Reviewed by: The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk by Samuel McCormick Daniel M. Gross (bio) Samuel McCormick, The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020. 326 pp. ISBN: 978-0-226-67763-7. Implicitly McCormick's book addresses a question that is urgent in the US academic context, where current rhetoric and communication practices are in fact much studied: Why study history at all? At best, so the skeptic might offer, historical work provides some interesting background to the pressing problems of today. At worst, historical work exacerbates some of those same problems around rhetorical power by simply by spending too much time on received traditions. (I've long admired Malea Powell's sly and self-consuming conference paper title "Aristotle Is Not My Father.") At the same time a set of distinct answers to this history question has been brewing at The University of Chicago Press, thanks in large part to the late editor extraordinaire Douglas Mitchell, who had himself learned about rhetoric from the late century Chicago scene, and Richard McKeon in particular. The series Mitchell started at Chicago "Rhetoric and Communication" has published different types of concept-oriented histories by scholars including Nancy Struever, John Durham Peters, Debra Hawhee, David Marshall, and now Samuel McCormick. Taken together, this group of scholars shows how rhetoric and communication can't be studied adequately without some strong historical version of conceptual work, because that is how the very [End Page 90] things we wish to study appear as such in the first place. In what follows I discuss how McCormick's book makes the case elegantly. First of all, why for McCormick "conceptual history," especially as it would apply to "everyday talk" counterintuitively? Shouldn't we study everyday talk by recording and coding ordinary speakers in face-to-face settings? No doubt, replies McCormick, such grounded study of the first type gets at something sociological (2). But how can we study the very concept of everyday talk as it has shifted significantly online for instance, showing up as "chat," which can't be the same thing? For that sort of study, historical work on the concept is essential, because that is the only way we know what our object of study is in the first place. It is not "conversation," which McCormick calls an interpersonal modality, that achieved its highest art and greatest conceptual clarity in the Enlightenment. At the same time, it is not public sphere discourse legitimated by (again Enlightenment) institutions of oratory and journalism (291). Instead, McCormick argues with a nod to paradox, "everyday talk" is a distinct concept that rises with modernity and its industrializing momentum (4), what Kierkegaard first identifies as snak. This is where McCormick must demonstrate—and he does so beautifully—why we turn to Kierkegaard at this point of inquiry, and not only to his rich archive of wagging tongues, noise and nonsense, cliché and bombast, wordplay and witticism, tangent, reprise, gossip, gimcrack, diversion, duplicity, tedious anecdote, absurd abstraction, abrupt interjection, and endless logorrhea (44). Methodologically, McCormick's powerful point is that snak is the concept that names this verbal efflorescence, and Kierkegaard's work is where the concept appears in its sharpest and critical form. If we studied for instance only Gert Westephaler's fictional talk, or the philosophical talk of Hegel's Danish parrots (44), we would lose track of the concept snak altogether, and thus we would not really understand what we were talking about ourselves: an irony that McCormick has to dance with throughout this substantial section steeped in Kierkegaard's first language Danish, and in his vast corpus that we no longer know how to handle academically. One outstanding virtue of McCormick's book is that it will teach a new generation of scholars what Kierkegaard did besides anticipate existentialism. The next section of the book, a book that runs 326 pages in total, picks up the work of Martin Heidegger, who was himself a keen reader of Kierkegaard. Now focusing on the 1920s, which were for Heidegger both a period of tremendous intellectual ferment that includes his 1924 lecture course on Aristotle's Rhetoric and...

When we pick up a big book like this with big names including Heidegger, Arendt, Benjamin, and Warburg, we want to learn something significant we don't already know by way of reading and reputation. And if we are in rhetoric per se, we are especially eager to see how these people are attached substantially to a field that none of them claimed. Following from these initial expectations, we are then owed a plausible methodology that tends neither toward the wish fulfillment of big rhetoric, nor toward one of the more conventional methods—for example biographic, or dictated by the more familiar scripts of philosophy, politics, and art history—that would render these surprises unlikely because the field would have been smoothed already; to break new ground one usually needs a new approach. Finally, we would want to know what's the point of this new approach beyond novelty per se—what can we think and do differently along these new lines? Marshall's book delivers richly on all these efforts. In what follows, I explain how, while keeping in play a pressing question about what intellectual history has to do with a larger and seemingly distant field of rhetorical studies, which is more often concerned not with big names, but with no names like “students” and the authorial commonplaces found in schoolrooms and textbooks.First a note on structure. As a book reviewer and longtime book review editor myself, I have always discouraged chapter-by-chapter reviews because that sequential structure tends to prioritize description over argumentation. In the case of Marshall's book, however, any careful argument about what the book does (or doesn't) do depends upon a sequential and experiential “here's what we know—here's what we don't know” structure of the book itself. One interesting quality of Marshall's argument, in other words, is his persistent challenge to the reader who is asked to review their own intellectual habits and presuppositions, while looking for worthwhile opportunities at