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1383 articlesJanuary 1999
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What Socrates said—and why Gorgias and Polus did not respond: A reading of Socrates’ definition of rhetoric in<i>Gorgias</i>461–466 ↗
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T his paper is an effort-which none of the characters in the dialogue maketo listen carefully to Socrates' most famous attack on rhetoric. This locus classicus is found in the Gorgias within the opening pages (461-466) of Socrates' conversation with Polus. In it he charges that rhetoric, Gorgias' skill, is a defective art and no more than base sucking up or flattery. He completes his condemnation by likening rhetoric, as Shakespeare's Faulconbridge does, a millennium and a half later, to sweet, sweet poison for the age's tooth, (King John, I, I), a debased confection in place of healthy food. It is not only characters in the dialogue who fail to make a searching inquiry into Socrates' condemnation. Many rhetors since that time, smarting from the sting of what Plato has Socrates say about rhetoric, have taken the passage as unproblematically expressing a blanket condemnation of rhetoric. But I believe it is not necessary to read Socrates' condemnation of rhetoric in that fashion, and I attempt a reading in which the condemnation is less absolute. In the interest of disclosure I should say that I undertake this analysis in an Aristotelian spirit. My interest in the passage began with Aristotle's allusion to it in the opening sentence of his Art of Rhetoric (1354a) and continues to be guided by what I believe Aristotle has to teach about rhetoric. It is also guided by a realization that Plato, a dramatic poet, achieves his effect, in dramas that have little overt action, almost entirely by rhetoric, that is, by the creation of a coherent voice through which we approach each character. Whatever Plato's ultimate understanding of the relation of wisdom and art (Roochnik), any argument that Plato has contempt for rhetoric must, sooner or later, deal with his constant and loving use of it in his work. The passage in question forms the first part-about a fifth of the bulk-of Socrates' dialogic encounter with Polus. This paper is thus limited to reflection on a fragmentary part of that encounter, for Socrates' condemnation of rhetoric emerges in four Stephanus pages. Nevertheless, it is a fragment that, like all of the pieces of a Platonic dialogue, spirals into place in the larger encounter and beyond that in the dialogue as a whole. I argue that our assessment of Socrates' argument is decisively affected by our grasp of the dramatic context in which it appears in several decisive ways. One obvious event that demands dramatic explanation is Polus' intervention in what had been a discussion between Gorgias himself and Socrates and his subsequent ineptness. Indeed, Polus is so inept that the pages barely qualify as part of a conversation, or at least a conversation with Polus. What we have is
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Identification and dissociation in rhetorical exposé: An analysis of St. Irenaeus’<i>Against Heresies</i> ↗
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A though there was a hiatus of several decades in the early part of the Twentieth Century in which little work was done on the rhetoric of the early Church, there has been a healthy revival of interest in the subject and the number of studies is growing rapidly. Robert Grant's Greek Apologists of the Second Century, Averil Cameron's Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, Peter Brown's The Body and Society and Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity, Harry Gamble's Books and Readers in the Early Church, George Kennedy's Greek Rhetoric Under Christian Emperors, William Schoedel's Philosophy and Rhetoric in the Adversus Haereses of and Pheme Perkins' Ireneus and the Gnostics: Rhetoric and Composition in Adversus Haereses Book One represent only a very limited listing of recent work. Some of these works present studies of relatively long sweeps of time (Cameron, Brown, Gamble, Kennedy), while others focus on restricted time frames (Grant) or individuals (Schoedel, Perkins). I come to this body of scholarship not as an historian but as a rhetorical theorist interested in studying the rhetoric practiced by leaders within orthodoxies. The development of the early Church and the rhetoric used by those instrumental in its formation provide an excellent case study from which characteristics of such rhetoric can be gleaned and used to explain the formation of orthodoxies in our own day. A typical episode in the rhetoric of orthodoxy is to identify those who appear to be legitimate insiders, but are not, and to expose them as alien. In the last quarter of the Second Century C.E., Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, wrote an extended treatise, consisting of five books, titled Adversus Haereses, commonly titled Against Heresies in English and abbreviated as AH. 1 The purpose of this work, he says, is to protect the sheep from certain men who outwardly are covered with sheep's clothing (Irenaeus AH I, Preface, 2). The first book contains a summary of the tenets of various heretical sects, the second consists of arguments, based on reason, that destroy the validity of these heretical doctrines, and the three remaining books set forth the doctrines of the orthodox faith in contrast with the teachings of the heretics. My present objective is to investigate the rhetorical strategies employed by Irenaeus and in so doing to describe a theory of rhetorical expose. Because Against Heresies is quite long and because much of the expose portion of the work is in Book I, I have restricted my analysis primarily to that book.
1999
November 1998
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Research Article| November 01 1998 Short Reviews George Kennedy,Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Crosscultural Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).Andrea A. Lunsford ed.. Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995).Takis Poulakos,Speaking for the Polis: Isocrates' Rhetorical Education (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1997), xii +128 pp.David Roochnik,Of Art and Wisdom: Plato's Understanding of Techne (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996) xii + 300 pp.Peter Auksi,Christian Plain Style: The Evolution of a Spiritual Ideal (Monfreal:McGill-Queen's University Press, 1995).Carole Levin and Patricia R. Sullivan eds. Political Rhetoric, Power, and Renaissance Women, (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1995) xiv + 293 pp.Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle,Loyola's Acts: The Rhetoric of the Self(Berkeley: University of Califomia Press, 1997) xv+274pp.L. L. Gaillet ed., Scottish Rhetoric and Its Influences (Mahwah, N.J.: Hermagoras Press, 1998) xviii + 238pp.Thomas W. Benson,Rhetoric and Political Culture in Nineteenth- Century America (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997) 200 pp. Mary Garrett, Mary Garrett School of Communication, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Shirley Sharon-Zisser, Shirley Sharon-Zisser Dept of English, Tel Aviv Univeristy, Ramat Aviv 69 978, Israel Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar C. Jan Swearingen, C. Jan Swearingen Dept of English, Texas A & M University, College Station, Texas 77843, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Edward Schiappa, Edward Schiappa Dept of Communication, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Jameela Lares, Jameela Lares Dept of English, University of Southem Mississippi, Southem Station Box 5037, Hattiesburg, Mississippi 39406, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Victor Skretkowicz, Victor Skretkowicz Dept of English, University of Dundee, Dundee DDl 4HN, Scotland Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Don Paul Abbott, Don Paul Abbott Dept of English, University of Califomia, Davis, Califomia 95616, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Paul Bator, Paul Bator Dept of English, Stanford University, Stanford, Califomia 94305, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Thomas Miller Thomas Miller Dept of English, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1998) 16 (4): 431–454. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.4.431 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 Mary Garrett, Shirley Sharon-Zisser, C. Jan Swearingen, Edward Schiappa, Jameela Lares, Victor Skretkowicz, Don Paul Abbott, Paul Bator, Thomas Miller; Short Reviews. Rhetorica 1 November 1998; 16 (4): 431–454. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.4.431 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 1998, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1998 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
September 1998
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Reviews 445 L. L. Gaillet ed.z Scottish Rhetoric and Its Influences (Mahwah, N.J.: Hermagoras Press, 1998) xviii + 238pp. Scottish Rhetoric and Its Influences, edited by L. L. Gaillet and introduced by Winifred Bryan Horner, offers up an eclectic collection of conference papers on eighteenth and nineteenthcentury rhetoric delivered originally at the 1995 ISHR meeting in Edinburgh. Save one, the contributors to this handsome volume in Jerry Murphy's Hermagoras Press Series all represent North American colleges and universities. The chapters are divided somewhat unevenly into two parts, thirteen papers on "Reexamining Influential Figures" and four papers on "The Rhetoric of North American Composition". Among the papers that stand out in the first grouping is Susan Jarratt's "Ekphrastic Rhetoric and National Identity in Adam Smith's Rhetoric Lectures". Applying ekphrasis as the "verbal descriptions of visual representations", Jarratt looks at Smith's own example of historical description, Jan Steele's Het offer van Iphigenia (The Sacrifice of Iphigenia), in order to illustrate Smith's rhetorical lesson in lecture 16 as "a reiteration of the use of visual arts by ancient rhetoricians". Constrained from supplying full responses to a series of critical cultural identity questions that launch the essay, Jarratt nevertheless supplies an imaginative portrayal of Smith's belief in what Jarratt characterizes as the "usefulness of visual theories for interpreting rhetorical texts". Herman Cohen's "Rhetoric and Freedom in the Scottish Treatment of the History of Rhetoric" and Linda FerreiraBuckley 's "'Scotch Knowledge' and the Formation of Rhetorical Studies in 19th-Century England", serve this volume title well in terms, respectively, of explicating Blair's rhetorical appraisal of "Roman rhetoric" and "Greek eloquence" in succinct contrast to that of Charles Rollin's appraisal at the College Royale in Paris, and in terms of demonstrating the careful results of archival investigation into the curriculum at University College, London, results which detail the "formative influence of Scottish education...on post-secondary English studies in England". Murray Pittock, the lone U.K. representative, weaves an enjoyable essay that frames a broad enlightenment context for the importance and impact of Scotland's student debating clubs and 446 RHETORICA societies as well as speculates briefly upon the ripple-effect upon modern speech curricula in the States. Also noteworthy in Part I are Don Abbott's findings on Blair's reception "abroad", Gary Lane Hatch's careful consideration of Blair's students' notes, and Sandra Sarkela's cogent analysis of sermons delivered in opposition to colonial independence. Notable in Part II, Beth Hewett and Andrea Lunsford, respectively, re-assess the impact of Samuel P. Newman's A Practical System of Rhetoric and Alexander Bain's rhetorics upon pedagogical practice in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in U.S. colleges and universities. Although arguing that Newman exhibits "a more modern understanding of composition pedagogy" than we might expect, Hewett acknowledges his modest "influence". Lunsford's depiction of Bain's impact is extended here with revealing reconsideration of Bain's autobiography that reinforces his "devotion to students' access to education". The terrain covered in this collection will appear familiarly to scholars in the field. Students of the subject will gain a foothold understanding of the broad impact of Scottish rhetoric that should lead to further discussion and inquiry. Unfortunately, there is no colloquy between or among authors of these chapters to spark further debate, for example, about competing channels of influence upon rhetoric in the early American colleges. Paul Bator Stanford University ...
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Reviews 443 historians than for those studying the impact of rhetorical tradition, practice, or survival. Its lack of focus renders it uninviting, but its very specialized, well-documented articles have much to offer. Victor Skretkowicz University ofDundee Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle, Loyola's Acts: The Rhetoric of the Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) xv+274pp. In Loyola's Acts, Marjory O'Rourke Boyle demonstrates that Ignacio Loyola's account of his life is deeply influenced by the traditions and techniques of classical rhetoric. In doing so, she challenges "the premise of modern interpretation, which regards Loyola's life as "an autobiographical narrative" which is "a factually historical document" (p. 2). In Boyle's view, Loyola's Acts {Acta patris Ignatii) is far from an autobiography in the twentiethcentury sense of that term. The work is, rather, is an example of what Boyle calls "the rhetoric of the self", a variation of the classical genre of epideictic oratory. The epideictic character of the Acts determines the text: "Although epideictic rhetoric assumed the matters for praise or blame to be true, it could by the rules exploit the techniques of fiction, so that every detail was not necessarily factual" (p. 3). So it is with Loyola's life, a narrative that is morally true, but not necessarily empirically accurate. As epideictic rhetoric, rather than autobiography, the Acts is an exercise in praise and blame: praise of God's glory and condemnation of Loyola's vainglory. Although the title suggests that Loyola's Acts is about Loyola's life, Boyle's book is more properly about Renaissance rhetoric broadly conceived. Boyle shows how Loyola's narrative is dependent upon the writings of Cicero, Quintilian, Augustine, Petrarch, Erasmus, and the many other authorities of the rhetorical culture of early-modern Europe. So great is this dependence that Boyle maintains "Loyola's piety is established in the renaissance revival of that rhetorical culture" (p. 9). To support this contention she advances an impressive display of evidence from Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance theological, 444 RHETORICA philosophical, and literary sources together with contemporary scholarship from the corresponding disciplines. This display of erudition is all the more remarkable because it is presented with concision and clarity. These are two qualities often absent from current humanistic prose but, as Boyle reminds us, both explicitly and by example, clarity is a virtue of classical rhetoric (p. 5). One result of Boyle's broad intellectual and cultural approach to the Acts is that Loyola himself seems removed from his own narrative. This is a necessary consequence of analyzing the Acts as rhetoric rather than autobiography. Boyle contends that Loyola refuses a "prominent authorial role" and is therefore quintessentially a type rather than an individual (pp. 148-49). This preference for the archetypal over the individual facilitates Loyola's presentation of the broad epideictic themes of praise and blame. Thus in each of the four chapters ("The Knight Errant," "The Ascetic," "The Flying Serpent," and "The Pilgrim"), Boyle considers the qualities and circumstances of Loyola's character that offer edification for readers of the Acts. As instances of epideictic rhetoric the episodes depicted do not so much represent a literal account of events in Loyola's life as they present opportunities for demonstrative oratory. A good deal of recent scholarship has illuminated the ways in which rhetoric has exercised a formative influence on Renaissance literature. Although much has been done in this area, we probably still do not fully appreciate just how pervasive was rhetoric's role in the Renaissance. Boyle has certainly advanced this appreciation by offering a rhetorical reading of a work presumed to be autobiographical, a reading informed by the work's cultural and intellectual context, rather than by critical standards derived from other genres and other eras. Moreover, Boyle demonstrates the value of recognizing epideictic rhetoric for what it is, a moral voice which spoke forcefully to antiquity and the Renaissance and, if we attempt to understand it, continues to speak to us today. Thus in Loyola's Acts, Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle presents an impressive addition to our understanding of rhetoric and literature in the Renaissance. Don Paul Abbott University of California, Davis ...
