Rhetoric Society Quarterly Jun 1998

The art of rhetoric: Aesthetics and rhetoric in the American renaissance

Christopher Diller University of Utah

Abstract

T he critical commonplace that rhetoric simply declined in direct proportion to rise of Romanticism has thankfully come under increasing scrutiny. In 1989, for example, Susan Jarratt questioned Donald C. Stewart's observation that the most notable feature of history of rhetoric in nineteenth century was its absence (73) and established constitutive role of rhetoric in literary and critical writings of Victorian Walter Pater. More recently, Don Bialostosky and Lawrence Needham have argued that the hesitancy of of rhetoric to consider political, cultural, or material factors when discussing rhetoric and Romanticism has been due to their willingness to accept at face value what Romantic authors have said about writing. For example, they have accepted uncritically pronouncements about Romantic genius that place author outside lines of dependency and relationship-and beyond concerns of rhetoric. Consequently, they write, historians of rhetoric have been curiously ahistorical in their accounts of rhetoric and Romanticism . (8). And just last year, almost as if in response to Bialostosky and Needham's assessment, Rex Veeder demonstrated how political and rhetorical principles informed Romantic pulpit practice in nineteenth century. He finds that What Romantics suggest is that purpose of art, including art of writing, is rhetorical in that it encourages act of identification and by so doing allows auditors to transcend their world view through imaginative participation with another (316). Rather than dismissing Romantic discourses as arhetorical or contentedly relegating Romantic texts to conservative pedagogies of taste, these rightly inquire into complex political and social conditions that impelled production and reception of Romanticism. Further, they implicitly or explicitly view their work as having important institutional consequences for literary studies, rhetoric, and composition. That is, if Romanticism has often been elided from histories of rhetoric for its aesthetic affiliations, this brand of revisionist historicism takes as its primary political motive opportunity to revisit-and to qualify-such founding Romantic oppositions as imaginary and factual, reading and writing, literary and rhetorical. In words of Bialostosky and Needham, A new investigation of relationship between Romanticism and rhetoric may lead to a rapprochement between literary and rhetorical branches of English studies (as well as between English and Rhetoric departments) whose separation was founded upon and is sustained by commonplace story of end of rhetoric and rise of literature in Romantic period (5).

Journal
Rhetoric Society Quarterly
Published
1998-06-01
DOI
10.1080/02773949809391122
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Topics
modern rhetorical theory rhetorical criticism assessment literacy studies editorial matter
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