Marshall's suggestion. Marshall's argument has an experiential quality part and parcel of his method explained below, which has to be evaluated in terms of its qualities: How might those scripts and presuppositions be mine after all? As a reader, what possibilities do I now see? Such qualities would not show up in the first place if I structured this review around the main claim found in the title, for instance. The primary point of the book would go missing if one were to argue whether rhetorical inquiry indeed has Weimar origins, and if so, to what extent. Missing, precisely, would be the book-length and sequential argument about the sayability of the title itself. What habits of language and thought produce the possibility of this title? The first part of Marshall's book addresses this first question. Then: What can we do with that title once it becomes a real possibility? The latter part of Marshall's book addresses that second question.Forgoing the catchy hook recommended by rhetoric, this ultimately thrilling book experience starts instead with the intentionally familiar. Chapter 1, “The Weimar We Know and the Weimar We Do Not Know,” begins by running “a standard received version of the Weimar origins of political theory” in order to set the scene for a more generative set of rhetorical presuppositions (31). That means in this case telling the story of Max Weber's political bureaucracy as it was taken up by Schmitt, Strauss, Baron, and Adorno, before introducing a nascent “rhetorical” thread in Weber's famous analysis of charisma. Methodologically, chapter 1 also introduces the philosophical work of Robert Brandom. Like Brandom's common law, concludes Marshall (312), “piecemeal” explication of concepts is both unavoidable in the everyday, and foundational for meaning itself. Concepts—including philosophical, rhetorical, theoretical, legal, and so on—don't unilaterally dictate their own meaning, nor are they delivered from on high or from authorities verbatim with meanings and extensions self-evident thereafter. Our job as interlocutors in particular fields and in everyday speech, then, is to take advantage of this cobbling dynamic with whatever skill we can muster—and indeed this will be the untapped potential of Marshall's book I will return to at the end.Chapter 2, like chapter 1, purports to offer the familiar but deceivingly so, because the pre-Weimar “Idioms of Rhetorical Inquiry” Marshall assembles won't be familiar to any but the specialized scholars of modern German rhetoric, and even for those few, familiar names like Gottsched, Sulzer, Novalis, Schlegel, Schopenhauer, Baumgarten, Kleist, Nietzsche, and most importantly for what is to come Adam Müller, will appear fresh as their rhetorical idioms point in unanticipated directions, that is toward “topical sensitization” (326) that multiplies the contours of a perception field we can productively discern and then navigate at any given moment. To that end, chapter 2 subheadings organize points of ongoing interest: topical surveying, specifications of context, the shift of trope (that bends or reconfigures a perception field), orientation to belief. Finally, Müller, as it turns out, emerges as an unlikely star of the story because his much-maligned liberal indecisionism turns out to be, for Marshall and his later critics including Benjamin, the surprising name for rhetorical virtue in parademocratic times: a name that is better known conceptually as “freedom” (e.g., 210). How does Marshall get there with his surprising start in Heidegger, who grounds the core chapters?Chapter 3, “Heideggerian Foundations,” sets the daunting task of locating foundations for this kind of political freedom in one of its avowed archenemies. The trick, as it turns out, is to make the Brandom-inspired case for Heideggerian foundations that offered multiple ways forward, some of which he took himself toward Nazism first, and then finally toward a wayward critique of modernity and its “total mobilization” (118). At the same time other ways forward—that Heidegger might have marked out himself smartly but inadvertently and without any intention of following himself—could point in different and even contrary directions still indebted, nevertheless, to their Heideggerian origins. Methodologically, this is one of Marshall's important points: it is a task of the intellectual historian to identify in retrospect, and to take seriously, possibilities that could be articulated only after the fact. But it would be wrong to think that this scholarly task is to read against the grain. Or to read symptomatically. Or to in any way read at a distance from the manifest material we have on hand. Instead, ideally this type of intellectual history reads thoroughly across the entire oeuvre (which in the case of Heidegger now runs to over one hundred volumes in the Gesamtausgabe), in the original languages, and in the rich local contexts that produce the work in its manifest not just its latent qualities. Real possibilities must be legible in the origins themselves. Through this process Marshall is particularly attentive to early Heidegger, and especially his Summer Semester 1924 course on Aristotle's Rhetoric Book II focusing on the emotions. For it is in these lectures that Marshall can most readily identify the “intimate connection between rhetoric and core elements in the Heideggerian philosophical project,” most importantly the foundational role emotions play in the space and time of appearance. “For Heidegger,” Marshall summarizes, “neither time nor space were prior to motion. In fact, time and space were produced by motions, the differentials among motions, and by the articulation of those differentials. This contention established ‘situatedness’ (Befindlichkeit) as the first—rhetorical—task of all presencing” (117). However, as Marshall tells the story, Heidegger himself then follows motion-as-dunamis toward a totalizing critique of modernity without realizing a possibility that would become manifest only later in one of his star students from those Marburg years, Hannah Arendt.In chapter 4, “Hannah Arendt and the Rhetorical Constitution of Space,” Marshall himself pursues this possibility but unavoidably from a point beyond Arendt herself: “The historian of thought qua thinker has something like a