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Reviews 437 culture. Reversing the usual emphasis on the uniformity of classical rhetorical culture, Poulakos's discussions provide ample food for thought, and a number of contentions that readers will quarrel with, such as the claim that for Isocrates rhetoric resumes the role Plato had dreamed for it: "instruction in philosophy" (p. 9). The use of Greek is inconsistently accompanied by translations and transliterations, creating a sense that this is only half written for the Greekless reader. In the general project of reclaiming Isocrates as much more than a hack, Poulakos's work joins that of Kathleen Welch and others in reminding us that neither philosophy nor classics have been particularly kind to rhetoric. C. Jan Swearingen Texas A&M University David Roochnik, Of Art and Wisdom: Plato's Understanding of Techne (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996) xii + 300 pp. Roochnik claims that the conventional view of Plato's texts that link techne with moral knowledge must be modified. According to Roochnik, moral knowledge cannot be analogous to techne without insurmountable logical problems resulting. Roochnik reads many of Socrates' arguments in Plato's early texts as proving that wisdom cannot be rendered technical. Because wisdom is not a techne, Plato wrote dialogues rather than technical treatises to illustrate the performance of nontechnical wisdom. The book is organized into four lengthy chapters accompanied by four useful appendices. Chapter one provides a thorough examination of the preplatonic meanings of techne in Homer, Solon, Aeschylus, Sophocles, the Hippocratic writings, Gorgias, Isocrates, and Anaximenes of Lampsacus. The chapter culminates with an examination of the rhetorical techne of the sophists to illustrate the claim that the sophists believe that moral knowledge could be taught as a techne. I note in passing that in his analysis Roochnik accepts the conventional accounts of the rhetorical technai of the sophists that Thomas Cole and I have been doing 438 RHETORICA our best to challenge. While he cites some of our work, he is apparently unpersuaded of the need to revise the conventional account. In chapter two Roochnik reads such Plato commentators as Martha Nussbaum, Paul Woodruff, Daniel Graham, Rosamond Sprague, C. D. C. Reeve, and Terence Irwin, as finding techne in the early dialogues offered as a positive theoretical model for the moral knowledge Socrates seeks. Roochnik contends that while Socrates does seek knowledge of arete, such knowledge cannot be a technical knowledge. Roochnik supports his case by a very careful reading of Socrates' use of the techne analogy in the early dialogues. He concludes that the early dialogues point their readers toward a nontechnical moral knowledge: "It is a Doric harmony of word and deed, a way of life spent seeking wisdom and urging others to do the same. It is a life spent turning a searching eye inward and therefore turning away from the external objects that become the subject matters of the ordinary technai" (p. 176). Chapters three and four contrast the rhetorical knowledge of Gorgias, Protagoras, and Isocrates with the philosophical knowledge sought by Socrates. Roochnik distinguishes between techne! and techne2. Techne! is a "fixed" and formulaic techne akin to mathematics, while Techne2 suggests that one can improve a set of skills without having to use them in a mechanical way. It is this second sense of techne that Roochnik assigns to Protagoras' and Isocrates' rhetorical education. Interestingly, Roochnik notes that what some call "postmodernism" he calls "rhetoric" (p. 11), and that Isocrates' views on rhetoric are "alive and well today" in the texts of such writers as Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty (p. 82). It is precisely because rhetoric pretends to be a moral techne that Plato is compelled to argue against rhetoric. Roochnik argues that "given Plato's conception of techne, rhetoric is not one". Though rhetoric generates nontechnical knowledge, "it is not the nontechnical moral knowledge that Plato thinks can be achieved by the philosopher" (p. 14). The way of Socrates is the search for rules, definitions, and universals (p. 250). Though Socrates may not find any human accounts of such things that survive his Reviews 439 scrutiny, it is the search itself that Plato portrays as exemplifying the life of philosophy. Roochnik says he is motivated, in part, by the...
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Reviews 433 the starting points for quite some time for those interested in other rhetorical traditions. Although Kennedy validates these traditions by placing them under the aegis of Greco-Roman rhetoric, this still constitutes a step forward in our study of world rhetorics, and we can be grateful to him for taking this first, hardest step. Mary Garrett Ohio State University Andrea A. Lunsford ed., Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995). Inscribing women into canons of writing from which they had long been excluded by a male-dominated canon-forging orthodoxy, telling (as a consequence of these inscriptions) new stories, "her" stories as distinct from his-stories, about past traditions of writing and speaking, pointing out what Carol Gilligan (1982) calls the "different voice" of women, those distinctive formal characteristics that distinguish "feminine" from "masculine" uses of language, all those have been standard goals of feminist criticism of the past two decades. In pursuing those goals, Reclaiming Rhetorica positions itself in relation to significant feminist critical projects such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's path-breaking The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) or Elaine Showalter's The New Feminist Criticism (1985) Most of the essays in the volume do, indeed, engage in reclamations of female voices and in the inscriptions of those voices in canons of writing and speech. Susan Jarratt and Rory Ong reconstruct the figure of Aspasia, who had been a teacher of rhetoric in classical Greece, from the fragmentary references to her in male-authored texts, and in the course of doing so, offer a compelling reading of the way in which Aspasia, as represented in Plato's Menexenus, both "exceeds the gender boundaries of Greek citizenship" that excluded women from oratory and is used to 434 RHETORICA "ventriloquize the very principles of exclusion that she challenges" by insisting on the myth of autochtonous birth of the Athenian citizen, which divests women of their reproductive role in the polis (pp. 19-20). Cheryl Glenn argues for redefining the English canon to include The Book of Margery Kempe on the basis not of the gender of its author but of her innovative contribution to narrative technique: the invention of a form in which "female spirituality, selfhood and authorship" converge (p. 59). Some of the essays in the volume underscore the formal and political contributions made by women whose place in the canon has already been recognized such as Marie de France, the author of a manual of ethical instruction for medieval women, Mary Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller, pioneers of women's rights, and twentieth-century intellectuals such as Suzanne Langer and Julia Kristeva. Others carve out a space for the discursive and social achievements of African American public women whose voices had largely been silenced, such as Ida B. Wells, a liberated slave who became a journalist and mounted a verbal anti-lynching campaign (p. 177) and Soujoumer Truth, who "commanded large crowds in an effort to arouse public action on the two most crucial political and social issues of her day -slavery and suffrage" (p. 227). Other essays in the volume address another common concern of feminist criticism: the existence of a distinctive feminine or female mode of language or vision of language. Thus C. Jan Swearingen rereads Plato's Symposium to reconstruct and reclaim Diotima's view of language as animated by "feeling, desire, love, and pity", a view that she identifies with recent insights into "women's ways of knowing" that stand in stark contrast to univocal, masculinist visions of language that have dominated Western thought since Plato (pp. 48-49). Christine Mason Sutherland shows how the rhetorical theory of the seventeenthcentury rhetorician Mary Astell diverges from that of her sources (Lamy and Descartes) in its emphasis on "caring", which is said to be "typical to women's approach to ethics", and its insistence on conversation rather than agonistic confrontation which recent research has associated with a "masculine epistemology" (pp. 113-15). In a similar vein, in her discussion of Mary Wollstonecraft, Jamie Barlowe underscores the latter's belief in Reviews 435 "dialogue" as a discursive form that is appropriate for achieving "feminist aims of effecting changes...
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Reviews 441 discrepancy between ideal simplicity and actual practice, as for instance among the Byzantine iconoclasts who were also patrons of secular art. At the least, this study on the tensions between modes of discourse suggests interesting directions for further study. Jameela Lares University ofSouthern Mississippi Carole Levin and Patricia R. Sullivan eds, Political Rhetoric, Power, and Renaissance Women, (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1995) xiv + 293 pp. This is a collection of essays by different authors on women who either wrote against, or were victimized by, misogynists. It closes where it begins, with Carole Levin and Patricia Sullivan associating Hillary Clinton and four queens: Isabel, Catherine de Médicis, Elizabeth I and Mary II (pp. 7, 275-81). It is a connection made in other papers, but here it is supported by another between the Republican Rev. Pat Robertson and John Knox (pp. 4-5). Where these title essays are destined to be short-lived, the critical essays sandwiched between vary enormously in subject and approach, are learned, and bear re-reading. But as there is no apparent theme to the entire book, and the organization is simply chronological, I try to group the material here into meaningful clusters. Only Jane Donaworth, choosing examples from Madelaine de Scudéry, Margaret Cavendish, Margaret Fell, Bathusa Reginald Makin, and Mary Astell, especially in Part 2 of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1697), deals with the call for a revival of classical rhetorical education for women. Throughout the rest of this book "rhetoric" has other meanings. Daniel Kempton explores how Christine de Pizan teaches women to survive male oppression by 'dissimulation' or hypocrisy in Cité des Dames (1405) and Trésor de la Cité Des Dames. "Rhetoric" means "cant" or "slander" in the demonising of Anne Boleyn that Retha Wamicke describes; in the reiteration of allusions to women as breeding stock that Jo Eldrige Carney identifies in Shakespeare s Henry VIII; and in the representation of women as commodities to 442 RHETORICA be bought, sold, won or lost in the wagers of Puritan Whigs that Arlen Feldwick produces multiple examples of in the royalist Margaret Cavendish's comedies. In balancing the accusations of promiscuousness leveled by Jacobites against Mary II, or eulogies by her supporters, W. M. Spellman urges rejection of conventional seventeenth-century biographical material in order to reassess Mary's active political role in episcopal appointments. There are three essays on Elizabeth I. Ilona Bell contrasts de Feria's and de Quadra's accounts of Elizabeth's "rhetoric of courtship", comparing "Camden's retrospective vision of the virgin queen" (pp. 61, 77). Lena Cowen Orlin collects examples of Elizabeth's "spousal trope", of her "fictional motherhood" of her state and nobles, and her "trope of royal kinship" towards a "figurative family of European sovereigns" (pp. 89-95). Dennis Moore places Henry Howard's unpublished "Dutiful Defence of the Lawful Regiment of Women" (1590) into the context both of other defenses of female rule, and attacks upon it. Elaine Kruse compares propaganda against Hillary Clinton with that used against Catherine de Medicis after the 1572 massacre at Paris, and Marie Antoinette, all vilified on the grounds that they control power. And Elizabeth Mazola sees in Anne Askew's semiautobiographical Examinations her "larger project to educate her accusers about their epistemological faults" (p. 164). In the remaining essays the focus is not on rhetoric so much as on women and politics. Gwynne Kennedy describes Margaret Cavendish's reformist intentions in the History of the Life, Reign and Death of Edward II, where Cavendish repeatedly urges better government in practice rather than rebellion. The fly in the ointment is the Queen's vindictively cruel streak that manifests itself after she gains power: a "rhetorical marginalisation" that ' calls attention to...a disjunction in Isabel's characterization". There is also a separate note on Cavendish's authorship. And finally, Carole Levin describes two case histories of impersonation, the claim by Mary Boynton to be the daughter of Henry VIII and of Anne Burnell to be daughter of Philip II, reviewing the unfortunate consequences waiting those who almost talk their way into power. Although this book is in the SUNY series...
