Abstract

414 RHETORICA The focus of "Chapter 5 Giving and Getting Advice by Letter" is the way advice was offered as a gift to the recipient. This act of advice giving, though, was fraught with many perils. White's analysis of these perils shows encyclopedic knowledge of Cicero's social relationships and sensitive close reading. He shows how the advice giver had to balance the risk of bad advice with the opposite risk that bland generalities would be useless, and the hierarchical problem that while detailed and specific advice was the most useful gift, it could also appear condescending. Furthermore, advice given or received could implicate the interlocutors in each others' actions, leading to credit in the case of good results and discredit otherwise. Finally, "Chapter 6: Letter Writing and Leadership," shows the role of letters in the political events of 44 and 43, showing how letters functioned as part of political persuasion, influence peddling, and strategic communica­ tion. White shows how Cicero's letters help us understand his involvement in these events in a more personal and direct manner than the Philippic Orations and provide for us a rare opportunity to understand the positions, motivations, and maneuvers of the Roman political elite in a time of crisis. Overall, Cicero in Letters is an erudite, readable and original work that promises to be a major landmark in its area. Rhetorical scholars, however, will find frustrating a few significant lacunae in White's approach. The first, and most obvious, is that in explaining Ciceronian persuasion, White does not cite Cicero's rhetorical works at all, apparently thinking that Cicero's books on persuasion are of no use at all in helping us understand his per­ suasive practices. A second issue not addressed by White is the pedagogical circulation of letters. Roland Barthes famously said that "literature is what is taught" (1986). As many letter collections circulated in antiquity as peda­ gogical models, and Cicero's orations also functioned as models for students of rhetoric, it is puzzling that White does not address the possibility of peda­ gogical intentions and uses of the letters. Despite lack of direct interaction with rhetorical scholarship and rhetorical approaches to epistolography and epistolary theory, White's Cicero in Letters lays invaluable groundwork for future rhetorical studies of Ciceronian letters. Carol Poster York University Samuel McCormick, Letters to Power: Public Advocacy Without Pub­ lic Intellectuals. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011.197 pp. ISBN (Hardcover) 978-0-271-05073-7 Samuel McCormick s new volume holds two arguments in equipoise. As its title suggests, the first argument focuses on Letters to Power. It is an investigation of epistolary rhetoric, its form, its audiences, its strategies, and its cunning. Make no mistake, this is not your standard issue ars dictaininis. Reviews 415 Under McCormick s careful hand, the old art of letter writing is invested with a host of pressing lessons: about power, about the professoriate, and about the history of rhetoric. As his subtitle suggests, the second argument is about Public Advocacy Without Public Intellectuals. Here McCormick's concern is with learned intervention. In an age in which the classic role of the public intellectual is increasingly unavailable, McCormick asks what modes of resistance are available for today's institutionalized academics? The book's conceit, of course, is that these two arguments work in tandem: that the epistolary form provides rhetorical resources for learned advocacy. McCormick's account of epistolary rhetoric is grounded in the letters of Seneca the Younger, Christine de Pizan, Immanuel Kant, and Soren Kierkegaard. He argues that the epistolary form constitutes a "minor rhe­ toric" (13). It is a "minor" rhetoric not because letters are subordinate to treatises, but because the letters harbor the capacity to destabilize the hierar­ chy according to which treatises or tomes are more important than personal letters. Most importantly from my perspective, as a "minor rhetoric" the letter harbors the potential to reshape the history of rhetoric. From the per­ spective of the epistolary form, Seneca, Christine, Kant, and Kierkegaard now fit squarely in rhetorical history. Significantly, their place in such a history requires no recourse to the thematics of their thought; Seneca thematized retirement and Kierkegaard...