duty to continue the line of inquiry that could have been but was not” (130). In this case, that means on the one hand highlighting how Arendt took plausible but unexpected turns: Heidegger on emotion became Arendt on love (131). Heidegger's analysis of Augustinian caritas—or mutual care across all creatures fallen from God—turned toward an equidistance Heidegger would never have seen favorably because it would have smacked of a proto-mathematical that later makes human beings susceptible to the cynical calculations of modernity. But contrarily within the Augustinian concept of caritas as it was developed in Arendt's dissertation, “there was an equidistance from all creatures that articulated the beginning of a political theory of equality” (135). And similarly for Arendt “solidarity” (dilectio proximi) was a “rhetorical capacity to attend to possible [e]motions without immediately succumbing to them” (138). Next Rahel Varnhagen's public spheres, according to Arendt's rhetorical twist, are not legislated but performed (142). But as Marshall points out from his methodological standpoint, “rhetoric” in this case has some interesting documentary evidence in Arendt's oeuvre—for example her 1953 notes on Aristotle's Rhetoric (267)—while at the same time remaining essentially latent in Arendt's manifest work, where it awaits revision. And here, concludes Marshall, “we have a provisional answer to the conundrum of how Arendt could have overlooked rhetoric: she saw that the ‘everydayness of being-with-one-another’ was a proto-science of politics, but she did not see that rhetoric was the analytic of everydayness” (129). Indeed, seeing at the edges of the visible shows up with increasing prominence for Marshall, especially as he moves into his final two core chapters on Benjamin and Warburg.Chapter 5, “Walter Benjamin and the Rhetorical Construal of Indecision,” approaches oeuvre like previous chapters, tarrying first with Benjamin's early Trauerspiel book and its artistic means. For Benjamin in this work on Baroque aesthetics, highly conventional forms along with their minute variations didn't signal stasis but rather the opposite. Originating Benjamin's analytic frame in the Trauerspiel book, “rhetoric made available ‘artistic means’ that were themselves critical frames” (175). Again pointing ahead toward Warburg, Marshall sees in Benjamin a “veritable gymnasium of perspicacity” (180) and gesture (182), with Iago serving as the dubious example of this art perfected. But along with the eye and its uncertain exercises, Marshall also ties Benjamin back to the aforementioned Adam Müller, and his much-maligned art of rhetorical listening that ends in regrettable indecision, according to Schmitt. Here Benjamin's rhetorical trick, according to Marshall, is to see potential, especially in societies that do not possess the classical oratorical institutions (204). “Where Schmitt emphasized emergency, Benjamin was emphasizing emergence” (200). In Benjamin's purview, indecision is not so bad after all because it is precisely where freedom of thought appears. Finally, in chapter 6, “Warburgian Image Practices,” Marshall names “freedom” outright (210) and implicates Warburg plausibly in an argument broadly designed to set rhetoric-as-restitutio eloquentiae against the captivating strategies of an emerging antidemocratic figure like Mussolini (240). “On December 22, 1927, Warburg asked himself the following question: what aspects of the classical rhetorical tradition were implicit in the phrase restitutio eloquentiae? Style, pathos, ethos, and magnanimity, he responded” (241). But as Marshall makes sense of a classicizing gesture that has largely stumped previous critics in art history, this “restitution of eloquence” is precisely not the imposition of rule but it's opposite: “Warburgian magnanimity becomes something like a plasticity and thus potential adroitness of body-imaginative response” (208). Ornamentation becomes “a mode of and a fillip for freedom because it could be seen through, rerouted, and changed” (210).Finally after these core chapters and key figures, Marshall completes his project appropriately with chapter 7, “New Points of Departure in the Weimar Afterlife,” and chapter 8, “The Possibilities of Now.” And this is where we get the best sense for how Marshall understands his approach with respect to the field of rhetorical studies writ large; it is as well, appropriately, the place where one is obligated to find unrealized possibilities in Marshall's work itself. Why, ultimately, all these larger-than-life figures at the heart of Marshall's project? And what would keep “intellectual history” from detaching from a less glamorous everyday, where most of us spend most of our time? In a move that boldly defies everyday meaning, Marshall asks the reader to take up with him and his parade of critics a connoisseurship that should be, in principle, available to everyone. Given the context of this book, the admirable goal is to refine different types of awareness and action possibilities typically buried in the totalitarian, as it is broadly conceived by Arendt in her book of that name. Moreover, these types of everyday awarenesses need not be elite. “I am arguing,” concludes Marshall, “that the critical capacity announced by ‘distinguishing’ qua krinein and collected in the mode of everydayness may be specified by ‘connoisseurial’ but not with the narrow, elite, or conservative connotations usually accompanying that term” (283).A generous gesture. But without belaboring this concrete everydayness as it tends toward the mundane, we don't wind up knowing what nonelite connoisseurship looks like. Finally, I would like to suggest that this is precisely where Marshall's truly groundbreaking work in rhetoric and intellectual history inadvertently makes new room for the archival and ecological expansion, cultural histories, and pedagogical projects that have animated rhetorical studies in the past few decades. Perhaps, for instance, even students who barely register in the public sphere are themselves collecting in the mode of everydayness just as Marshall suggests, but does not pursue himself. As teachers and scholars, we could then be more attuned to how these practically anonymous modes of collection invent-toward-freedom, every day.