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436 RHETORICA Takis Poulakos, Speakingfor the Polis: Isocrates' Rhetorical Education (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1997), xii +128 pp. Two ambiguities in Takis Poulakos's title provide a synopsis of the themes developed in this slim volume. In Isocrates' time and practice rhetoric was becoming domesticated; by performing classroom exercises students learned the art of speaking for—and not to—the polls. The rhetorical education designated as "Isocrates'" denotes both the rhetorical education Isocrates received and, Poulakos emphasizes, gleaned for himself; and the rhetorical education he crafted for his students. Perhaps the most innovative thesis advanced in Poulakos's re-reading of Isocrates' model speeches and teaching methods is the claim that the Athens Isocrates speaks for was moving away from an an elite, often xenophobic, hegemonic self conception at the end of Pericles' era and toward an acceptance of its diversity, and its need to negotiate with rather than conquer its neighbors. "Isocrates attempted to close the gap separating individual and collective interests as well as the gap separating Athenian and allied interests" (p. 53). Although Pericles' speechwriters were almost all foreigners, they crafted a discourse of Athenian superiority and homogeneity. Isocrates, the native Athenian, developed a curriculum based on assuming difference and thereby the necessity of creating commonality through training in character, agency, political, and social reform. In this, Poulakos locates Isocrates as a synthesizer of earlier divergent and often hostile rhetorical traditions, represented by Gorgias, Protagoras, and Plato. Poulakos traces the growing conceptualization of logos, oikos (as a domestic model for the city and for its discourse), agency, eloquence, reflection, deliberation, and education itself. These common places of Athenian speeches are preserved in Isocrates' speeches. As with Pericles' oration but with perhaps more deliberateness, each of Isocrates' speeches is a handbook of how to make a speech: once committed to memory each of the set themes and stock oppositions would transmit rhetoric about rhetoric and education about education to successive generations, transmitting a common language to an increasingly diverse Reviews 437 culture. Reversing the usual emphasis on the uniformity of classical rhetorical culture, Poulakos's discussions provide ample food for thought, and a number of contentions that readers will quarrel with, such as the claim that for Isocrates rhetoric resumes the role Plato had dreamed for it: "instruction in philosophy" (p. 9). The use of Greek is inconsistently accompanied by translations and transliterations, creating a sense that this is only half written for the Greekless reader. In the general project of reclaiming Isocrates as much more than a hack, Poulakos's work joins that of Kathleen Welch and others in reminding us that neither philosophy nor classics have been particularly kind to rhetoric. C. Jan Swearingen Texas A&M University David Roochnik, Of Art and Wisdom: Plato's Understanding of Techne (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996) xii + 300 pp. Roochnik claims that the conventional view of Plato's texts that link techne with moral knowledge must be modified. According to Roochnik, moral knowledge cannot be analogous to techne without insurmountable logical problems resulting. Roochnik reads many of Socrates' arguments in Plato's early texts as proving that wisdom cannot be rendered technical. Because wisdom is not a techne, Plato wrote dialogues rather than technical treatises to illustrate the performance of nontechnical wisdom. The book is organized into four lengthy chapters accompanied by four useful appendices. Chapter one provides a thorough examination of the preplatonic meanings of techne in Homer, Solon, Aeschylus, Sophocles, the Hippocratic writings, Gorgias, Isocrates, and Anaximenes of Lampsacus. The chapter culminates with an examination of the rhetorical techne of the sophists to illustrate the claim that the sophists believe that moral knowledge could be taught as a techne. I note in passing that in his analysis Roochnik accepts the conventional accounts of the rhetorical technai of the sophists that Thomas Cole and I have been doing ...
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Reviews 439 scrutiny, it is the search itself that Plato portrays as exemplifying the life of philosophy. Roochnik says he is motivated, in part, by the belief that Plato's dialogues "can benefit us in these hypertechnical times" (p. xii). How Plato's writings can benefit us in this regard is unclear, though he appears unsettled by the rise of postmodernism nee rhetoric. Roochnik notes that "philosophy v. rhetoric is a fundamental dispute" that animates the entire book (p. 181). According to Roochnik, rhetoric is not a techne, rhetoric is distinct from philosophy, and Socrates was rhetorical but not a rhetorician. In sum, book offers a marvelously clear and thorough explication of the platonic case against rhetoric with which most readers of this journal are probably all too familiar. Edward Schiappa University ofMinnesota Peter Auksi, Christian Plain Style: The Evolution of a Spiritual Ideal (Montreal:McGill-Queen's University Press, 1995). Professor Auksi contends that there has been no broad study ■z of the Christian plain style in the West, and he proposes to fill the gap by tracing this stylistic ideal from its prehistory in classical rhetoric, through its biblical beginnings, its foundations in Paul and Augustine, its treatment by church fathers, and its fortunes in the middle ages to its culmination in the English Reformation, and particularly the seventeenth century. Such an ambitious study is indeed needed, and Auksi's text at least moves in the direction of its goal. Auksi's overall claim, made in his title and at intervals throughout, is that simplicity "evolves" as an ideal in Christian art, and particularly in Christian discourse. His numerous examples, however, demonstrate just the opposite. Rather than proving causal links between venous stages of an evolution record, Auksi shows that all the theorists ultimately derive their authority from Christ, Paul, and Augustine. It is the example of Christ, the statements in the Pauline epistles and De doctrina Christiana to which Auksi's theorists always return. Even the terms 440 RHETORICA he employs suggest the recursiveness of their enterprise: "renewal or reform" (p. 178), "return ad fontes" (p. 238), "restored or recovered" (p. 268). They also return to a finite number of scriptural commonplaces about the proper employment of classical rhetoric, likening it to the spoils of Egypt refashioned to godly use by the Israelites or to the captive heathen woman who may be married once her head is shaven and her nails pared. Christian plain style proves to be a changeless ideal which is constantly being rediscovered rather than a mutation in the history of rhetoric That there are no dinosaurs in this fossil record other than Christ, Paul, and Augustine is worth noting. Auksi's study unfortunately is compromised by its historical vagueness or even inaccuracy. In spite of the wide readership intended by his broad study, he provides little information as to the particular historical situations of various texts. Thus, for instance, he mentions the Byzantine iconoclastic controversies without any overall framework of dates of parties (pp. 84-86). Indeed, historical figures are inconsistently introduced. We hear for instance of Thomas of Celano (p. 107), but not when he lived nor why his account of Francis of Assisi is important. Throughout, examples are cited in no observable order, as when John Wilkins's late preaching manual is introduced before William Perkins's, albeit "the first and best" (pp. 289, 296). Auksi's terminology also sometimes ignores historical realities. The vexed term "puritan" goes undefined, and is often used either as if it represented a denomination separate but equal to the established Church of England, although there was but one church through the early 1640s in which many "puritans" were also "Anglicans", or as an unexamined synonym for the more enthusiastic sects, as the term was sometimes used at the time. But one asks an historical study to distinguish polemical labels from actual loyalties. Indeed, Auksi's occasional readiness to take his sources at face value leads him to some rather startling factual errors. He says, for instance, that Robert of Melun (f. 1150) "understands Plato's style" (pp. 100-101), when only a translated portion of the Timaeus was available to him. Auksi does however provide...
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The contribution of Cicero’s discussion of facetiae in the De oratore to Renaissance rhetoric and literature has been consistently undervalued.
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Short Reviews George Kennedy, Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Crosscultural Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Comparative rhetoric, the study of rhetoric across different cultural traditions, is a potentially rich, extremely challenging, and thus, largely untouched area of study. Anyone reviewing George Kennedy's book on this subject must begin by commending him for his scholarly dedication and, even more, his courage, in venturing into such a demanding subject. As he describes it in his prologue, comparative rhetoric involves using comparison to identify the universals and the particulars in various rhetorical traditions, and then formulating "a General Theory of Rhetoric that will apply in all societies", with concepts and terms applicable across cultures. Kennedy construes the object of this inquiry equally broadly, defining rhetoric as "a form of energy that drives and is imparted to communication". But Kennedy's comparative rhetoric very quickly becomes something much less ambitious. Kennedy gives pride of place to the terminology and theories of Western rhetoric, not just as a heuristically convenient starting point, but also as the limit of his inquiry. From Kennedy's perspective, the project is one of "test[ingj the applicability of Western rhetorical concepts outside the West" (p. 5). Specifically, to what extent can the rhetorical terminology of the Greco-Roman tradition describe the practices of other traditions? Kennedy makes two highly questionable methodological choices as he pursues this question. First, he rules out serious consideration of rhetorical terms and systems developed by other cultures, even as a categorization of their own practices, on the grounds that they are "unfamiliar" and their use would be "confusing" to the reader. Second, he refuses to explore the 431 432 RHETORICA possibility that Greco-Roman terms or concepts might be rooted in particular presuppositions that are not widely shared across cultures. With these two moves Kennedy has erased the most obvious sources of checks on, correction of, and resistance to his readings of these cultures. The "testing" of Greco-Roman rhetoric is reduced to a simple identification of similarities and differences; as Kennedy puts it, "I see no objection to the use of Western terminology to describe parts of a non-Westem discourse where these are clearly present" (p. 236). This is comparison with no methodological safeguards, and thus no struggle against such ever-present dangers of cross-cultural work as unreflective projection, forced comparison, and unexamined ethnocentrism. Caveat lector. The reader might be surprised to find that the first half of this book, titled "Rhetoric in Societies without Writing", begins with communication in animal societies. This reflects Kennedy's desire to ground rhetoric, not merely in human nature, but in nature itself; "[tjhe existence of elements of invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery in animal communication suggest that they are all natural parts of rhetoric" (p. 220). Kennedy then turns to speculation about the origins of human language, as a bridge to his discussion of rhetorical practices and terms in various non literate societies. The organizational principle here is developmental, for Kennedy believes that Australian aboriginal culture may allow us to see more clearly our (rhetorical) closeness to the animals, and also preserves the early stages of human rhetorical development. The objections to this kind of developmental theorizing have been voiced so often elsewhere that I see no need to reiterate them here. The second half of the book, titled "Rhetoric in Early Literate Cultures", starts with the Ancient Near East, moves to Classical China, then to India, and ends where it all began, with Classical Greece and Rome. In each chapter Kennedy introduces the culture's rhetorical practices, concepts, and theorizings, analyzes some representative examples of oratory or literary composition, and provides references and a bibliography. It is in these introductions to other literatures and the accompanying reference lists that I see one of the greatest values of Kennedy's book. These individual chapters will doubtless be Reviews 433 the starting points for quite some time for those interested in other rhetorical traditions. Although Kennedy validates these traditions by placing them under the aegis of Greco-Roman rhetoric, this still constitutes a step forward in our study of world rhetorics, and we can be grateful to him for taking this...
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From its origins in ancient Greece, Western rhetoric has been embodied in city life. Save for his walk with Phaedrus, Plato's Socrates only practiced his dialectical rhetoric within the walls of Athens and then only for the ennoblement of the republic. So in the Apology, Socrates defends one version of life in the city against another, explaining that in his talk with others, he had been trying to persuade each of you not to have a greater concern for anything you have than for yourselves, that each of you may be the best and wisest person possible, nor to consider the affairs of the city in preference to the well-being of the city itself' (36c5-9; trans. in Kennedy 44). For Plato the one best hope for Athens was embodied in cultivating the character of its citizens. Cultivation of self and the well-being of the city were so closely linked, a link so prominent in classical rhetoric, that Cicero could monumentalize rhetoric's civic dimensions through the figure of the orator's open hand: a gesture of conciliation and cooperation, of civic responsibility and democratic possibility. The open hand of the Ciceronian orator still has hold of imaginations, embodying hopes of communitarianism, democracy, and mutuality. Thomas Farrell, for example, has explained rhetoric's open-handedness as our partisanship for the familiar and, from within the world of the local and particular, movement toward the other (279). Ideally we would always approach others with outstretched arms and open hands. Yet open-handedness no longer embodies the rhetorical activities, perspectives, and values of persons who share life in cities. In the United States, material conditions and mass media representations of postindustrial urban space, as well as expressions of difference, questions of identity, and conflicts over multiculturalism, have overwhelmed the figure's resonance. Suburban sprawl, the proliferation of privatized consumer spaces, and the fortification of inner cities materialize inequalities that empty the open-handed appeal of its genuineness; at the same time, mass media representations of urban spaces as dangerous, decaying, and violent fuel suspicion and caution people against open-handed appeal. Informed by the material and representational realities of cities, the global sameness and commonalty suggested by the open-handed gesture become expressions of a
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T his paper deals with the embodiment in Cicero's De Oratore of a particular rhetorical method. The method is referred to by the Romans as controversia and by the Sophists before them as antilogic and involves the conduct of argument by placing two or more opposing claims in juxtaposition. I will argue that instead of discussing controversia in a formal manner, by abstracting its general nature and detailing its logical parts (diaeresis), Cicero chooses to dramatize controversia in order to transcend abstract principles and allow his students direct access to argument in action. In a word, Cicero chooses to perform the subject, and in so doing to give substance or body to theory and pedagogy. In the process, he also pursues his own most cherished philosophical objective, which is to bring res and verba, the thing and the word into synthesis. I will further suggest that the rhetoric of embodiment which Cicero develops in De Oratore is replete with interesting pedagogical implications. Like much of Cicero's published work, De Oratore was intended to serve as a model for imitation by others (see Axer 59). In this case, the text models both a particular set of rhetorical principles and a distinctive pedagogical stance for teaching them. I am particularly interested in what the pedagogy of De Oratore has to say to us today about an appropriate approach to the teaching of argumentation.' But before I begin with Cicero, De Oratore, antilogic, controversia, and the rhetoric of embodiment, I would go back even further in history, from Rome to the eastern Mediterranean, from the eloquence of Cicero to the arguments of Odysseus, that other man famous for dealing with contention (Odyssey 1.2). You will recall that when Odysseus leaves Calypso after seven years as a captive on her paradisal island, he sails away on a log raft which breaks up in a large storm sent by Poseidon. When it looks as though he is doomed to drown, he laments that all he has accomplished on his way home will perish with him. Would that I had died on the fields of Troy, he cries, where all my deeds would have been noted, praised, and preserved (5.306-12). What Odysseus is concerned with here is his kleos: his fame, honor, stature, renown, that standard heroic obsession that one's reputation will ring out under heaven (8.74f; cf. Thalmann 60-69). Instead of a life of adventure marked by kleos, however, Odysseus in Book V is faced with death at sea, a death unmarked and lonely (5.312). What is notable for us in this episode is that kleos appears only to exist in the reports on one's life; i.e. it requires discourse to give it substance, enough substance to transcend the event itself. Consequently, when Odysseus arrives on land and is taken by Nausikaa to the Phaiakian court, he acts the part of a poet as well as a hero (11.68-69) by recounting his adventures and in the process giving form to his kleos. Discursive enactment, therefore, becomes the only way in which the unforgettable experi-
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(1998). Writing the third‐sophistic Cyborg: Periphrasis on an [in]tense rhetoric. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 28, No. 4, pp. 51-72.
