Abstract
Reviews 419 tional textual forms than they might have appeared when first becoming widely available and used in the 1990s. And yet, the contemporary history narrated here doesn't always seem right. McCorkle acknowledges that many digital rhetoricians often equate delivery with medium. He himself seems to equate them early in his book, in some of its opening sentences: “This book is about the moving parts of the rhetorical process: the raised arm, the clenched fist, the shifting counte nance, and (more recently) the array of typefaces, color palettes, graphics, background audio files, and other multimodal content used to help covey a given message to its intended audience" (1). Ultimately, however, the materi ality of digital interfaces is not embodiment, even if such interfaces remediate approaches, positions, and stances from embodied rhetorical performances. Late in the book, McCorkle acknowledges this: "In the era of digital writing, rhetoric has disembodied the canon of delivery" (160). Such disembodiment suggests that what is at stake in contemporary delivery is more than just an interplay of older media forms and newer media forms. As he puts it: "expanding the theoretical scope of delivery to include texts not uttered by the speaking body extends the conceptual language of the canon beyond the traditionallv understood constraints of space and time, making it a far richer part of the rhetorical process" (160). Yes, surely he's right. But perhaps digital delivery is not just disembodiment, or portends a new set of relations between communication and bodies? Such a question lies beyond the scope of McCorkle's book, but it's to his credit that his analysis leaves us wondering what new bodies of knowledge our digital technologies might deliver to us. Jonathan Alexander University of California, Irvine Costelloe, Timothy M., ed. The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 13 + 304 pp ISBN 978-0-521-14367-7; Eck, Caroline van, Stijn Bussels, Maarten Delbeke, Jurgen Pieters, eds. Translations ofthe Sublime: The Early Modern Recep tion and Dissemination of Longinus' Peri Hupsous in Rhetoric, the Visual Arts, Architecture and the Theatre. Leiden: Brill, 2012. xix + 272 pp. ISBN 978-90-04-22955-6 Just as aesthetics is undergoing something of a revival in classical studies, so too is the heritage of the sublime increasingly getting its due again. The two collections under review contribute mightily to both trends. And they do so above all by marshaling a strong army of scholars from a number of disciplines, from Classics and modern literatures to philosophy, geography, architecture and design, art history, theater, and rhetoric. The diversity pays off: the sublime is shown to flourish in each of these areas, 420 RHETORICA often unexpectedly, as if diffusing its radiant light into all conceivable corners of the modern world and into the present. If you had any doubt whether Longinus made an impact on modernity, you need look no further than here. Costelloe's volume, though not explicitly concerned with the reception of Longinus, is nonetheless heavily informed by this agenda. The Introduc tion and the first chapter ("Longinus and the Ancient Sublime" by Malcolm Heath) set the tone for the remaining chapters, which quickly rush into the eighteenth century, starting with Burke, Kant, representatives of the Scot tish Enlightenment (a refreshing change), French neoclassicists, and then the sublime of Lyotard and company, the most recent French heirs to Boileau and company. These essays constitute the first part of the collection, which offer less of a "Philosophical History of the Sublime" than a drastically fore shortened version of that history. The second part spreads out in fascinating ways to look at the sublime in the Netherlands and in America in the 18i/7 and 19f/z centuries, in the fields of the philosophy of nature and the environment, in religion, among British Romantics, and against the background of the fine arts question and in architecture. The most interesting essays are those that broach unfamiliar territory. The associationalism of Gerard, Karnes, Alison, and Stewart reconstructed by Rachel Zuckert and put in relation to the sub lime will likely send readers off to the library (or to Google) in search of X these intriguing figures, as will Eva Madeleine...
- Journal
- Rhetorica
- Published
- 2014-09-01
- DOI
- 10.1353/rht.2014.0007
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