Abstract
454 RHETORICA speakers moved (along with a comic lexicon of abuse) from drama to oratory, surfacing also in the Platonic dialogue (although ignored for the most part by Aristotle) and proliferating in Theophrastus. Although for the sake of clarity I have focused in this review on the central opposition between the aggressive versus and the weak and decadent speaker, W. is clear that these two types exist at opposite ends of a continuum and that characteristics of one type can slide into another. Particularly welcome is her insistence that the iambic mode transcends genre. This enables her to make wideranging and successful connections between comedy, satyr play, tragedy, philosophy, and forensic rhetoric. One of the pleasures of the book is to trace the various instantiations of the paradoxical figure of Socrates from Aristophanes to Plato and Theophrastus. Socrates does not occur explicitly in the last of these, but the cumulative force of W.'s analysis compels the reader to give serious consideration to her suggestion that he is a shadowy presence in several of Theophrastus7 caricatures, the product of "a tradition of characterization that wittily assimilates to intemperate types a teacher who used his famous recalcitrance to disparage and tease haughty, boastful elites" (317). Individual readers will, of course, find places where they could desire reformulation or areas where further questions arise. I, for example, am not entirely comfortable with the contention (22) that Plato adopted the language of insult from dramatic genres—this seems to me to be perhaps an overly reductive way of formulating a process that was surely more complex. This leads in turn to problems about how informal practices of insult bleed into and from the rhetoricized versions we find in our literary texts (a reading of the treatment of invective found in Plato's Laws 934-936 would be useful here). Yet it is no insult to suggest that the book presents opportunities for future reflection; some discomfort is a small price to pay for such thoughtful and productive work. Kathryn A. Morgan University of California at Los Angeles Sergey Dolgopolski. What is Talmud? The Art of Disagreement. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009. xii + 333 pp. ISBN: 9780823229345 This book joins an increasing body of work devoted to the study of Jewish discourse. The study of Jewish rhetoric has found a place in the work of rhetoric and composition scholars who are turning their attention to the subject of non-Western or alternative rhetorics (Carol Lipson and Roberta Binkley's Ancient Non-Greek Rhetorics), as well as scholars who imagine that the conceptual integrity of the notion "Jewish perspectives" can be coherently expressed as a book (Andrea Greenbaum and Deborah Holstein's Jewish Perspectives in Rhetoric and Composition). What is Talmud? Reviews 455 also shares a concern with work in Jewish studies devoted to pedagogy (Simcha Assaf), rabbinic literary activity (Daniel Boyarin, Jeffrey Rubenstein, David Stern), historiography (Ismar Schorsch), systematic Hebrew rhetorics (Isaac Rabinowitz, Arthur Lesley) and the hermeneutical activity of textbased communities (Moshe Halbertal). While there are resources enough from which to construct a course on "Jewish discourse," the idea of teaching and studying "Jewish rhetorics" is still problematic inasmuch as there is a sense that organizing the considerable scholarly activity devoted to "Jewish discourse" under the phrase "Jewish rhetorics" is at best an anachronistic projection and, at worst, an act of violent appropriation. One way to avoid the charges of appropriation or anachronism would be to treat "rhetoric" as a set of methodologies that could be productively applied to any "text." The problem with this approach is that often the methodologies that fall under the heading of rhetoric were produced in support of philosophical or historical investigations. For this reason, others have chosen to treat rhetoric as a set of concerns, or even a predisposition to ask certain kinds of questions. The idea of "Jewish rhetorics" might, in that instance as well, avoid the violence of appropriation, but "rhetoric," then runs the risk of simply being another name for something that is being productively and more accurately examined as "discourse" or "literary activity." The concept of "Jewish rhetorics" may encounter some resistance because, in avoiding the charges of anachronism or violence, "Jewish...
- Journal
- Rhetorica
- Published
- 2012-09-01
- DOI
- 10.1353/rht.2012.0011
- CompPile
- Search in CompPile ↗
- Open Access
- Closed
- Topics
- Export
- BibTeX RIS
Citation Context
Cited by in this index (0)
No articles in this index cite this work.
Cites in this index (0)
No references match articles in this index.
Related Articles
-
Pedagogy Jan 2022modern rhetorical theory rhetorical criticism genre theory discourse analysis african american rhetorics decolonial rhetorics first-year composition writing pedagogy basic writing writing across the curriculum graduate education teacher development argument collaborative writing transfer assessment portfolios writing program administration writing centers peer tutoring technical communication professional writing archival research digital rhetoric social media grammar and mechanics literacy studies race and writing gender and writing disability studies public rhetoric community literacy literary studies editorial matter
-
Philosophy & Rhetoric Apr 2013Ekaterina Haskins
-
Philosophy & Rhetoric Jun 2012Stephen Howard Browne
-
Rhetorica Mar 2011Rhetoric and the Republic: Politics, Civic Discourse, and Education in Early America by Mark Longaker ↗Paul Dahlgren
-
Rhetorica Jun 1998John Poulakos