August 1998
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Research Article| August 01 1998 M. Tullius Cicero, The Fragmentary Speeches Jane W. CrawfordM. Tullius Cicero, The Fragmentary Speeches, Second Edition, American Classical Studies No. 37 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994) x + 350pp. Robert W Cape, Jr. Robert W Cape, Jr. Austm College, Suite 61539,900 North Grand, Sherman, Texas 75090-4440, USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1998) 16 (3): 319–323. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.3.319 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Robert W Cape; M. Tullius Cicero, The Fragmentary Speeches. Rhetorica 1 August 1998; 16 (3): 319–323. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.3.319 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 1998, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1998 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Research Article| August 01 1998 Persuasion: Greek Rhetoric in Action Ian Worthington ed. Persuasion: Greek Rhetoric in Action (London: Routledge, 1994) xi+277pp. John Poulakos John Poulakos Department of Communications, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260, USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1998) 16 (3): 308–312. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.3.308 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 John Poulakos; Persuasion: Greek Rhetoric in Action. Rhetorica 1 August 1998; 16 (3): 308–312. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.3.308 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 1998, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1998 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Research Article| August 01 1998 Roman Rhetoric: Revolution and the Greek Influence Richard L. Enos,Roman Rhetoric: Revolution and the Greek Influence (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press 1995) xiv+l35pp. Andrew M Riggsby Andrew M Riggsby Department of Classics, University of Texas, Austin, Texas 78712, USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1998) 16 (3): 315–318. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.3.315 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 Andrew M Riggsby; Roman Rhetoric: Revolution and the Greek Influence. Rhetorica 1 August 1998; 16 (3): 315–318. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.3.315 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 1998, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1998 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Abstract: Gorgias's Encomium to Helen presumes a similarity between verbal and visual art. Where language, envisaged as masculine, attempts a logical persuasion, the visual image, seen as feminine and disruptive, overwhelms the beholder and leads the mind astray. Gorgias's account of Helen takes as its starting point an interpretation of her role which originates in book three of the Iliad, where her beauty is seen as causing the Trojan war and inspiring Homer's epic. The tragic poets identify her with destruction. Gorgias proves her innocence, but only by transforming her from a volimtary subject to a passive object. Because Helen was overcome by eros caused by visual stimuli she cannot be held responsible for the consequences of her actions. In this assertion Gorgias has used verbal logic to delimit and overcome the emotional force of previous images of Helen.
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Research Article| August 01 1998 The Reader's Figure: Epideictic Rhetoric in Plato, Aristotle, Bossuet, Racine and Pascal Richard Lockwood, The Reader's Figure: Epideictic Rhetoric in Plato, Aristotle, Bossuet, Racine and Pascal (Geneva: Droz, 1996) 310 pp. Peter France Peter France Department of French, 4 Buccleuch Place, Edinbugh 8, United Kingdom. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1998) 16 (3): 312–314. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.3.312 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 Peter France; The Reader's Figure: Epideictic Rhetoric in Plato, Aristotle, Bossuet, Racine and Pascal. Rhetorica 1 August 1998; 16 (3): 312–314. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.3.312 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 1998, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1998 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
July 1998
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Commentary: When this essay first appeared more than 10 years ago, it built on a small but substantial body of scholarship that declared scientific writing an appropriate field for rhetorical analysis. In the last 10 years, studies of scientific writing for both expert and lay audiences have increased exponentially, drawing on the long-established disciplines of the history and philosophy of science. These newer studies, however, differ widely in approach. Many take the perspective of cultural critique (e.g., the work of Bruno Latour and Stephen Woolgar), whereas others use the tools of discourse analysis (e.g., Greg Myers, M.A.K. Halliday, and J. R. Martin). But, application of rhetorical theory also thrives in the work of John Angus Campbell, Alan Gross, Charles Bazerman, Jean Dietz Moss, Lawrence J. Prelli, Carolyn Miller, and many others. Randy Allen Harris offers a useful introduction to this field in Landmark Essays on Rhetoric in Science (1997). “Accommodating Science” applies ideas from classical rhetoric and techniques of close reading typical of discourse analysis to the question of what happens when scientific reports travel from expert to lay publications. This change in forum causes a shift in genre from forensic to celebratory and a shift in stasis from fact and cause to evaluation and action. These changes in genre, audience, and purpose inevitably affect the material and manner of re-presentation in predictable ways. Two concerns informed this study 10 years ago: the impact of science reporting on public deliberation and the nature of technical and professional writing courses. These concerns have, if anything, increased (e.g., the campaign on global warming), warranting continued scholarly investigation of the gap between the public's right to know and the public's ability to understand.
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Commentary: My intent in doing this project was to illustrate that an archaeological site as (apparently) obscure as the Amphiareion of Oropos holds a wealth of evidence about the nature and practice of rhetorical contests. Indirectly, I also hoped to illustrate that developing new methods of analysis through “field work” in classical rhetoric complements conventional arm-chair research - characteristic of literary analysis - as a source of primary evidence. The study opportunities and support that I received in 1974 and 1977 from the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and the Greek Ministry of Science and Culture convinced me that the Amphiareion would be appropriate for study. The Amphiareion was small enough for an in-depth examination and large enough to be known by ancient geographers such as Pausanias. From 1977 to 1985 I analyzed the information I had gathered about the site: the inscriptions my wife, Jane Helppie, and I had photographed and drawn on our field trips, the commentary of ancient sources, and the results of archaeological excavations under Basil Petracos and the Greek Archaeological Service. This study reveals that rhetoric was practiced at locations other than prominent centers such as Athens and that these practices were sustained for centuries. In the future I plan to visit other larger and better known sites in order to continue the search for information that provides the basis for a richer understanding of the history of written communication in Greece.
June 1998
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Gorgias's Encomium to Helen presumes a similarity between verbal and visual art. Where language, envisaged as masculine, attempts a logical persuasion, the visual image, seen as feminine and disruptive, overwhelms the beholder and leads the mind astray. Gorgias's account of Helen takes as its starting point an interpretation of her role which originates in book three of the Iliad, where her beauty is seen as causing the Trojan war and inspiring Homer's epic. The tragic poets identify her with destruction. Gorgias proves her innocence, but only by transforming her from a voluntary subject to a passive object. Because Helen was overcome by eros caused by visual stimuli she cannot be held responsible for the consequences of her actions. In this assertion Gorgias has used verbal logic to delimit and overcome the emotional force of previous images of Helen.
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Reviews 333 L'inventaire final, plus large que la matière traitée (il englobe même les"histoires" qui ne servent pas d'exemples) complète admirablement l'exposé, en trois étapes: les exemples sont d'abord classés, selon l'ordre traditionnel des oeuvres de Grégoire, avec tous les critères de nature rhétorique exploités dans les deux premières parties; une deuxième liste suit l'ordre alphabétique, en distinguant matériau biblique et matériau "païen"; une troisième obéit à l'ordre traditionnel de la Bible. Un livre majeur, donc, sur l'oeuvre de Grégoire de Nazianze, et un livre exemplaire, pour des enquêtes analogues sur d'autres auteurs. Alain Le Boulluec Transmundus, Introductiones dictandi, ed. and trans. Ann Dalzell (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1995) x + 254 pp. Considering how few among the hundreds of medieval arts of letter writing have been printed at all, the appearance of such a text in a critical edition is in itself an important event. Ann Dalzell's edition of Transmundus' Introductiones dictandi is especially significant because it is the first edition of an ars dictandi to be accompanied by a modern English translation of the Latin text. As Dalzell points out, the treatise merits editing and translating for several reasons: (1) it provides a comprehensive introduction to the ars dictaminis, (2) its use of classical rhetoric illuminates the "state of classical learning in the late twelfth century and contemporary attitudes toward it," and (3) its author's service as protonotary of the paper chancery invests its contents with unusual authority (pp. ix-x). An additional attraction is that the treatise is presented in the form of a letter and frequently observes the rules for the Roman cursus and the other precepts of style that it teaches. Like Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova, with which it is exactly contemporary, the Introductiones dictandi is at once about the art of letter writing (de arte) and an example of that art (ex arte). 334 RHETORICA Dalzell provides a substantial introduction in which she treats under separate headings the life of Transmundus, as well as the composition, the sources, the style and syntax, the manuscripts, the editing, and the translating of the Introductiones dictandi. Like the equally full commentary that follows the edition and translation, the introduction not only provides the essential information about the text being edited but also about its generic context. In fact, the comprehensiveness of the text itself, the richness of the commentary, and the presence of a translation combine to make Dalzell's book an ideal introduction to the genre of the ars dictandi for advanced students of rhetoric. Among the most important scholarly contributions of the introduction is its precise description of the treatise's complex transmission. According to Dalzell, two versions of the introductiones dictandi survive. The earlier version is preserved in four copies, each of which differs from the others in significant ways. Dalzell believes that this version was composed while Transmundus was still at the papal chancery, possibly as early as the 1180s, and was subsequently revised at Clairvaux, after Transmundus had joined the monastic community there. Sometime after 1206 but still early in the thirteenth century, a second version was produced by Transmundus or someone else, probably at Clairvaux. This later, revised and expanded version is preserved in at least twelve copies, which exhibit greater consistency among themselves than do the copies of the first version. Although Version II almost certainly contains material not contributed by Transmundus, it is the version of the treatise that was most widely used and hence is the one edited and translated by Dalzell. To illustrate the relationships among the four copies of Version I and between Versions I and II, she also edits and translates the initial treatment of Style (appositio) from each copy of Version I in an appendix. Version II of the Introductiones dictandi, Dalzell further shows, is itself divided into an elementary course and an advanced course. The elementary course (sections 1-11, in her edition) sketches the basic rules on epistolary style and the parts of a letter; the advanced course is...
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The Reader’s Figure: Epideictic Rhetoric in Plato, Aristotle, Bossuet, Racine and Pascal by Richard Lockwood ↗
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RHETORICA 312 In chapter 11, "Philosophy and rhetoric", Stephen Halliwell considers the debate between rhetoric and philosophy along the lines suggested in several of Plato's and Aristotle's works. Although both Plato and Aristotle consider rhetoric "philosophically", Halliwell argues that Plato imposes on it the demands of his ethical and political standards while Aristotle accepts the commonsensicalness of rhetorical practice all along reinforcing it with the technical equipment that rendered it an intellectual force of consequence. In the final chapter, "The Canon of the Ten Attic Orators", Ian Worthington reconsiders the dating, the authorship, and the intellectual background of the canon of the Attic orators and concludes that both the rationale and character of the canon are unsatisfactory if only because they hamper scholarly efforts to study and assess the orations of those orators who are excluded. John Poulakos Richard Lockwood, The Reader's Figure: Epideictic Rhetoric in Plato, Aristotle, Bossuet, Racine and Pascal (Geneva: Droz, 1996) 310 pp. Epideictic has always been the joker in the pack. Where deliberative and judicial eloquence can be fairly readily defined, and their function briefly summarized, epideictic continually poses problems. In the first place, what is it? The demonstrative genre, we are told, is that in which the orator (or writer) attributes praise and blame. But this narrow definition is quickly expanded into something much more amorphous—epideictic comes to be the gathering up of all speech acts which are not deliberative or forensic, sometimes including the didactic or academic (as in the volume under review), and not infrequently spilling out to include all speaking whose purpose is not obvious, including, as the writing "for nothing" which came to be called literature. For the question "who does what to whom in epideictic" is by no means straightforward, as Richard Lockwood makes abundantly clear in this densely written and interesting book. Quintilian saw it as aiming solely at delighting its audience", Reviews 313 with the further aim of enhancing the "honour and glory of the speaker". The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "intended or serving to display oratorical skill". It is thus a form of entertainment, a performance meant to gather in applause. But of course there are other views. A speech of praise, for instance, is not necessarily a piece of self-indulgence or flattery. Many historians of the subject have written of the potential civic function of epideictic for inculcating values and creating social consensus. As Aristotle put it, "to praise a man is...akin to urging a course of action". Even Plato, with his sharp eye for the deceits of rhetoric, allows room in his republic for "hymns to the gods and encomia to good men". So what is going on in epideictic? The strength of Lockwood's study is that it homes in on these tensions within the genre. He argues that this type of speech or text carries within it a doubleness, and thus, even more clearly than other rhetorical performances, creates a double figure of the listener or reader, who can at the same time admire the orator and admire the thing praised. It is this doubleness, he claims, that accounts for the powerful effects of epideictic, effects that in the examples he gives are not infrequently unsettling, often fruitfully so. One of the most important points stressed here is the vital role played in epideictic by metadiscursive elements—those points at which the orator or writer reflects as he goes along on what he is doing. In an interesting preliminary, this tactic is seen at work in the Gettysburg Address, where "five full sentences out of ten discuss Lincoln's own act of speaking, and the rest focus largely on the parameters of its context" (p. 19)—the speech in other words is largely about "how to give speeches and how to listen", and in so doing seeks to create what Lockwood calls the "figure" of the reader/listener. In other words, theory and practice are closely interwoven, and there can be no question of a simple dualism whereby the naive take the bait while the sophisticated reflect critically on it; all readers and listeners are involved in the perils and pleasures of...
