translation pages add notes identifying all of Junius's quotations, with extensive quotations in Greek and Latin. One can only admire both the editor's diligence and the publisher's devotion to scholarly standards in producing such a meticulous and costly-to-print apparatus. As if this were not enough, Dr. Nativel then adds a commentary section, running to 183 closely-printed pages, an extensive bibliography (96 pages), and Index locorum and an Index nominum. All students of rhetoric and art theory are deeply indebted to the editor for this magnificent edition, the introduction concisely shows just how "cet ars pingendi puise sa pensée dans Pars dicendi" (p.15), drawing on the richness of ancient treatises on rhetoric just at those points where analogies were made between discourse and image: "C'est un detour de comparaisons où les arts visuels servent de référents aux arts de la parole que Junius trouve ses théories picturales. Il élabore sa réflexion suivant un double procès: tantôt, il se contente d'utiliser la comparaison qu il rencontre...
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A hybrid <i>technê</i> of the soul?: Thoughts on the relation between philosophy and rhetoric in <i>Gorgias</i> and <i>Phaedrus</i> ↗
Abstract
Whether Plato coined the word rhetoric, what is striking is that he was the first to attempt to make it disappear.' My argument may well add some strength to Schiappa's contention that Plato may have coined the word by suggesting that to make something disappear, one would need to be dealing with something like a well-defined object (though entering directly into the heart of these often heated debates is not the focus of this essay) (Did Plato Coin the Word Rhetorike?; Neo-Sophistic Rhetorical Criticism). If Plato desires to make disappear, as I shall argue he did at least in the Gorgias, then it behooves him to have a well-articulated target of concern. If it is the case that naming a set of practices helps to constitute those practices as an object domain, then it makes sense to suggest that Plato has cause to name a set of practices rhetoric so as to be able to deal with them.
February 1999
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Abstract: The Commentary on the Psalms is the least studied of Cassiodorus's sixth-century works. Close knowledge of it significantly alters our understanding of the Introduction to Divine and Human Readings, with which it should be paired. The Commentary serves to establish the Bible as the source for all the liberal arts and a model for rhetorical imitation. This essay examines the eloquence Cassiodorus discovers in the Psalter, focussing in particular on those passages which he marked with the marginal notation for Rhetoric: RT. Cassiodorus finds examples of deliberative, demonstrative, and judicial oration in the Psalter. His elucidation of them does not simply preserve classical lore,but rather presents a sophisticated alternative to pagan theory and practice. A fuller understanding of Cassiodorus's view helps us to grasp his formative influence on medieval culture, rhetoric, and poetics.
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Raffaele Regio's 1492 <i>Quaestio</i> doubting Cicero's authorship of the <i>Rhetorica ad Herennium:</i> Introduction and Text ↗
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Abstract: Fifteenth-century rhetoricians inherited from the Middle Ages the belief that Cicero was the author of the work generally known as theRhetorica ad Herennium. This assumption was challenged in 1491 in a shortQuaestio by Raffaele Regio (1440?-1520). He refutes the three main arguments advanced for Cicero's authorship, but in the end declares that he will leave the matter undecided. Regio's claims did not settle the matter,which was still being debated two centuries later.
January 1999
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Abstract
In the Christian society and culture of England before the Norman Conquest literary education was centred on grammar. The extant texts reflect an educational system which by no means neglected rhetorical education—but the classical ars bene dicendi was apparently basically unknown. Anglo-Saxon England thus provides a test case for the continuation and elaboration of alternatives for classical rhetorical teaching. It is argued that, besides the influence of pedagogical considerations and Germanic poetical devices, the background of Anglo-Saxon rhetorical strategies is to be sought in an extended grammatical curriculum. Instruction in the praeexercitamina may have been included in this curriculum. The figures and tropes contained in the grammars for the purpose of text interpretation were certainly studied, and they were also employed in the production of literature. Of utmost importance was the creative use of rhetorical techniques which were deduced from model texts by way of grammatical enarratio.
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Abstract
The Commentary on the Psalms is the least studied of Cassiodorus’s sixth-century works. Close knowledge of it significantly alters our understanding of the Introduction to Divine and Human Readings, with which it should be paired. The Commentary serves to establish the Bible as the source for all the liberal arts and a model for rhetorical imitation. This essay examines the eloquence Cassiodorus discovers in the Psalter, focussing in particular on those passages which he marked with the marginal notation for Rhetoric: RT. Cassiodorus finds examples of deliberative, demonstrative, and judicial oration in the Psalter. His elucidation of them does not simply preserve classical lore, but rather presents a sophisticated alternative to pagan theory and practice. A fuller understanding of Cassiodorus’s view helps us to grasp his formative influence on medieval culture, rhetoric, and poetics.
