Abstract

Reviews 325 form, or form ox er content? Malm's work is not really situated in relation to extant criticism on Aristotle and his reception, despite the eighteen pages on which the eminent Classics scholar Stephen Halliwell is cited. In the end, I have no clear sense of either Halliwell's arguments or how Malm's account of mimesis may or may not relate to them. Other scholars are cited with still greater opacity: for example, in a not uninteresting excursion on the sublime and its relation to visualization (phantasia), we are told, "The evolution of aes­ thetics can be tied to the ev olution of a new kind of social subject, as Peter de Bolla has demonstrated" (p. 139). No explanation follows. To my' mind, the best chapter of The Soul of Poetry Redefined is its tenth and last, "Emotions and the system of genres" (pp. 171-85). Here Malm advances, however tentatively, a real argument with explanatory force. Addressing the question of whv Aristotle stresses content over style and dra­ matic poetry over lyric, Malm writes that in the Poetics, "The pleasure of poetry. . .comes mainiv from understanding, and from pity and fear which are means of understanding. In this way, Aristotle distances poetry consider­ able' from the Platonic critique of linguistic voluptuousness and decadence. . . . Defining the soul of poetrv as lexis, mimesis-representation would have been to subject it to Plato's critique of rhetoric and representation. The soul of poetrv being muthos, content and structure, poetry becomes less reproachable" (p. 175). For Aristotle, emotions are "instrumental," intended to influence an audience, and thus fundamentally rhetorical (p. 176). It is only in the Renais­ sance—Malm adduces Antonio Minturno's L'Arte Poetica (1564)—that lyric, as the representation of a character's emotions, is theorized as a third genre alongside epic and drama. "The definition of a lyric genre," Malm argues, "could onlv take place by redefining emotions from instruments into objects" (p. 178)—a process Malm associates with painting and its theorization as the objectiv e representation of emotion (pp. 178-83). These arguments, sketched at the end of Malm's study, might profitably be pursued in future research. Whatev er the shortcomings of its content might be, The Soul of Poetry Redefined is, as a physical object, resplendent. In cover design, front papers (of a deep scarlet), page layout, and type face, the book is a delight to behold; its paper quality is a delight for the fingers. The Museum Tusculanum Press of the University of Copenhagen is to be commended for reminding us in the age of the internet that academic books can still be things of beauty. Adam Potkay, The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg William Fitzgerald, Spiritual Modalities: Prayer as Rhetoric and Perfor­ mance. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012. x+158 pp. ISBN 9780271056227 Spiritual Modalities is an extremely useful book. It not only explores in depth the rhetorical power of prayer; it also provides abundant hermeneutic resources for the further study of this ancient yet still contemporary speech 326 RHETORIC A act genre. Creatively employing Kenneth Burke's dramatism as an interpre­ tive lens, William Fitzgerald has written a detailed post-secular analysis that reveals prayer as an embodied performance, a cognitive scene of address, a material act of invocation, and a social attitude of reverence. Historians of rhetoric might question Fitzgerald's claim that his book is "the first system­ atic study of prayer in relation to rhetoric" (3) and place it instead within the loose tradition of rhetorics of prayer (sometimes anachronistically called artes orandi) that stretches back to William of Auvergne's Rhetorica divina and Erasmus's Modus orandi Deum. Nonetheless, Spiritual Modalities is cer­ tainly a significant contribution to the ongoing religious turn in rhetorical studies and the human sciences more generally. One of the most impressive things about Spiritual Modalities is that Fitzgerald achieves many critical and theoretical goals simultaneously and thus his book can be used in different ways by different readers. For example, he analyzes prayer as a specific rhetorical genre and also employs it as a general meta-rhetorical framework. Rhetorical critics of prayer will value the rich illustrations...