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Reviews 319 readable manner, there are frequent strange turns of phrase, sometimes bordering on the incomprehensible. For instance: Aristotle...viewed politics and rhetoric as an inherent relationship" (3), "[In Verrem] provides an indirect index of the value Rome felt for such acquisitions" (12); "Rhetoric is always under a state of metamorphoses" (21); "We know that by Cicero's time the heavy emphasis in Greek rhetoric was being transformed to Latin" (63). Given the number of typographical errors and minor factual errors, it looks as if this book were written and edited in a great hurry.5 Andrew M Riggsby Jane W. Crawford M. Tullius Cicero, The Fragmentary Speeches, Second Edition, American Classical Studies No. 37 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994) x + 350pp. Cicero's status as Rome's pre-eminent orator has helped most of his published speeches survive the ravages of time and caprice of Fortuna. Fifty-eight orations are transmitted by manuscripts more or less complete and only sixteen or so exist as fragments, usually as single words or lines quoted by grammarians and rhetoricians, but a few as lines quoted in the systematic commentary of Asconius and the Bobbio Scholiast. We have information about approximately ninety other speeches which Cicero delivered, but most of those he chose not to publish and the rest have been completely lost. Since the corpus of complete 5 E.g. p. 7: for Euthydemus 217 B.C. read (apparently) Euthydemus 271b-c; p. 12: for Archaean read Achaean; p. 22 for lex pecuniis repetundis read lex de p. r. and for questio read quaestio; p. 23: for 196 read 106; p. 31: for agnostic read agonistic; p. 44: for Altratinus read Atratinus; p. 77: for Dipnosophistae read Deipnosophistae p. 80: Gellius is cited (without explanation) by OCT page number (then conventional numeration in brackets), then Plutarch's lives are similarly cited in the following sentence, except that the main reference is to the Teubner pagination; throughout: the date of Bonner's seminal Roman Declamation is 1949, not 1969. Cicero's works are sporadically referred to by paragraph numbers as well as sections, and on two pages (39-40) book numbers for Pliny's letters are given in Roman numerals. RHETORICA 320 speeches is fairly large, students of Cicero have paid little attention to the fragmentary ones. There have been several editions of the fragments themselves, including two in this century, but the last edition with a commentary appeared in the sixteenth century. Jane Crawford has now given us a much needed new edition and commentary of the fragmentary speeches that forms a useful companion to her earlier work, M. Tullius Cicero: The Lost and Unpublished Speeches (Gottingen, 1984). For each of the sixteen speeches in this book Crawford provides a detailed historical introduction, gives the ancient testimonia and surviving fragments, and comments extensively on each fragment. This second edition appeared less than a year after the first, correcting errata and adding the fragmenta incertae sedis and an appendix on the fragments which have been falsely identified. A few minor errors still remain and there is, unfortunately, no commentary on the fragmenta incertae sedis, but the latter was not in the original plan. She does include a valuable commentary on the "fragment" of Pro Vatinio, tacitly correcting her own previous omission of the oration as a lost speech, and makes a convincing argument for not considering it a true fragment. Crawford states that her aim "has been to put each speech into the context of Cicero's career as a politician, advocate, and orator" (p. 3). Readers of this journal will be most interested in the last two categories, but it should be noted that Crawford's goal is quite broad. It requires the skills of a textual critic, historian, and rhetorician. The great strength of her work lies in the historical perspective she brings to the speeches. The introductions and commentary provide a wealth of useful background material against which one must view each speech. Crawford generally follows the views of other scholars on historical events and is generous about citing opposing views. Readers will be grateful for her balanced discussions since controversy surrounds most of the events she covers. Footnotes and the...
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Pagan and Biblical Exempla in Gregory Nazianzen. A Study in Rhetoric and Hermeneutics by Kristoffel Demoen ↗
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Reviews 329 communicating what he had to say to his various audiences. For this reason Anderson is also right in insisting on the use of ancient rhetorical theory and practice in the original languages. I would add that further help may be gained from the commentaries of the fathers of the Church and those later writers who were more familiar with rhetoric than most of use are, e.g. Melanchthon or the Jesuits, and also from modem rhetoric. In addition to a select bibliography and full indices, there is a useful, select glossary of Greek rhetorical terms (pp. 259-302 and 303-14). This is a most welcome contribution to the debate which has suffered a great deal from various kinds of confusion, a book itself well-planned and clearly argued, offering a good deal of help to those who are interested in this controversial subject. It is important because it also raises some general questions as regards the possibilities and limits of rhetorical criticism, and while I disagree with the author on a number of points, I do not hesitate to recommend it to the critical reader. C. Joachim Classen Kristoffel Demoen, Pagan and Biblical Exempla in Gregory Nazianzen. A Study in Rhetoric and Hermeneutics, coll. Corpus Christianorum, Lingua Patrum, 2 (Tumhout: Brepols, 1996) 498 PP· Cet ouvrage a parfaitement sa place dans la collection prestigieuse du Corpus Christianorum, non seulement parce qu'il y côtoie l'admirable Corpus Nazianzenum, mais parce qu'il fait progresser de façon décisive la connaissance des oeuvres de Grégoire de Nazianze et de sa manière de composer. Il comporte deux grands ensembles, un exposé constitué de deux parties, et un répertoire (p. 325-458). Il s'agit d'une analyse rhétorique de Vexemplum, qui va donc au delà du procédé stylistique, pour l'étudier comme moyen de persuasion. Cela implique une enquête sur la tradition rhétorique dont Grégoire est tributaire, ainsi que l'examen des jugements explicites et sous-jacents portés sur les 330 RHETORICA vecteurs des deux courants culturels que fait se rencontrer "le Théologien", l'hellénisme et ses (xûôoi, le christianisme et la Bible. Le livre est issu d'une Dissertation doctorale présentée à l'Université de Gent (Gand) en février 1993. L'introduction part de l'attitude ambiguë de Grégoire à l'égard de la tradition classique, pour esquisser une idée qui prendra toute sa force au terme de l'ouvrage: voulant rivaliser avec les écrivains non chrétiens, Grégoire sépare l'hellénisme de la religion; cette conception restrictive lui donne le moyen de reconquérir l'hellénisme (après la tentative anti-chrétienne de l'empereur Julien); K. Demoen illustre cette reconquête par l'usage rhétorique d'exemples pris dans la mythologie, dans l'histoire et dans la Bible. Les éléments de l'étude sont de nature narrative. Les sources, du côté grec, sont la mythologie, les légendes, l'histoire, les fables et, par ailleurs, les récits bibliques (épisodes historiques de l'Ancien Testament, paraboles du Nouveau Testament). Ne sont retenues que les "histoires" qui ont une fonction exemplaire. Dès le début est proposée une définition du παράδειγμα, distingué de μεταφορά, παραβολή, γνώμη, σύγκρισις, définition élaborée à l'aide des théories antiques analysées dans le premier chapitre (p. 33-50): "l'évocation d'une histoire (de la Bible ou de la tradition païenne) qui s'est réellement produite ou qui n'est pas arrivée, dont la matière ressemble ou est liée au sujet traité, qui est associée implicitement ou explicitement à ce sujet comme argument (preuve ou modèle) ou comme ornement, et qui prend la forme d'une narration, de la mention d'un nom, ou d'une allusion" (p. 25). Le corpus est fait principalement des poèmes de Grégoire, très hétérogènes, les oeuvres en prose intervenant surtout à titre d'illustration ou de confirmation. L'entreprise se situe (p. 26) dans la perspective érudite de la Συναγωγή; kai; έξήγησις de Cosmas de Jérusalem, scholiaste du VIIIe si...
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324 RHETORICA Milonis F2, where it should be pointed out that the words sine ore used to describe Clodius are parallel to an expression at Pro Caelio 78. Crawford's comments on this fragment (at the beginning of a speech) offer a good explanation of the personal invective in the Pro Caelio passage (end of the speech) which is ignored in the standard edition. Jane Crawford has provided a rich and valuable book that will be the necessary starting point for future work on the fragments. Historians and students of classical rhetoric are in her debt. Now that we have commentaries on the fragmentary speeches, let us hope that they will help inspire some much needed commentaries on Cicero's surviving orations. Robert W Cape Jr. R. Dean Anderson Jr., Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Paul (Kampen: Kok Pharos Publishing House, 1996) 315 pp. Rhetorical criticism appears to have become fashionable in biblical studies lately, and some people seem to regard it as a kind of magic providing answers to all questions and solutions to all problems of interpretation. Critics of modem literature discovered some decades ago that rhetoric had something to offer for the interpretation of texts, while classicists never lost sight of the ancient handbooks of rhetoric and their precepts. It is most fortunate, therefore, that a scholar with both a classical and a theological training should have chosen to write a book on Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Paul, addressing himself to two questions: whether Paul knew and consciously worked with rhetorical theory (or some aspect of it) in mind (p. 249) and what kind of help ancient rhetoric has to offer for the interpretation of Paul's letters. The author begins with a very brief historical account of rhetorical criticism of the Bible—St Augustine, Melanchthon, Muilenberg, Kennedy, Mack and a few remarks on Perelman— mentioning neither Chrysostom nor Marius Victorinus or Betz to whom he refers later. This section is not very satisfactory, because Reviews 325 in its first part it is largely derivative and far too short to be useful, in the second it contrasts Perelman's "New Rhetoric" with ancient rhetoric instead of emphasizing how much the former is indebted to the latter. The second chapter is devoted to the sources for ancient rhetorical theory from the Rhetorica ad Alexandrum to Quintilian, ending with an overview in which the usefulness both of the various aspects of rhetorical theory and of the individual works and their methodology for rhetorical criticism are considered. Here the author shows himself a well-informed master of the subject, though somewhat arbitrary in the selection of secondary literature and editions he is referring to, as he omits all works in French and (with one exception) in Italian. As regards the basic issue whether ancient rhetorical theory may offer help in interpreting Paul's epistles today, Anderson stresses several important points: a) "Given that the specific topoi allocated to the three genres of rhetoric have little in common with the arguments and topoi used in the letters of Paul .., we must conclude that rhetorical genre analysis of Paul's letters has little value" (p. 90); b) "Such labelling (sc. of an extant speech by various terms for arguments and figures).. does not really help us much unless we can say something about the use and function of such arguments or figures" (p. 92). But I find it difficult to agree with Anderson , when he says: "Our conclusions, then, tell us more about how ancient critics might have viewed Paul's literary abilities, than about what Paul himself may have thought"; surely, our conclusions may tell us what Paul thought and how he tried to impart his ideas and views to his readers and audiences. In the section on the "relation of rhetoric to epistolography" Anderson discusses first a few of the earlier attempts by a number of scholars to define various types of letters, then the ancient handbooks of epistolography, at the end tentatively suggesting "that it is in vain to strictly apply a scheme of classification designed for speeches to letters" (p. 100) and criticizing Betz, Kennedy and Stowers. Next, after rejecting Betz's claim that Galatians is an apologetic letter...
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Reviews 315 In the long and important chapter on Bossuet's sermons, for instance, Lockwood shows convincingly how the preacher's metadiscursive reflections on the difficulty, or indeed impossibility, of giving expression to the word of God and on the possibility of true knowledge which the listener creates by listening to his/her inner voice, forces the listener into active participation. As he puts it, "metadiscursive analysis through a figure such as the Inner Master [the preacher within us] becomes a response not to a philosophical problem, but to the pragmatic problems of authorizing the speaker and giving him the power to determine the audience's reaction to the speech" (p. 276). One of the engaging features of Lockwood's book is the way in which from time to time it too becomes self-reflexive, discussing the author's rhetorical problems and strategies and the reader's likely response: will he/she keep reading? What will be the relation between the reader at the outset and the reader at the end? As I read, I found myself wondering whether I was in fact embodying the reader figure laid down for me by the text, whether I was Pascal's good reader with his "esprit de discemement" who sees enough to be aware of what he/she doesn't see. Lockwood's text, as some of the passages quoted suggest, it not always easy reading, and sometimes a tell-tale "of course" suggests that the connections between one thing and another are clearer in the author's mind that in the (this) reader's. This is therefore a book to reread and reflect on. Peter France Richard L. Enos, Roman Rhetoric: Revolution and the Greek Influence (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press 1995) xiv+135pp. This book is not an analysis of the internal structure of ancient rhetoric in the manner of George Kennedy's several handbooks or M L Clarke's recently re-released Rhetoric at Rome: A Historical Survey. Instead, Enos offers an account of the interaction of Greek and Latin rhetoric as cultural phenomena and in the context of other cultural developments. The seven chapters (plus brief RHETORICA 316 preface and conclusion) are somewhat loosely connected studies of key moments in the history of roman rhetoric and (insofar as it is part of the Roman story) of Greek rhetoric. The goal is, to my mind, an admirable one; the execution is therefore all the more disappointing. The first chapter explores the political importance of sophistic rhetoric in the Western Greek colonies. It suggests that a similar politics (i.e. "democratic" imperialism) encouraged Roman absorption of rhetoric from south Italian sources. The second chapter traces the opportunities for and role of rhetoric in the changing political scene of the late Republic. This history is highlighted by a case study—chapter three—of state suppression of rhetoric at Rome in the second and early first centuries B.c. Chapter four traces the eventual acceptance of Greek rhetoric at Rome and particularly the role of declamation in Roman education. The next two chapters examine the influence of Roman patronage on the fortunes of rhetoric in Greece; this patronage was both of individual rhetors and of institutions and even entire cities (Athens) as educational centers. Enos considers first the Second sophistic in Athens, then the history of literary competitions at a relatively obscure festival at Oropos. The nonliterary (particularly epigraphic) evidence deployed in the latter chapter is probably the most novel and most substantive contribution of the book. Finally, an "epilogue" tries to account for the survival of rhetoric in various areas of the sometimes hostile Christian middle ages. The first important problem in this attempt to contextualize rhetoric is a sometimes dated and sometimes simply mistaken view of Roman history. For instance Enos uses the term "patrician" variously to mean the senate, the nobiles, political conservatives, or simply the economic upper-class. Not only does this mistake the technical sense of what was a largely unimportant caste term by the late republic, but it also means Enos has trouble explaining distinctions within the Roman elite: Catiline's opponents are non-aristocrats" (27)" and equestrian jurors are represented as the ' voice of the...
