Rhetoric Review Sep 1987

A critique of classical rhetoric: The contemporary appropriation of ancient discourse

Kathleen E. Welch University of Oklahoma

Abstract

In a recent Festschrift for Edward P. J. Corbett, Andrea A. Lunsford and Lisa S. Ede look dispassionately at the issues we now concern ourselves with in historical rhetoric, evaluate them, and conclude forcefully that much of Aristotle's work has been reduced to the unrecognizable.I They assert that much of the secondary work in Aristotle depends on misunderstandings that can occur when commentators ignore the fundamental connections among Aristotle's writings (41). Later in the same essay, in citing William Grimaldi's complex interconnections among Aristotle's works, Lunsford and Ede say, rational man of Aristotle's rhetoric is not a automaton, but a languageusing animal who unites reason and emotion in discourse with others. Aristotle (and indeed, Plato and Isocrates as well) studied the power of the mind to gain meaning from the world and to share that meaning with others (43). The Aristotle as logic-chopping that Lunsford and Ede have named for us represents the inadequate and sometimes even wrong interpretation that a significant number of rhetorical scholars rely on in their presentations of classical rhetoric. The explication of Aristotle as automaton also provides us with a critique of the state of some scholarly work on classical rhetoric in American rhetoric and composition during the last twenty years. This formulaic view of rhetoric, which emerges eventually as a pattern, relies on reducing the intertwining theories that make up classical rhetoric and replacing them with simple categories. This kind of reductivism, a version of classical rhetoric that writers of the Heritage School (Welch 120) often use, hinders complex interpretation, such as the work of Walter Ong and James Kinneavy, and deprives classical rhetoric of its strength and its attractiveness. The Heritage School presentation of classical rhetoric primarily as a series of rules, dicta, and

Journal
Rhetoric Review
Published
1987-09-01
DOI
10.1080/07350198709359154
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Topics
classical rhetoric rhetorical criticism discourse analysis archival research
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Citation Context

Cited by in this index (3)

  1. Donavin (1996)
    The medieval rhetoric of identification: A Burkean reconception
    Rhetoric Society Quarterly
  2. Bender (1993)
    Diversity revisited, or composition's alien history
    Rhetoric Review
  3. Sullivan (1989)
    Attitudes toward imitation: Classical culture and the modern temper
    Rhetoric Review

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    The “Art” of Rhetoric
  5. Cicero (1970)
    Brutus; or, Remarks on Eminent Orators. Cicero on Oratory and Orators
Show all 36 →
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