Alva Noë, who is a major figure in establishment philosophy, has been producing work that speaks directly to rhetoric in new ways that are important. This “In Focus” project explores how so, with the help of Carrie Noland on dance, Thomas Rickert on music, and, in a previous issue of Philosophy & Rhetoric 53.1, Nancy Struever on the basics of human inquiry including pictorial, which she thinks almost nobody gets right except for R. G. Collingwood, and perhaps now Noë. In each case you will see how “rhetoric” must be stretched by way of these lateral artistic, and at the same time essential, projects in the discipline per se.“Rhetoric” in these considerations is certainly not a vague notion that the things we do have persuasive goals, or audiences, for example. Though complicated in this discussion with Noë, “rhetoric” has precise meaning it's the job of this introduction to clarify, because it goes to our basic situation and it does so in a way that's unfamiliar.In Varieties of Presence (2012),1 Noë makes the argument for a rhetoric of experience explicit. Starting with the example of traditional art like song or a painting, Noë explains how mere perceptual exposure is not yet aesthetic experience. Only “through looking, handling, describing, conversing, noticing, comparing, keeping track, [do] we achieve contact with the work/world” (125). But this kind of contact with the world is not neutral; following Kant it falls in the domain of “ought”: our response reflects our sense of how one ought to respond to a work of art for instance. Hence rhetoric as persuasion: “aesthetic experience happens only where there is the possibility of substantive disagreement, and so also the need for justification, explanation and persuasion” (126). Is such persuasive rhetoric relevant only to traditional art forms per se? No—and this is Noë's bold move: he is really working on perceptual experience “tout court,” with art recapitulating the basic fact about perceptual consciousness and serving as a model or “guide to our basic situation.” “Perception is not a matter of sensation; it is never a matter of mere feeling,” Noë summarizes. Instead perceiving is “an activity of securing access to the world by cultivating the right critical stance,” or even more directly: human experience has a “rhetorical structure” (128). How do we miss this according to Noë? “The big mistake,” explains Noë, “is the overlooking of the aesthetic, or critical, character and context of all experience. There is no such thing as how things look independently of this larger context of thought, feeling and interest [classical rhetoric would similarly list the goals of rhetoric: docere, movere, delectare]. This is plain and obvious when we think of the experience of art. It is no less true in daily life” (129).Though resonant with the work of Struever and then with her major reference point Collingwood, or with John Dewey as Noë points out himself, this is a major reorientation of philosophy and rhetoric. It puts philosophy right next to other human activities that include the arts like dance, music, and painting. And it does so not as the addendum after basic human activities have wound down. On this mistaken model, philosophy and the arts including linguistic arrive only belatedly, after the real work is finished on the ground. Instead, according to Noë, these artistic and thoughtful activities are exactly what make us human in the first place, as they are the inherent possibilities that shape human activity from the outset: no language without the probing possibilities, like irony, that bind up language in a world flexibly, no music without the capacity for musical reflection that offers up the audible world one way not another, no dancing or for that matter movement without the possibility of the arts that put on display dancing and movement, indeed giving us the very world where things including us get moved around. Movement at its most immediate, to pick up this last example, is always already choreographed though not mechanically so—as Noë explains in his reply it is precisely the choreography that at the same time “sets us free,” opening up the distance whether more habitual or more explicitly mindful that makes the activity human in the first place. Rhetoric, then, names the inflection points—of movement, of language, of philosophy and the arts—that make the human situation what it is, with the scholarly activity we call “rhetoric” offering a kind of field guide to the environments in which we are.But, finally, are these environments just ours? They can't be. They are shared fundamentally, though not in ways that Noë explores in this project, despite the fact that he is trained, we should recall, as a philosopher of biology.Gesturing thus to an opportunity beyond this project, I conclude with biologist Joan Roughgarden, who helps us see how environments are shared across species, even down to the rhetorical structures that give particular environments their shape. Instead of selecting sexually for ideal types, argues Roughgarden in her groundbreaking work Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People, a species needs “a balanced portfolio” of genes to survive over the long term (2004, 5), and sex, which entails a very wide (but not indefinite; 177) range of behaviors—reproductive and otherwise—is the social activity that continually rebalances a species' overall genetic portfolio in the context of dynamic environments. Instead of offering only background noise, indeterminacy of the sign (as we might call it from the semiotic or rhetorical perspective, where X is somewhere between attractive or repellent, pro- or antisocial, praise or blameworthy, and so on) is compatible with biodiversity precisely insofar as it constitutes the social. Antisocial eugenics and cloning are Roughgarden's counterexamples; just like the computer scientist knows that focusing only on the code while ignoring the execution environment is a mistake, cloning biologists who focus on the nucleus of the cell while ignoring the cytoplasm make the same mistake insofar as they have ceased to work ecologically (311).Then back to Noë at last, it is worth thinking at some point about the ways in which his activities that “put on display” are a subset of a more general biological capacity to triangulate, in environments that are always dynamic and often threateningly so. Now with the help of Struever, Noland, Rickert, and Noë, we can at least start thinking differently about the rhetorical opportunities our current environment offers.