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The Evangelical Rhetoric of Ramon Llull: Lay Learning and Piety in the Christian West Around 1300 by Mark D. Johnston ↗
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RHETORICA 336 Mark D. Johnston, The Evangelical Rhetoric of Ramon Hull: Lay Learning and Piety in the Christian West Around 1300 (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) xii + 274 pp. This book continues the author's already distinguished investigations into Ramon Llull's theories on language. While Johnston's previous work The Spiritual Logic of Ramon Llull (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) focuses on Llull's argumentative methods for justifying medieval Catholicism, his recent book articulates lullian principles of eloquence. The Evangelical Rhetoric of Ramon Llull demonstrates Llull's significant contribution to the field of rhetoric: the innovative use of his Great Art as an inventional tool. With fine organization, Johnston evokes a wide variety of lullian texts coalescing in a theory of rhetoric. The first three chapters outline Llull's premises for effective speech. Chapter 1 summarizes the heuristic method of the Great Universal Art of Find Truth, from which discourse proceeds. The Great Art employs an elaborate system of comparison, relying on nine letters of the alphabet—B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I and K—to symbolize absolute and relative principles, concepts and questions for discovery. When combined, these letters yield knowledge of divine truth which can illuminate a variety of arts, in this case, Christian wisdom for rhetoric. Like Augustine, who declares charity the ultimate end of reading and preaching, Llull calls theological understanding the end of speech whose material derives from the Great Art. Chapter 2 depicts Llull's vision of divine truth, a picture of interconnected creation, described in a representational language which correlates words and things. Chapter 3 discusses Llull's epistemology of resemblances in which humans, participating in God's universe, observe, think and finally speak according to the likenesses of creation. The middle section of the book, chapters 4 through 9, specifies how Llull's premises apply to particular offices of rhetoric and highlight Llull's emphasis on beauty, order and propriety. Finally, chapter 10 takes up Llull's sermons and brings the organization of the book full-circle by demonstrating Reviews 337 how the Great Art provides the heuristic for preaching material. The Liber de praedicatione reviews the Great Art; the Liber de virtutibus et peccatis employs the combinatory process in the Great Art to produce sermons. The concluding chapter introduces a polemic, so eloquent and compelling on the pertinence of Johnston's study, that this reader wished the argument had been dispersed throughout. Here, Johnston differentiates his own view of Llull from those who imagine him as either an inspired saint or a cutting-edge academic. While emphasizing Llull's contributions, Johnston repudiates claims to holy uniqueness in lullian rhetorical theory because of the preponderance of allusions to both classical and medieval lore. Moreover, exposing the narcissism in certain scholars' perceptions of Llull as an avant garde professor, Johnston reminds his readers of Llull's antipathy to the schools. Since Johnston's readers include those "unfamiliar with [Llull's] work, but interested generally in medieval intellectual or cultural history, and especially in the arts of eloquence" (10), it would have been helpful to describe, test and eschew pervading scholarly attitudes toward Llull throughout. Johnston, on the other hand, presents evidence that Llull was a Majorcan courtier, "born again" into the religious life and propelled into contemplation and study by his desire to convert. Having little background in language studies, Llull probably sought local tutoring and lectures in Paris in order to read divine writings and develop preaching skills. This exposure to learning allowed Llull to invoke well-known rhetorical authorities such as Cicero. However, Llull departed Paris with a distrust for scholasticism, which in his view, obscurely analyzes and thus fragments the picture of an integrated, unified creation. Throughout, Johnston observes Llull's differences with scholastic thought and practice. For instance, he notes Llull's failure to question the efficacy of language, an enduring issue for medieval schoolmen, but not for Llull, who relied on speech for evangelizing. Johnston concludes that "[Llull's] general regard for rhetoric as a means of fostering community in human society is one of the features that most distinguishes his accounts of eloquence from conventional Scholastic doctrines" (27). RHETORICA 338 Johnston establishes his...
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RHETORICA 308 these six essays demonstrate the breadth, status, and versatility of rhetoric as a field of inquiry, study, and practice. In their introductory essay, Bennett and Leff remark, "Working quietly against the grain of a specialized [academic] culture, Murphy has opened a conduit between historical scholarship and the classroom" (4). A lengthy bibliography of Murphy's publications and work in progress, contributed by Winifred Horner, follows the Preface. Like Murphy's own contributions to the field, the essays collected in Rhetoric and Pedagogy successfully "hold historical scholarship and current pragmatic interests in a useful relationship to one another" (4). By their own interest in bridging historical scholarship and current teaching practice, the contributors to this Festschrift honor Murphy's legacy and continue his work. Cynthia Miecznikowski Sheard Ian Worthington ed. Persuasion: Greek Rhetoric in Action (London: Routledge, 1994) xi+277pp. This collection of twelve essays is interesting for three reasons. First, it constitutes one more sign that rhetoric is undergoing a veritable renaissance. Second, it shows that classics, a discipline once indifferent or hostile to the rhetorical enterprise, is now willing to join other disciplines in recognizing rhetoric as a major force in the shaping of western culture (nine of the contributors to this collection are classicists). Third, and most important, this volume does not concern itself with rhetoric in isolation. Rather, it examines its many intersections with such genres as politics, history, law, epic, tragedy, comedy and philosophy. The various treatments of the particular intersections combine traditional and new insights, and open the path to many provocative questions. Likewise, they generally invite reflection and criticism. More importantly, however, the collection as a whole points to a maximalist project that takes rhetoric beyond the orators, who practised it and the philosophers, who discussed Reviews 309 it. In so doing, it suggests that richer understandings can be had when placing rhetoric at the center of the Hellenic culture and crossing it with other genres (i.e. epic, tragedy, comedy, history). In this regard, the collection recommends itself in its entirety much more than any one of its chapters. The common framework that all contributors share comes from the distinction as well as the connection between rhetoric as the study, and oratory as the practice of persuasion. According to the editor, "The aim of this book is to bring together...discussions of the relationship of Greek oratory and rhetoric to a variety of important areas and genres, at the same time reflecting new trends and ideas now at work in the study of rhetoric" (ix). In the first chapter, "From orality to rhetoric: an intellectual transformation", Carol Thomas and Edward Webb trace the emergence of rhetoric along the orality-literacy continuum. Relying on but also refining the work of George Kennedy, Eric Havelock, Walter Ong and Thomas Cole, the authors point out that even though rhetoric benefited from the contributions of literacy it nevertheless retained its initial oral character. This chapter examines rhetoric along the registers of composition, delivery, and analysis, and pays attention to four features: uses, persuasive intent, magical aura, and the speaker's esteem. In chapter 2, "Rhetorical means of persuasion", Christopher Carey argues that of the three Aristotelian pisteis, pathos and ethos are more indirect while the third, logos, is a more direct means of persuasion. Carey illustrates the uses of pathos and ethos in the actual speeches of orators such as Demosthenes, Aeschines and Lysias, and concludes that Aristotle's distinctions are considerably "neater" than their actual use shows. In chapter 3, "Probability and persuasion: Plato and early Greek rhetoric", Michael Gagarin seeks to minimize the Platonic influence on our understanding of classical Greek rhetoric. His thesis is that Plato's widely accepted claim that the orators prefer probability over the truth is demonstrably wrong. Gagarin reviews the uses of probability arguments in the surviving speeches of orators and sophists and finds no evidence supporting Plato's claim. Gagarin's study shows convincingly that the orators generally value truth; however, they resort to probability when RHETORICA 310 the truth of a case is unknown, unclear, or subject to differing interpretations. In chapter 4, "Classical rhetoric and modem theories of discourse", David Cohen takes a brief but...
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Rhetoric and Pedagogy: Its History, Philosophy, and Practice: Essays in Honor of James J. Murphy ed. by Winifred Bryan Horner and Michael Leff ↗
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REVIEWS Winifred Bryan Horner and Michael Leff eds, Rhetoric and Pedagogy: Its History, Philosophy, and Practice: Essays in Honor of James J. Murphy (Mahwah, NJ: Elrhaum, 1995) 337pp. This commemorative volume honoring James J. Murphy is an eclectic collection of essays authored by scholars from around the world, colleagues and former students of Murphy whose own contributions to rhetorical history are well known. The collection pays tribute to Murphy's career as scholar and teacher and celebrates historical texts and figures for their cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural contributions to rhetorical history and pedagogy. Beth S. Bennett and Michael Leff's Introduction praises Murphy for his commitment to the history of the rhetorical tradition—both discipline and profession—through his integration of teaching and scholarship as well as his role in the founding of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric. They note that ISHR, in addition to publishing the field's premier journal, Rhetorica, has held biennial conferences since 1977 leading to the publication of important articles and edited volumes on Western rhetorical history and historiography "from the end of the Roman Empire through the 16th-century" (3). The intellectual status of rhetorical studies was thus elevated through Murphy's efforts. The collection's eighteen chapters are grouped chronologically into four sections: I. Theory and Pedagogy in the Classical and Medieval Traditions, II. Renaissance Textbooks and Rhetorical Education, III. Continuity and Change in 18th-Century Rhetorical Education, and IV. Rhetoric and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present. The Introduction forecasts the recurrence of three themes throughout the volume: "(a) Murphy and his work are 305 RHETORICA 306 ahead of their time; (b) Murphy not only studies rhetoric but also uses it to promote a communal effort; and (c) Murphy adopts a comprehensive view that opens an old tradition to future inquiry" (2). Bennett and Leff describe the ways in which each of the essays that follows illuminates one or more themes. They also advocate reading "across" chapters to trace the ways in which certain topics and controversies have evolved and enduring throughout rhetorical history. This way of reading, they suggest, can yield "the sense of unity in diversity" (16) that exemplifies Murphy's teaching and scholarship. The six essays in part one concern such topics as Aristotle's enthymeme as a doxastic rather than syllogistic form of reasoning (Lawrence D. Green), Cicero's criticism of philosophers (Robert Gaines), distinctions between Cicero's published court speeches and their oral presentation (Jerzy Axer), attitudes toward textual authority and ownership of ideas into the Christian era (George A. Kennedy), the use of poetry in the teaching of rhetorical tropes during the Middle Ages (Marjorie Curry Woods), and the contrasting missions and pedagogical practices at the universities of Oxford and Bologna in the late Middle Ages (Martin Camargo). Against long-held misperceptions of the "medieval fragmentation" of the classical rhetorical tradition, this first group of essays re-envisions the rhetorical tradition's passage from a "golden" to a "dark" age. Rather than "confused and confusing" (Woods 73), this early period in the history of rhetoric is rehistoricized as a period in which the study and practice of rhetoric flourished in new and various shapes, "each appropriate for its particular time and place" (Camargo 94). The second group of essays, the most esoteric in the collection, extends discussions of pedagogy into the Renaissance. John Ward s essay on Guarino da Verona includes lengthy discursive notes and references to primary texts as well as Latin excerpts for the specialized reader of Renaissance rhetoric. As scholar, teacher, and rhetor, Guarino contributed "toward the definition of 15th-century Italian paideia ...educative of the whole man", capable of developing his human, moral, social, and civic potential (101). Jean Dietz Moss's essay on Ludovico Carbone follows, offering a summary of the contents and significance of Carbone s On the Nature of Rhetoric and Eloquence", the first Reviews 307 book of his De arte dicendi (On the Arts of Speaking), a work organized as a series of disputations with classical rhetoricians. William A. Wallace's essay on Antonio Riccobono and rhetorical pedagogy in 16th-century Padua shows the persistence of such issues as whether rhetoric is an...
