Abstract

This essay delineates essential features of memory as a salient topos of rhetorical literature, both classical and modern. This essay also considers how both the arts of rhetoric and memory alike underwent cultural devaluation in Western modernity only to reappear in altered forms as compelling objects of analysis. In doing so, the essay contends that current enthusiasms for the study of collective memory in communication and composition studies alike signify forms of simultaneous connection and disconnection with the historical role of rhetoric in the classical art of memory.