The old news is that Theory with a capital “T” happened from approximately 1965–85 and then dissipated in scandal. Or to the contrary, Theory is an ancient and global activity we find wherever we have evidence of systematic reflection, upon language especially. Alive and well. But neither of these stories can be adequate given a graph like those above, and given our facts on the ground. For Theory is still, or is again robust, with Philosophy & Rhetoric as a premier venue, at the same time that it persists in literary studies and under the quasi-philosophical heading “critical theory.” Meanwhile, if Brian Leiter offers any indication in his Avital Ronell-scandal quip about theory—what they call “bad philosophy in literature departments”1—then the very question “Why theory now?” would be challenged by professional philosophy in the Anglo-American tradition, if not ignored altogether. How and to what extent has Theory consumed territory that was once occupied by philosophy per se? Is “Continental philosophy” now practically synonymous with Theory, and if so, how does that work from the two very different philosophical perspectives? From a global perspective, is professional philosophy small and getting smaller, while “theory”—until recently associated with Europeans and others who indeed consider themselves “philosophers”—large and getting larger? In what ways are theories like postcolonial, queer, and critical race related historically to philosophy? That is to say the question of philosophy/theory raised by the Frankfurt School and recently reiterated by Andrew Cole in The Birth of Theory speaks to people in rhetoric and to many others across the humanities and social sciences. In this forum I join Martin Jay, Nancy Struever, D'Angelo Bridges, Steven Mailloux, Peter Simonson, and Catherine Chaput as we address this question “Why theory now?” paying special attention to the relevant histories we need to untangle “theory” on the recent scene.One might imagine how a single question posed to seven scholars in a forum invites debate, with the answers pitched against one another. Since we can only buy one answer, it would seem the others can't be right—we are faced with an argumentative scheme of the mutually exclusive. And no doubt there are moments both within and among these essays that don't allow for easy agreement. My essay is set up polemically, so the reader is faced with a choice between a prevailing take on rhetorical theory that invokes classical antiquity, and my own contrary place and date: Ann Arbor, 1900. Bridges recalls for this P&R readership how in 1985 the literary critic Barbara Christian made us choose between Theory then consolidating in the elite practices and institutions where traditional forms of power—including most prominently white, male, and colonial—came at the expense of theory that has long been practiced elsewhere (formatively in Douglass's explicitly rhetorical My Bondage and My Freedom, Bridges will argue). And then there are familiar divides within the essays themselves, and into their presumed readership. At the end of this forum, for example, Catherine Chaput forces a question that has been percolating throughout: Isn't theory as we mean it now originally and essentially critical, running from Marx through Adorno et al., so that any other uptake like the new materialism must explain itself under pressure, or appear suspiciously uncritical and hence a quiet advocate for the powers that be?Ultimately, however, the argumentative scheme of the forum as a whole is not mutually exclusive as it might appear in a more systematic philosophical imaginary, but is rather genealogical. And we each try to be critical, while avoiding master narratives in their reductive forms—whether Marxist, colonial/decolonial, or epic as in the battle between rhetoric and philosophy—so that the essays surprise. The biggest problem with master narratives as a form of scholarship is that they can become predictable and render the scholarly work practically unnecessary: once the master narrative begins you know pretty much where it will end.Instead “Why theory now?” is purposefully polyvalent, and the answers given depend upon the scholarly uptake, which is itself an embedded practice. As the question is picked up distinctly by an intellectual historian Martin Jay, we are returned to the nineteenth-century critique of psychologism that would simultaneously produce philosophy in its most universal aspirations, along with its critique that would come by way of “theory.” Then understood through this formative moment, current conversations around post-critique, and Berkeley-style pragmatic philosophy, appear productively different. Nancy Struever, a very different type of intellectual historian, comes at the question characteristically askew by way of “not theory” and Collingwood/Noë. From the get-go according to Struever, theory has been hampered in its abstraction that is then, inevitably, subsumed into various dumb ideologies. Instead, by way of Collingwood's work on art, we see the possibilities of particular modes of inquiry that are practical all the way down. This is theory in another key, or perhaps not theory at all (just modes of inquiry). Then my piece, inspired in part by Struever's work on history and theory over the decades, hammers at an equivocation whereby we apply the term rhetorical theory indiscriminately to any systematic reflection upon language use or some other type of communication. Instead my goal is to gather inductively what we currently tend to mean when we use the term rhetorical theory, and then locate when exactly it took on its current scope that can include all sorts of things beyond such reflexive activity mentioned above. For the sake of argument, the answer I come up with is Gertrude Buck (Ann Arbor, 1900), and the Strueverite phrase I land on is “reality figured by way of its alternatives,” metaphor most prominently. D'Angelo Bridges, alternatively, foregrounds the “critical” in (critical) theory as a decolonial fact that isn't just a legacy of Hegel and Marx, but fundamentally a legacy of racialized slavery in the United States and its imperative for thought: hence Douglass and the dating 1855. Thus answering “Why theory now?” for Bridges is an account of a decolonial and antiracist imperative that works only when its history becomes legible. And in this reading it turns out that our theory is now and has always been more American than usually recognized, which would help explain much of the critical edge it has now in the book publications of Duke, Minnesota, Fordham, Routledge, now Ohio State, and so on. Then also on the genealogical front we have the piece by Steven Mailloux, which I understand this way: There is no premodern theory, in our more recent, critical sense of the term. Theory emerges out of secular modernity and its others, initiated most famously by Hegel and then worked out in various detail by midcentury German and French thinkers including Fessard, who is especially noteworthy because he makes this confrontation with modernity explicit postwar (hence the dating 1945 if we need one) and in ways indebted to but not politically aligned with Schmitt's political theology. For us beyond the historical argument, this means we would be wise to consider regularly how some version of our contemporary (critical) theory, including rhetorical, negotiates this challenge of secular modernity. Or in a formula: no secular modernity, no theory.Finally and differently we have the piece on rhetorical theory by Peter Simonson, which considers itself most prominently a “sociology of knowledge.” His work is thus historical in the sociological mode, insofar as it persistently asks the questions who is doing rhetorical theory and where exactly, and who is not doing rhetorical theory and why exactly. That said, sociology of knowledge is not indigenous to Simonson's field and those fields that name this journal—philosophy and rhetoric—so Simonson must experiment methodologically. In the end, a reductive sociological formula (e.g., knowledge = power, where power is understood, against Foucault, as unidirectional) cannot prevail. (That might give us, for example, a predictable narrative where rhetorical theory is the product of white privilege and hence can be read only as a tool of oppression.) Instead, the rhetorician that he is, Simonson offers a more circuitous story, which ultimately foregrounds the trope “irony” and the historical turn that has pitched theory, and rhetorical theory in particular, against the powers that be.So instead of systematic on the order of logical argumentation, what lies before you is in itself deeply rhetorical. We work from the places we are as only we can, while narrating for others what that work entails. In this case, we can only hope that you find that work worthwhile.

