Abstract

RHETORICA 346 parliamentarians' polemical methods new? How was the "revolutionary reader" an improvement on the grammar-schooltrained reader? Was there ultimately such a creature as a "revolutionary reader"? For a student of the history of seventeenth-century rhetoric, the most striking irony of these two books is the way in which they embody the great divide in perception that, as Richard Lanham has recently reminded us, occurred with the advent of Ramism. Despite the paucity of his rhetorical discussion, Rushdy's assumptions about the epistemic nature of the rhetorical self are profoundly humanistic, Achinstein's limiting of "rhetoric" to tropes, figures, and entertainment, supremely Ramist. In an age that demands critical self-consciousness, it is appropriate to expect that scholars of seventeenth-century "rhetoric" examine their own understanding of the term, and bring to their work an awareness not merely of current theoretical trends but of the theory and practice that pervaded their subjects' world. For this kind of study, models abound. To name only two examples, I call readers' attention to Mary Thomas Crane's Framing Authority (1993), which compellingly shows how school training in the practice of keeping commonplace books radically structured sixteenth-century poetic practice, and Garry Wills's Lincoln at Gettysburg (1992), which, through brilliant rhetorical analysis, demonstrates how Lincoln drew from the oratorical practice of the day to transform American political thought. Elizabeth Skerpan Wheeler Emmanuel Bury, Littérature et politesse: l'invention de l'honnête homme (1580-1750), Perspectives littéraires (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996) 268 pp. Emmanuel Bury's ample and ambitious synthesis seeks to link the elaboration of norms of social behaviour in early modem France not so much to large-scale social processes (though these are not ignored) as to the emergence of a new literary culture from the humanist inheritance. It shows how literature functioned Reviews 347 as a pedagogic agency in the broad sense, and thus enables a fuller comprehension of the subtlety of what neo-classical poetics meant by 'instruction'. The most fruitful emphasis of the introductory chapter on humanism is on the role of procedures of reading in the constitution of an individual and cultural memory: above all the absorption of exempla and sententiæ, particularly from classified anthologies of ancient writing. Not only ethical ideals are thus nourished, but practices of writing: the presentation and re-presentation of moral truth in fragmentary form, or in new, often fictional or dramatic, contexts. 'Truth' here, of course, means the truths of doxa; and the empire of the probably is consolidated over prose fiction and theatre, as conceived and produced from the 1630s on: the very period in which the notion of honnêteté becomes established. 'Descriptive' mimesis constantly slides into the 'prescriptive' inculcation of norms. The romance (d'Urfé, Scudéry) is a kind of laboratory for the development and testing of moral codes, equipping readers to participate in the social world; comedy, Balzac and others argued, offered unobtrusive instruction through the presentation of character. Aspects of this ideal of moral and social formation through literary culture survive into the eighteenth century, but Bury well brings out the various pressures that eventually transform it almost beyond recognition. The rejection by Pascal, Descartes, and Malebranche of the logic of the vraisemblable and the humanist cultural memory in favour of an individual apprehension of truth is suggestively linked to the emergence of a literature (as in Marivaux) that appeals to communicable individual experience rather than a doxal culture shared by author and reader. Although retaining the sense of literature as morally formative, Marivaux's conception of style and personality breaks radically with the humanist inheritance: he is a major figure in Bury's global narrative of the displacement of humanist paideia by the modern conception of 'literature'. The affinity between literature and honnêteté as an ideal of sociability is jeopardised when late seventeenth-century writing takes up the criticism of society and especially of the court, a theme also of contemporary discourses of honnêteté which define it more and more in terms of probity. The analysis is pursued down to Rousseau, in whom the suspicion of culture and of society is most 348 RHETORICA radically voiced...