May 1998
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Theory, Text, Context: Issues in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory; Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception; Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodemism; Traditionen der klassischen Rhetorik im angelsachsischen England; The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces; Speaking for the Chief: Okyeame and the Politics of Akan Royal Oratory ↗
Abstract
Research Article| May 01 1998 Theory, Text, Context: Issues in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory; Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception; Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodemism; Traditionen der klassischen Rhetorik im angelsachsischen England; The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces; Speaking for the Chief: Okyeame and the Politics of Akan Royal Oratory Christopher Lyle Johnstone,Theory, Text, Context: Issues in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996) 196 pp.Kathy Eden,Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 119 pp.James L. Kastley,Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodernism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), pp. vi + 293.Gabriele Knappe,Traditionen der klassischen Rhetorik im angelsachsischen England (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 1996), xx + 573 pp.Thomas P. Miller,The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces, (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1997), x + 345 ppKwesi Yankah,Speaking for the Chief: Okyeame and the Politics of Akan Royal Oratory, African Systems of Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 194 pp. George Pullman, George Pullman Department of English, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia 30303-3083, USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Richard A. Miller, Richard A. Miller Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio 43403, USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Thomas M. Conley, Thomas M. Conley University of Illinois, 244 Lincoln Hall, 702 S. Wright Street, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Martin Camargo, Martin Camargo Department of English, 107 Tate Hall, University of Missouri Columbia, Missouri 65211, USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Kermit Campbell, Kermit Campbell Department of English, Parlin Hall, University of Texas, Austin, Texas 78712, USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Lynee Lewis Gaillet Lynee Lewis Gaillet Department of English, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia 30303-3083, USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1998) 16 (2): 227–242. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.2.227 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 George Pullman, Richard A. Miller, Thomas M. Conley, Martin Camargo, Kermit Campbell, Lynee Lewis Gaillet; Theory, Text, Context: Issues in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory; Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception; Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodemism; Traditionen der klassischen Rhetorik im angelsachsischen England; The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces; Speaking for the Chief: Okyeame and the Politics of Akan Royal Oratory. Rhetorica 1 May 1998; 16 (2): 227–242. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.2.227 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 1998, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1998 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Traditions (Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich) ↗
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One of the few authors to define and focus on feminist theories of rhetoric, Krista Ratcliffe takes Bathsheba s dilemma as her controlling metaphor: I have the feelings of a woman, says Bathsheba Everdene in Hardy s Far from the Madding Crowd, only the language of men. Although women and men have different relationships to language and to each other, traditional theories of rhetoric do not foreground such gender differences, Ratcliffe notes. She argues that feminist theories of rhetoric are needed if we are to recognize, validate, and address Bathsheba s dilemma. Ratcliffe argues that because feminists generally have not conceptualized their language theories from the perspective of rhetoric and composition studies, rhetoric and composition scholars must construct feminist theories of rhetoric by employing a variety of interwoven strategies: recovering lost or marginalized texts; rereading traditional rhetoric texts; extrapolating rhetorical theories from such nonrhetoric texts as letters, diaries, essays, cookbooks, and other sources; and constructing their own theories of rhetoric. Focusing on the third option, Ratcliffe explores ways in which the rhetorical theories of Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, and Adrienne Rich may be extrapolated from their Anglo-American feminist texts through examination of the interrelationship between what these authors write and how they write. In other words, she extrapolates feminist theories of rhetoric from interwoven claims and textual strategies. By inviting Woolf, Daly, and Rich into the rhetorical traditions and by modeling the extrapolation strategy/methodology on their writings, Ratcliffe shows how feminist texts about women, language, and culture may be reread from the vantage point of rhetoric to construct feminist theories of rhetoric. She rereads Anglo-American feminist texts both to expose their white privilege and to rescue them from charges of naivete and essentialism. She also outlines the pedagogical implications of these three feminist theories of rhetoric, thus contributing to ongoing discussions of feminist pedagogies. Traditional rhetorical theories are gender-blind, ignoring the reality that women and men occupy different cultural spaces and that these spaces are further complicated by race and class, Ratcliffe explains. Arguing that issues such as who can talk, where one can talk, and how one can talk emerge in daily life but are often disregarded in rhetorical theories, Ratcliffe rereads Roland Barthes The Old Rhetoric to show the limitations of classical rhetorical theories for women and feminists. Discovering spaces for feminist theories of rhetoric in the rhetorical traditions, Ratcliffe invites readers not only to question how women have been located as a part of and apart from these traditions but also to explore the implications for rhetorical history, theory, and pedagogy. In extrapolating rhetorical theories from three feminist writers not generally considered rhetoricians, Ratcliffe creates a new model for examining women s work. She situates the rhetorical theories of Woolf, Daly, and Rich within current discussions about feminist pedagogy, particularly the interweavings of critical thinking, reading, and writing. Ratcliffe concludes with an application to teaching.
March 1998
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SHORT REVIEWS Christopher Lyle Johnstone, Theory, Text, Context: Issues in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996) 196 pp. In many ways, this collection of articles on Ancient Greek rhetoric in English offers the best of what contemporary historiography and rhetorical theory have to offer. Rather than reading texts in isolation, or presuming interpretive clarity, these articles interpret their objects in relationship to the social, political, and even physical circumstances that influenced their production. Taken together, they summarize much of what is new in ancient rhetoric. Christopher Lyle Johnstone introduces the collection by rehearsing current rhetorical historiography, attributing the term rhetorike to Plato but acknowledging the creative significance of a set of prototypical rhetorical conditions such as the rise of democratic institutions, the spread of literacy, and the concomitant transformation of mythos into logos which made abstract categorization possible. These social, political, and intellectual conditions nurtured rhetoric as a distinct discipline. Johnstone's perspective clearly differentiates this work from earlier creation narratives that attributed rhetoric to the spontaneous genius of specific individuals. Continuing this line of reasoning, the first article, one of Father Grimaldi's last, "How Do We Get from CoraxTisias to Plato-Aristotle in Greek Rhetorical Theory?" is an excellent overview of the sophists' contribution to the development of rhetoric, and thus a contribution to their ongoing rehabilitation. While Grimaldi acknowledges that his task is synthetic and therefore not highly original, the article is nevertheless thorough and cogent. The second article dedicated to sophistic origins, John Poulakos's "Extending and Correcting the Rhetorical Tradition: Aristotle's Perception of the Sophists" argues that Aristotle acknowledged the 227 RHETORICA 228 sophists for inaugurating the study of rhetoric but went to great lengths to correct the logical and linguistic inadequacies that were the inevitable result of their imperfect epistemology. Thus he concludes that Aristotle followed Plato insofar as he critiqued the sophists but "marked out an independent path", for himself by including their efforts as among those founding the rhetorical tradition. In the third piece on the place of sophistry within the tradition, Schiappa argues for what he calls a "predisciplinary approach" to the study of the sophists, by which he means avoiding "vocabulary and assumptions about discursive theories and practice imported from the fourth century when analyzing fifth-century texts" (p. 67). He makes the case for rigorous historiography by rereading Gorgias's Helen in such a way as to prove that it "advanced the art of written prose in general, and of argumentative composition in particular" (p. 78) while in no way succumbing to the tendency to perceive the sophistic piece as somehow indicative of the philosophy/rhetoric split which was an intellectual artifact of later developments. Leaving the sophists but remaining firmly within the realm of current theoretical issues, Michael C. Leff questions the general applicability of Dilip Goankar's assertion that contemporary rhetorical theory differs from ancient theory in that it is hermeneutic rather than performative and dubious about the possibility of human agency fully explaining rhetorical decisions. Leff reads Thucydides's account of the Mytilene disaster as evidence that the ancients were, or at least Thucydides was, aware of how rhetorical discourse could be shaped by circumstances beyond participants' control. Leff ends his argument, however, by asserting that Thucydides' observations were intended to have a therapeutic effect in that "The readers of History...become better equipped to assume the role of agent, for they are better able to interpret that role not just at the moment of action but also from within an understanding of history" (p. 96). Christopher Lyle Johnstone's own noteworthy contribution combines archaeology with acoustics to challenge one of the idols of traditional rhetorical history. Whereas we have always argued that deliberative rhetoric must have played an integral part in Athenian democracy, Johnstone points out that we have never taken into account the physical circumstances of delivery in the open spaces of the ancient agoras. The Pynx, in particular, he argues, was constructed such that even under ideal climatic conditions, perhaps only "half of the 5000 Reviews 229 present could understand what speakers were saying" (p. 126). If this compelling argument is true, then we need to...
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Reviews 233 dramatic characters and explain their actions as though they were real people. The Socrates Kastley portrays seems less like the Socrates of Plato than that of Cameades's Academy. And if Persuasion shows us how, in the wake of social transformations, it became necessary for women to discover how to speak, cannot the same be said of men? On the other hand, Kastley's argument that Sartre quietly allows Kant in by the back door and his detailing of the paradoxical results of de Man's favoring knowledge over action are both persuasive. Even more impressive is the subtlety with which he thinks through the problems posed by post-Enlightenment thinking to reject the temptation to find some place to stand "outside the rhetorical flux" and move, rather, toward a world in which we act, toward a community that is pluralized, temporal, and a provisional form of sharing, where we might begin to wrestle with the injustice and injury that are inevitable, but not insurmountable. Kastley's "refutations" are, in the end, affirmations; and for those he is to be commended. THOMAS M. CONLEY University ofIllinois Gabriele Knappe, Traditionen der klassischen Rhetorik im angelsachsischen England (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 1996), xx + 573 pp. According to Gabriele Knappe, previous efforts to assess the knowledge, use, and function of classical rhetoric in Anglo-Saxon England have failed to distinguish between the tradition of ancient rhetoric proper and elements of rhetorical instruction taken over by grammarians. The goal of the former was the production of prose texts designed to have a specified effect on an audience, while the principal goal of the latter was the proper interpretation of texts and only secondarily their production. Systematic evaluation of all available evidence indicates little or no direct knowledge of classical rhetoric per se in England from the seventh through the eleventh centuries: Knappe demonstrates convincingly that the sources of "rhetorical" instruction available in early medieval England invariably belong to the grammatical tradition. RHETORICA 234 The study is divided into four large parts. Part I raises the central problem of the different traditions of classical rhetoric, surveys and critiques previous research on classical rhetoric in Anglo-Saxon England, and concludes with a brief overview of the book’s goals and procedures. In Part II, Knappe sketches the major developments in the teaching and transmission of rhetoric in late antiquity, with particular emphasis on the ways in which the teaching of the figures was incorporated into grammatical textbooks, such as that of Donatus; into other works, notably Cassiodorus's Expositio psalmorum, that may have been used in teaching grammar; and, along with the progymnasmata, into a grammar instruction that was broadened to include not only "correct" but also "good" speaking and writing and even the production of texts. The heart of the book documents the reception of the traditions of classical rhetoric in Anglo-Saxon England. Drawing on the evidence of surviving insular manuscripts, book lists, and contemporary testimony, Knappe concludes that the Anglo-Saxons appear not to have participated in the transmission of ancient rhetorical texts. Even the single work by an Anglo Saxon author that is directly based on such texts, Alcuin's Dialogus de rhetorica et de virtutibus, was written and circulated on the Continent. In his panegyrical verses on York, Alcuin claims that archbishop Alberht taught Ciceronian rhetoric; but if this is true, no other traces of that teaching survive. By contrast, Knappe finds abundant evidence for the availability and use of grammatical texts with rhetorical contents. In considerable detail, she shows that texts such as Bede's Liber de schematibus et tropis, Elfric's grammar, and Byrhtferth's Manual derive their treatments of the figures exclusively from grammatical sources. Part IV approaches the question of influence from the perspective of text production, especially in the vernacular. Although Knappe is able to make some distinctions regarding rhetorical techniques—for example, writers of prose prefer figures that enhance clarity and accuracy, whereas writers of verse are more likely to employ figures for aesthetic effect—the considerable overlap with native Germanic traditions makes it impossible in most cases to prove that a given passage was influenced by rhetorical doctrines taught in the context...