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Raffaele Regio’s 1492 Quaestio doubting Cicero’s authorship of the Rhetorica ad Herennium: Introduction and Text ↗
Abstract
Fifteenth-century rhetoricians inherited from the Middle Ages the belief that Cicero was the author of the work generally known as the Rhetorica ad Herennium. This assumption was challenged in 1491 in a short Quaestio by Raffaele Regio (14407–1520). He refutes the three main arguments advanced for Cicero’s authorship, but in the end declares that he will leave the matter undecided. Regio’s claims did not settle the matter, which was still being debated two centuries later.
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Short Reviews Cheryl Glenn, Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997) xii + 235pp. Glenn's purpose in Rhetoric Retold is feminist and cartographic: to remap the history of rhetoric by putting female rhetoricians and rhetorical practices solidly on the map. She challenges patriarchal rhetorical history at the center by including the voices of women who practiced rhetoric from the margins. Her hope is to revitalize "rhetorical theory by shaking the conceptual foundations of rhetorical study itself" (p. 10). Glenn's method derives from historiography, feminism, and gender studies. She uses "resistant readings...of the paternal narrative" and "female-authored rhetorical works" as well as "broad definitions of rhetoric" (p. 4). Her rationale for subject selection appears in Chapter One. Thereafter, she develops each historical chapter by overviewing cultural conditions of the period, describing women's place in those worlds, sketching the nature of patriarchal rhetoric at the time, then presenting the rhetorical activities of some exceptional women who were able to speak and write from the margins. Whenever she can, she highlights significant "points of contact" across all of the subjects she considers. Chapter Two examines pretheoretical sources of rhetorical consciousness in ancient Greece. Her reading of Sappho and female Phythagorians (Theano, Phintys, Perictyone) present rhetorical avenues that mainstream tradition never explored. She details public (argumentative) rhetoric (Corax, Gorgias, and Isocrates), then treats Aspasia as a silent heartbeat at the center of Pericles's intellectual circle. Aspasia was as likely a source of inspiration to Socrates and Plato as was Diotima. Glenn examines© The International Society for the History of Rhetoric, Rhetorica, Volume XVII, Number 1 (Winter 1999) 89 RHETORICA 90 tradition (Cicero and Quintilian), challenging this tradition with voices from the margins. Here we meet Vergima, Cornelia, Hortensia, Amasia Senta, Gaia Afrania, Sempronia, Fulvia, and Octavia. In Chapter Three Glenn details Christian cultural dynamics, calling the Bible the "ur-text of history, wisdom, and doctrine" (p. 75). She discusses inheritance laws, conceptions of women's bodies, the theoretical equality of men and women in the eyes of Christ, yet the practical inequality of doctrine and of Christian institutional piety. Examining representations of women in medieval literature (imaginative, Marian, inspirational), Glenn contends that women never received "the full range of human feelings or characteristics" (p. 86). Women appear as inferior to rational men, some of whose (Augustine, Jerome) rhetorical practices (ars poetica, ars dictaminis, ars praedicandi) Glenn treats next in some detail. She shows how a small group of religious women achieved some release from the cultural hold, such as Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, whose unusual rhetorical practices Glenn tells in illuminating detail. In Chapter Four Glenn overviews the general nature of Renaissance culture, tracing the patriarchal bias of laws, the nature of women's work both outside and inside the home, the inferiority of women's bodies when compared to men's, and more. She situates classical and Christian humanism, showing the usefulness of humanistic education in society and religious life. Some special English women, according to Glenn, received humanistic training, and she traces their (modest) literary accomplishments. She contrasts these women to the fake representations of women in literature; some women appear overly assertive (Edmund Spenser's Britomart, Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth), while others appear willfully disobedient (Juliet, Desdemona, the Duchess of Malfi). Such images reinforced women's exclusion from the public world of traditional Ciceronian rhetorical practice, though the entry of educated women became more probable as rhetoric and poetics converged in early English rhetorics that focused on style and eloquence. Glenn shows how three exceptional woman each used their own versions of rhetorical eloquence to make an impact on the public Reviews 91 from the margins—Margaret More, Anne Askew, and Queen Elizabeth I. In Chapter Five Glenn stresses the performative value of her project: the "promise that rhetorical histories and theories will eventually (and naturally) include women" (p. 174). She presents "four ways...[to] work together to realize...[these] performative...goals": we must recognize our common ground, "explore various means of collaboration", reevaluate the notion of "silence", and recognize the unlimited opportunities for research in this area (p. 174-78). This was a difficult...