ABSTRACTGoogle Ngram metadata reveal that the English phrase “rhetorical theory” is not that old, appearing on the scene in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and then picking up dramatically with critical and literary theory in the 1960s. How do we square this with familiar arguments that rhetorical theory is much, much older? In this forum contribution I argue that the long view applies to our contemporary rhetorical theory only if we equivocate. Much of what currently falls under the heading “rhetorical theory” has little or nothing to do with the systematic conceptualization of persuasive discourse (i.e., the long view)—general, posthuman, eco-, and materialist rhetorics are the most prominent counterexamples. Instead, around 1900, Gertrude Buck develops what I call the short and sharp view that prevails to this day: rhetorical theory offers reality figured by way of its alternatives.

Book Review| May 01 2018 Review: Passions & Persuasion in Aristotle's Rhetoric, by Jamie Dow Jamie Dow, Passions & Persuasion in Aristotle's Rhetoric ( Oxford University Press) Oxford & New York, 2015. 248 pp. ISBN: 9780198716266 Daniel M. Gross Daniel M. Gross Daniel M. Gross English Department 435 Humanities Instructional Building University of California, Irvine Irvine, California 92697-2650 USA dgross@uci.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2018) 36 (2): 209–211. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2018.36.2.209 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Daniel M. Gross; Review: Passions & Persuasion in Aristotle's Rhetoric, by Jamie Dow. Rhetorica 1 May 2018; 36 (2): 209–211. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2018.36.2.209 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2018 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviews 209 Jamie Dow, Passions & Persuasion in Aristotle's Rhetoric (Oxford University Press) Oxford & New York, 2015. 248 pp. ISBN9780198716266 Aristotle s Rhetoric has long posed problems of fit, which makes its uptake particularly revealing of the preoccupations that define a historical moment. Where should the Rhetoric be situated in the Corpus Aristotelicuml Is it primarily a practical work in the handbook tradition, or is it supposed to offer a full-blown theory of rhetoric? Should it be approached as a kind of philosophy, or something else entirely, especially since it devotes so much attention to style and passion? Is it even a coherent text to begin with? In his ambitious book, Passions & Persuasion in Aristotle's Rhetoric, Jamie Dow begins with these basic questions in mind, and he defends a set of interlocking answers that point to the Rhetoric as a serious, philosophical work along the following lines. Aristotle's Rhetoric is primarily a work on argumentation as understood by medieval Arab commentators along with some of our contemporaries including Bumyeat and Allen; it offers a full­ blown theory of rhetoric opposed to the handbook tradition of Gorgias and Thrasymachus; it is coherent in general and in detail, and it legitimates on philosophical grounds the use of passion in rhetoric. Thus, Dow's project also speaks to our historical moment—broadly postwar—when passions in political life became suspect for good reasons. Few will agree with all of the key claims as laid out by Dow or with each of the demonstrations offered. But it is an outstanding virtue of the book that Dow defends each claim with such care that even objections can be sharpened productively. In what follows, I outline the main arguments and what appears to be at stake. The first page offers the basic argument and a sense of the imperatives that make Dow's book bracing. "The principal claim defended in this book is that, for Aristotle in the Rhetoric, arousing the passions of others can amount to giving them proper grounds for conviction, and hence a skill in doing so is properly part of an expertise in rhetoric. This claim rests on two principal foundations. First, it involves defending the attribution to Aristotle of a norma­ tive view of rhetoric, centered around its role in the state, in which rhetoric is a skill producing proper grounds for conviction. If the arousal of the passions is part of rhetoric, thus understood, Aristotle must hold, second, a particular view of the passions: he must think they are representational states, in which the subject takes things to be the way they are represented" (p. 1). First Foundation I: this normative view, according to Dow, contrasts sharply with the merely practical understanding of rhetoric held by his pre­ decessors in the handbook tradition, and it diverges from the Platonic expectation that the orator needs to know the truth about the subject matter. Instead, according to Dow, Aristotle's orator should skillfully grasp plausi­ ble starting points for the listener's deliberations in the form of reputable opinions" (endoxa) related to the subject at hand (pp- 34—5). So how exactly is the rhetor obligated, and why isn't this obligation arbitrary? Here Dow is careful not to invoke some higher ethical principle. The obligation of the 210 RHETORICA rhetor remains immanent to the skill itself, as it becomes manifest in the context of the state organized along participatory lines. That is to say, rhetoric is by virtue of the world in which it appears as such—originally in the lawcourts and in the political assembly (p. 9). Understood at the most basic level, a rhetor should exercise skill precisely where the subject at hand speaks to the commonplaces and reputable opinions anchored in the state thus consti­ tuted. This is an important point that Dow wishes to extend beyond Aristotle per se: rhetorical skill has wide value and it must be measured as such (p. 76). Hence Dow gives us an ethos-proof like this: "they believe the things Pericles has said, because they believe Pericles—he himself is what is pistos" (p. 98). And then more formally this example of a pathos-proof: "1.1 register evidence...