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RHETORICA 232 James L. Kastley, Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodernism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), pp. vi + 293. At a time when so many are trying to "rethink" rhetoric by making up stories about "the sophists" or parroting de Man's version of Nietzsche, Kastley's book is most welcome. In it, we have a thoughtful and illuminating contribution to the conversation that needs to be promoted about the ways in which the past may meaningfully speak to the present. His list of "required reading" is not the standard one. The book begins with readings of the Gorgias and the Meno that present a Plato who was not an enemy of rhetoric but its subtlest theorizer. The two dialogues, Kastley argues, constitute a critique of the rhetoric of private interests. Socrates, by his practice of refutation (elenchos), gets us to see the inevitable entanglements with injustice and injury that ensnare anyone who engages in symbolic action in political concerns. Sophocles' Philoctetes and Euripides' Hecuba are then shown to address problems of the availability of audience, the crisis of trust, and the consequences of marginalization. In the second half of the book, Kastley reads Austen's Persuasion as an allegory confronting the lost public sphere of discourse, offering rhetoric not as a solution, but as a problem. He then presents critiques ("refutations") of Sartre's views in What is Literature? and, in one of the book's most successful chapters, of de Man's views on rhetoric. In his reading of de Man, he offers an adroit demonstration of the ways in which de Man's position is blind to the dangers of collapsing position to truth and of framing rhetoric in terms of cognition rather than action. The final chapter, "Rhetoric and Ideology," takes us to Kenneth Burke—partly by way of Lentricchia's misreading of him—and to an insightful reconsideration of the nature of ideology and of community that yields a vision of a rhetoric that can use the strategies of classical skepticism as critical devices to "expose the exercises and deformations of power operating as a set of structured relationships" (p. 257). Kastley's readings are not without problems. Not everyone will agree, for instance, that Gorgias (in Plato's dialogue) has the best interests of the community at heart (p. 35); and some may feel uncomfortable with Kastely's tendency to shape his expectations of Reviews 233 dramatic characters and explain their actions as though they were real people. The Socrates Kastley portrays seems less like the Socrates of Plato than that of Cameades's Academy. And if Persuasion shows us how, in the wake of social transformations, it became necessary for women to discover how to speak, cannot the same be said of men? On the other hand, Kastley's argument that Sartre quietly allows Kant in by the back door and his detailing of the paradoxical results of de Man's favoring knowledge over action are both persuasive. Even more impressive is the subtlety with which he thinks through the problems posed by post-Enlightenment thinking to reject the temptation to find some place to stand "outside the rhetorical flux" and move, rather, toward a world in which we act, toward a community that is pluralized, temporal, and a provisional form of sharing, where we might begin to wrestle with the injustice and injury that are inevitable, but not insurmountable. Kastley's "refutations" are, in the end, affirmations; and for those he is to be commended. THOMAS M. CONLEY University ofIllinois Gabriele Knappe, Traditionen der klassischen Rhetorik im angelsachsischen England (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 1996), xx + 573 pp. According to Gabriele Knappe, previous efforts to assess the knowledge, use, and function of classical rhetoric in Anglo-Saxon England have failed to distinguish between the tradition of ancient rhetoric proper and elements of rhetorical instruction taken over by grammarians. The goal of the former was the production of prose texts designed to have a specified effect on an audience, while the principal goal of the latter was the proper interpretation of texts and only secondarily their production. Systematic evaluation of all available evidence indicates little or no direct knowledge of...
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In the late Renaissance in England and France women appropriated classical rhetorical theory for their own purposes, creating a revised version that presented discourse as modeled on conversation rather than public speaking. In Les Femmes Illustres (1642), Conversations Sur Divers Sujets (1680), and Conversations Nouvelles sur Divers Sujets, Dediées Au Roy (1684), Madeleine de Scudéry adapted classical rhetorical theory from Cicero, Quintilian, Aristotle, and the sophists to a theory of salon conversation and letter writing. In The Worlds Olio (1655), Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, feminizes rhetoric by analogies from women's experience and inserts women into empiricist rhetoric by assuming discourse based on conversation rather than public speaking. In Women's Speaking Justified (1667), Margaret Fell revises sermon rhetorics, claiming preaching for women, but preaching in private spaces, in the Quaker prophetic fashion. In A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1701), Mary Astell adapts Augustine, proposing a women's college to promote a "Holy Conversation", and a rhetoric of written discourse treating writer and reader as conversational partners. These women use categories of the ideal woman to contest the gendering of discourse in their culture, questioning "private" and "public" as defining terms for communication.
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Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception by Kathy Eden ↗
Abstract
RHETORICA 230 unify. As in the past, he continues to argue for the multiple moments of composition theory. George Pullman Georgia State University Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 119 pp. Those interested in the evolution of particular discursive practices that helped shape antiquity, especially the theoretical relationship between reading and interpretation, will benefit from this study in locating classical antecedents that ally rhetoric and hermeneutics. Unlike most studies of hermeneutics that spring from the Germanic tradition of Schleirmacher and Dilthey or the recent perspectives of Gadamer or Riceour, this study prizes the rhetorical precedent of an ancient mode of reading, known as interpretatio scripti, as crucial to the development of the field study of hermeneutics. By tapping into this rhetorical tradition largely overlooked in philological studies, Eden historically discerns and synthesizes a convincing case for the recognition and study of interpretatio scripti as a meaning making agent common to both the rhetorical and hermeneutical enterprises that have gained renewed prominence in humanistic inquiry today. In what may be the most valuable portion of the book, the first chapters construct the significance of interpretatio scripti as a model of reading that Roman rhetoricians inherited—from the Hellenistic rhetorical tradition—as "a loosely organized set of rules for interpreting the written materials pertinent to legal cases" (p. 7). As a point of origin, Eden moves decisively to Cicero, particularly De inventione and De oratore, in contextualizing how transforming character of interpretatio scripti often complicates treatments of proof and style in his rhetorical manuals, and plays a deciding role in appropriating legal arguments between the intention (voluntas) and the letter (scriptum) of an author or text under scrutiny. Interpretation, to Cicero, is understood in terms of controversy; thus interpretation theory (and by later implication Reviews 231 hermeneutics) finds a habitual home in rhetorical theory. Eden notes that while Cicero was not the first one to do this, his work has enjoyed the widest reception and can be seen as a generative point from which to track the influence of interpretatio scripti in her book's subsequent chapters. Such a discursive heredity becomes convincing as Eden links the interpretive principles of interpretatio scripti to the classical arts of poetry and grammar as seen through Plato, Aristotle and Plutarch. The prerequisite study of grammar, in classic times, is seen to develop similar concerns as its rhetorical counterpart in the coordinating and complementary notions of decorum and oeconomia which prove crucial in "underlying the hermeneutical concept of contextualization, historical and textual, respectively" (p. 41). Eden extends her coverage of the influence of interpretatio scripti through the Christian appropriation of classical culture, in Basil, Paul and most notably in Augustine. Amidst this backdrop of Patristic hermeneutics, Eden achieves a fine sense of dialogue between the concepts of Cicero, Quintillian and Augustine, and accommodates both a spiritual and historical order that extends into the rehabilitating humanism of Erasmus. Though less substantial than the first part of the book, the final few chapters bring the selected work of Philip Melanchthon and Flacius's Clavis scripturae sacrae into the interpretive landscape as a whole. In the end, this book serves a vital role in establishing the credibility of classical scholarship in legitimizing what Ricoeur would call the hermeneutics of tradition. As a centerpiece in the debate between the role of equity and spirit in the ancient act of reading, interpretatio scripti emerges as a meaningful landmark in charting the never-ending task of interpretation, and suggests an expansion in the intellectual history of both hermeneutics and rhetoric. As an instalment in the Yale Studies in Hermeneutics, this book works an effective balance between written economy and great scholarly depth. Such a stylistic blend should provide ample access points for both experts and novices interested in theories of interpretation, antiquity and rhetoric. RICHARD A. MILLER Bowling Green State University ...
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High-modernist writers professed a disdain for rhetoric and yet found it hard to escape. They scorned the artifice of traditional, overt rhetoric and they did not wish to acknowledge that all communication is rhetorical, whether frankly or covertly. They especially distrusted “persuasion by proof” just as they distrusted traditional religion, aversions which had significant consequences for modernist literature. Modernists such as Pound favored poetry over the more frankly rhetorical genre of fiction. They valued the poet’s privilege, first articulated by Aristotle and later by Sidney, of writing only of possibilities and therefore escaping the constraints of rhetoric and of historical veracity. Nevertheless, in order to justify their poetics, these modernists developed the concept of poetic belief first popularized by Matthew Arnold and elaborated upon by I. A. Richards and T. S. Eliot. Ultimately that modernist poetics became not only a substitute for religion but a new form of the rhetoric which modernists had hoped to avoid. The poetic theory helped the literature create a covert religious rhetoric that frequently denied its own existence in a ploy for audience belief.
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Christopher Lyle Johnstone, ed. Theory, Text, Context: Issues in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996. viii + 196 pages. Craig R. Smith. Rhetoric and Human Consciousness: A History. Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, 1998 (1997). xiv + 456 pages. Robert J. Connors. Composition‐Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997. 374 pp.
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In this article I intend to share my experiences of teaching writingintensive courses at a large state university with the use of computers.' I want to present my positive experiences to the reader in such a way that will make you want to join me in exploring the myriad of possibilities of teaching with technology: ways that will free us, not constrict us-ways that will enhance learning and dialogue, not provide new ways of shutting down the inquisitive minds of students, but rather of expanding and enhancing all their possibilities and ours. Let me explain at the outset that the technologies I am advocating for teaching writing in writing-intensive literature and folklore courses are largely electronic mail formats and web sites for the distribution of assignments, for syllabi, for student writing, written assignments and peer reviews, and for the position of hypertext archives for class listservs.2 E-mail discussion listserv formats provide an easy way for everyone in the class to communicate automatically with every other member of the class, as well as with the instructor(s).3 Teachers, teaching assistants, tutors, and students can all be subscribed to the discussion listserv; whenever anyone on the list posts a memo addressed to the listserv, all persons subscribed to the list receive a copy of the entry. The listserv owner (generally, the teacher) controls who can be subscribed to the discussion list and who can participate in this electronic forum and how the discussion will operate. For example, in my descriptions below, I will illustrate how every student journal entry or writing assignment goes automatically to the computers of all the other students and myself. However, when I wish to communicate privately with a student or send her or him a graded paper, I can send that message only to that particular student simply by addressing the note to the individual student rather than to the entire list; similarly, when students are doing peer reviews of other students' papers, for privacy, they can post their comments only to the author of a paper, rather than to the entire class. In this paper I am advocating the use of the e-mail discussion list format because I believe in its capacity to better enable students to write well
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Few correspondences have enjoyed the widespread readership of the paternal lletters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth earl of Chesterfield. Never actually intended for the public eye, the epistles were written for the explicit purpose of preparing the Earl's son, Philip Stanhope, for a distinguished career in politics. Following the tradition of the courtesy book established in Cicero's De Officiis and further developed in Castiglione's Ii Cortegiano, Chesterfield infused Renaissance courtly rhetoric with Enlightenment pragmatism, rendering it more accessible and applicable to everyday life than ever before. First published posthumously in 1774, the expansive collection of letterswhich extended from 1737, when the lad was a mere five years old, to his protege's untimely death in 1768-became a standard manual for self-improvement. Despite the condemnation of moralists such as Samuel Johnson, who quipped that the letters teach the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing master, twelve editions were brought out in England and Ireland by 1803. On the Continent, the letters were soon published in various forms in Leipzig (1774-76), Paris (1775), Amsterdam (1786), and Vienna (1800), with Spanish and Italian translations coming out in the mid-nineteenth century. The first American edition was published in 1779. In both Europe and America, new editions, abridgements, selections, adaptations, and even parodies of the letters have been popular since the their original publication. In the United States, for example, an adaptation entitled Principles of Politeness was published over twenty times before 1820. In the twentieth century, several significant editions have been issued, including texts by Everyman Library (1929; last reprinted in 1986) and Oxford's World's Classics (1929; most recent edition, 1992). The Earl's letters no longer find their way to aspiring lads' nightstands, yet it is interesting to note that twenty quotes from them are included in the sixteenth edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1992). Because discussion of oratorical prowess-which Chesterfield believed was essential for success in civic life (see Son 1: 521)-pervades the letters, his characterization of persuasion has long been scrutinized by students of rhetoric. In the nineteenth century, Thomas De Quincey praises the Earl as so accomplished a judge [of rhetoric] (111), yet most scholars of our era express skepticism toward the Earl's advice, downplaying his commitment to the full scope of
February 1998
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Abstract: In On Invention, Cicero discusses both induction and deduction. In regard to the latter, Cicero presents a controversy between those who advocate a five-part analysis of deductive reasoning and those who prefer three parts. The issue is not practical or pedagogical, but conceptual in nature. Cicero himself prefers analysis into five parts, and rather confusingly he presents the argument of the advocates of five parts as if it were his own. The argument is striking in that it makes elaborate use of mixed hypothetical syllogisms in order to argue for five parts. Cicero claims that the five-part analysis has been preferred by all who take their start from Aristotle and Theophrastus. A survey of what Theophrastus is reported to have said concerning the hypothetical syllogism renders Cicero's claim intelligible. That is not to say that Theophrastus himself advocated a five-part analysis. Most likely the association with him derives from his known interest in hypothetical syllogistic. Later rhetoricians who identified themselves with the Peripatos made the cormection with the founders of the school, thereby gaining authority for a controversial analysis.
January 1998
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In the course of this paper, I shall say some things about Cicero’s discussion of induction, but my primary concern will be with his account of deduction. In particular, I want to call attention to Cicero’s argument for a quinquepartite analysis of deductive reasoning (Ded. 3). It is remarkable in that it makes elaborate use of the mixed hypothetical syllogism, and also of some importance in that it supplements our evidence for early Peripatetic interest in syllogisms of this land. Recent scholarship on the history of ancient logic has generally focused on later sources—like Alexander of Aphrodisias, Boethius, Philoponus and Simplicius— and pointed to Theophrastus as a significant contributor to the development of hypothetical syllogistic. Cicero, writing three centuries before Alexander, seems not only to confirm the importance of Theophrastus but also to indicate that his contributions were recognized as such by Hellenistic rhetoricians. In presenting this thesis, I shall not be accepting Cicero’s claim to have written more accurately and diligently than others (Ded. 7), but I will suggest that the argument in favor of quinquepaitite analysis (Ded. 3) is more coherent than what precedes (Ded. 2) and that this difference is largely attributable to Cicero’s use of sources.