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Abstract
RHETORICA 108 from "the people", the tabloids, the dirty political infighting. Rhetoric awaits its Disraeli who can persuade the appropriate personages to bring rhetoric back to the life that damaged it in the first place, the life that is its life, for better or worse or otherwise. BRUCE KRAJEWSKI Laurentian University Craig Waddell, ed., Landmark Essays on Rhetoric and the Environment, Landmark Essays 12 (Mahwah, NJ: Hermagoras Press-Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998) xix + 239 pp. The eleven essays reprinted in this collection map the ecotone where rhetoric and environmental politics meet. Though individual essays resist easy classification, the collection reveals important focuses of work in this sub-field. Several essays trace and evaluate characteristic lines of argument in environmental policy debates. In the lead essay, for instance, Robert Cox glosses Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's account of the locus of the irreparable in The New Rhetoric, drawing out the strategic and ethical implications of, among other deployments of this locus, "forewarnings" of irreparable damage to the environment. Jonathan Lange analyzes five characteristics of the "logic of interaction" between the timber industry and environmentalists engaged in the debate over protecting Northern spotted owl habitat in old growth forests. Other essays study (mis)constructions of audience. Craig Waddell argues that Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb failed to "reconstitute" its audience because it did not articulate "a more comprehensive [ecocentric] framework" to replace egocentric and anthropocentric ethical frameworks (p. 68), while Tarla Rai Peterson and Cristi Choat Horton study ranchers' sense of stewardship for the land "to show how communication that responds attentively to an audience's perspective can assist in retrieving potential points of affiliation among diverse groups" (p 168). Reviews 109 Still other essays focus on the ethos of environmental advocates. M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer consider the charge of hysteria lodged against Rachel Carson and other environmentalists, arguing that the "environmentalist and the nature writer, in becoming 'voices for the earth'...represent the return of the repressed, the coming into consciousness of that which, having been avoided for far too long, has created an illness within the mind-body system of earthly existence" (p. 37). However, they note that "like any political position, environmentalism seeks to restrict access to certain subject positions just as surely as it opens access to others" (p. 50), and like Peterson and Horton, they warn against this exclusionary tendency. Finally, some essays view environmental debates through wide cultural lenses. For instance, Christine Oravec argues that the debate over damming Hetch Hetchy valley in Yosemite National Park was settled not so much by the explicit arguments of the conservationists and preservationists engaged in the debate as by the alignment of conservationists' arguments with "prevailing presumptions concerning the nature of the 'public' and its relationship to the natural environment", presumptions characteristic of early twentieth-century Progressive politics (p. 17). All of these essays conceive of environmental rhetoric in deliberative terms, focusing on conflicts over public policy (individual essay titles bristle with terms such as "controversy", "confrontation", "conflict", "dispute", and "opposition" or evoke contentious deliberative situations). Accordingly, this collection provides an excellent introduction to rhetorical studies of environmental policy debates. But readers should keep in mind that there are more discourses on earth than can be studied from any one perspective. The disciplinary rhetoric of environmental sciences and the epideictic rhetoric of much American nature writing are just two of the landscapes that lie for the most part beyond the bounds of this particular map. H. Lewis Ulman The Ohio State University ...
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Comparative Rhetoric by George A. Kennedy. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press (1998): ix + 238 pp. Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition by Janet M. Atwill. Cornell UP, 1998. xvi; 235 pp. Landmark Essays on Aristotelian Rhetoric edited by Richard Leo Enos and Lois Peters Agnew. New Jersey: Hermagoras Press of Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998.265 pp. Rhetoric and the Arts of Design by David S. Kaufer and Brian S. Butler. Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996.322 pp. The Rhetoric Canon edited by Brenda Deen Schildgen. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1997.251 pp.
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(1999). Aristotle on epideictic: The formation of public morality. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 5-23.