ABSTRACTOnly recently have we begun to realize how Martin Heidegger's 1924 lecture course on Aristotle's Rhetoric permanently altered the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy. This article explains how it did so, outlining what exactly Heidegger reclaimed in Aristotle's Rhetoric just as he was radically reformulating the history of Western metaphysics against his contemporaries in philosophy. Key are a couple of scholarly moves. Heidegger places Aristotle's Rhetoric in the Corpus Aristotelicum next to the Physics, away from the logical works and the Poetics. And he defines rhetoric as the hermeneutic of Dasein itself only after working out what he calls the “Greco-Christian interpretation of life.” Finally, this article explains how and why Heidegger left rhetoric behind soon after 1924, as he actively took up Weimar politics and consequently lost faith in the analysis of factical life Aristotle made possible.

In the wake of the influential 2011 Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing, this article extends the conversation along two related tracks: historical and theoretical. We situate the Framework historically with respect to the philosophies and cultural pressures behind the “habits of mind” structure so central to the text. We then read success against queer theory's recent turn to negative emotion, notably in Ahmed's The Promise of Happiness, Berlant's Cruel Optimism, and Halberstam's Queer Art of Failure. Our goal is to think about how the Framework can be understood with respect to a longer social turn in writing studies.

We learn something from the mistakes we make with a book. In this case I read the word “quarkism” where I should have read the word “Quakerism.” As in the sentence on page 102 of Lisbeth Lipari's quirky book: “This kind of listening is perhaps what is called in Quakerism [or was it “quarkism”] the ‘gathered meeting,’ where the assembled silent worshipers cease being individual selves and instead join together in ‘gathered harkening.’” You can guess “worshipers” alerted me to this mistake, but the first part seemed perfectly plausible, as the discussion in the first chapter of holism versus atomism runs through quantum mechanics and brings up subatomic particles like quarks and the space in between.I venture there is no other book on earth that would have produced this mistake. And that is high praise: we are rightfully pleased when academic commonplaces are foiled for a good cause. More on that later.First, in Lipari's book we do also, thankfully, encounter some of the expectations that her title creates. We run into the philosophers of hearing and listening—Murray Schafer, Walter Ong, Don Ihde, David Michael Levin, and especially Gemma Corradi Fiumara—who theorize what happens when “the listening interlocutor actually becomes a participant in the nascent thought of the person who is listening” (199). Hence one contribution: Lipari draws together such philosophy and communication psychology to make a case for what she calls “constitutive listening” (133–35), which frames some interesting laboratory research on the ways in which attentive listeners make us remember things and talk more (sometimes a dubious gift!).As expected, we also encounter Martin Heidegger on being, especially the late Heidegger working around Heraclitus toward noninstrumental language, as it calls, “Being's poem, just begun, is man” (101). And Lipari is right: Heidegger sees language neither as an ideally transparent means of communication between minds nor as an arbitrary system of differences, à la Saussure. Instead, language is understood discursively; now stretching Lipari in a pragmatic direction I would say rooted in shared moods, human institutions and the nonchronological history these institutions compose. Here I emphasize an important relationship between Heidegger's early work on language—its use and abuse, its emergence and silence—and his later work on this topic in Unterwegs zur Sprache. In his earlier 1924 Aristotle lectures, Heidegger describes rhetoric as the art of listening, not as the art of speaking. It is the rhetor who has “genuine power over being-there” (“ῥητορική πειθοῦς δημιουργός”) (2009, 74, referencing Plato, Republic 453a), which for Heidegger doesn't mean the ability to manipulate others by way of the voice. Instead he gives us a being who, insofar as that being can hear, is constituted as someone among others, Mitsein, someone in a particular situation who demands action or who goes conspicuously unheard (2009, 72). In other words I think the ethical attunement Lipari finds beyond Heidegger in a figure like Levinas actually does appear in its nascent form circa 1924, only to be abandoned by Heidegger soon thereafter. But that's another story.We also encounter, as we might expect, Nel Noddings (181) on feminist care ethics, and as I just mentioned, Levinas, along with his proximate reader Michael Hyde on response as responsibility (178). This is to say an “ethics of attunement,” as we read it in the title of Lipari's book, figures the ear centrally as a genuinely engaged response (178) that can hear what she calls the otherness of the other.But as you start to see by way of my introductory confusion, Lipari's book is not just this recap of listening philosophy in its largely Continental, twentieth-century incarnation. Quantum physics gives way to music smoothly enough, where metaphors of vibration and resonance and also dissonance become concrete. It is a virtue of Lipari's book that she works through material registers like the physicality of music without losing track of the phenomenology typically missing from sound studies and from the sciences of audiology (as Heidegger insisted, we don't hear a sound but a motorcycle, for example). Then, also importantly, Indian music with its twenty microtones (38), Indian cosmology, including holistic theories of sound in language (27), then in some depth ancient Eastern language philosophy (fifth/sixth-century Sanskrit grammarians and then others) as it developed through competing schools that can now provide some rich resources for listening projects designed, like Lipari's, to foreground holistic, not atomistic, perspective on language (78).So emergent patterns, including particles and plants, musical resonance, ancient Eastern and Western language philosophies, being/becoming—all mobilized against atomism as an apparatus of capture (not her term) — my liberties there at the end should remind you of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, which is similarly designed to upset the linear expectations of academics. And like A Thousand Plateaus, which, incidentally, Lipari doesn't cite, this listening book is hugely ambitious but in a different way, as it gestures toward world peace: “By changing our thinking about listening, we may be freed to dismantle the linguistic prison house that confine us to misconceptions of our own making about who we are, what we do, and how we might live peacefully together with others on this planet” (3). Indeed phrases regularly appear like those I fondly remember from Grateful Dead shows during the 1980s: “Space infuses all things” (17), and we are guided into the “elusive mysteries of listening” (101). When everything is connected, Lipari's project becomes ambitious to the point of courageous impossibility: “So what would a holistic paradigm of listening include?,” Lipari asks. “In short, everything” she answers (99).At that point I do get overwhelmed, and I retreat to critical pragmatism. It is not untrue that everything is connected, but at the same time footholds suggest themselves strongly, or, to shift the modality, we are subject to earworms not of our choosing, as Lipari explains well enough. Perhaps our difference as listening theorists ultimately lies in the ethics I see emerging out of these impositions—how we are hailed, who is rigorously unheard—whereas Lipari looks for a listening ethics that precedes or exceeds such worldly imposition. I can only hope she is right.

Reviews 331 Il commenta, prevalentemente letterario-linguistico, fornisce molti loci pnrnlleli e informazioni linguistiche di varia natura: particolarità della lingua e della sintassi della declamazioni in confronto con il latino di età classica, discussione dei passi problematic! dal punto di vista filológico. I passi in cui Z. opera scelte diverse rispetto all'edizione di riferimento vengono elencati già in nota a p. 106 e alcuni di essi vengono poi discussi nel commento: come in tutti i volumi della collana, infatti, anche questo è privo di apparato critico. Va tuttavia notata l'assenza di informazioni relative alla tradizione del testo, che sarebbero state di aiuto nei casi in cui vengono affrontati problemi di tale natura (cfr. p. 162, per esempio, sulle varianti debilitate e debilitas, 112 H., in alternativa alie quali Z. preferisce ad debilitatem). Z. fornisce un esame attento e sottile degli aspetti formali e retorici della declamazione, indaga e testimonia la presenza in essa di materiale letterario precedente o contemporáneo e la sua permanenza nella letteratura successiva. II suo contributo è altresi prezioso per il confronto tra la realtà culturale contemporánea e quella tratteggiata nella declamazione, con cui egli dimostra in modo esemplare come le declamazioni possano contribuiré a ricostruire il dibattito del tempo sui valori e sulle rególe comportamentali. María Luisa De Seta Lattarico, Italy David L. Marshall, Vico and the Transformation of Rhetoric in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press), Cambridge & New York, 2010. 302 pp. It has always seemed fitting that Giambattista Vico's last rediscovery came at the end of the psychedelic era in 1969 (Giambattista Vico: An Inter­ national Symposium, eds. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Hayden V. White), when category mistakes could appear at the heart of cultural and political revo­ lution. Unlike Foucault's orderly thinkers of the Enlightenment, Vico and his tables of knowledge always appeared intriguingly disheveled and full of holes that led, if one was fortunate, to new dimensions of time and human character. But like other casualties of the psychedelic era, Vico has often seemed in danger of perishing in the epiphany, falling victim to accusations of idiosyncrasy or even incoherence. Thanks to David Marshall, however, we now know that the story of Vico's rediscovery does not end this way. In his landmark book Vico and the Transformation of Rhetoric in Early Modern Europe, Marshall demonstrates that Vico is once again a pivotal figure in a modern age broadly conceived, where sober sciences newly engage the irra­ tionalisms of emotion, language, and human history. We can now celebrate the first major, English-language monograph on Vico in over a decade at the same time that we enjoy expert guidance through a range of concerns that traverse Vico's work; Marshall's book serves as an excellent primer on the 332 RHETORICA interlocking fields of modern epistemology after Descartes, the prehistory of Peircean pragmatism, early modern European intellectual history across four literatures (English, German, French, and Italian), and the history of rhetoric and communication, which serves as a key to the rest. Marshall launches the story in original fashion when he begins with Vico's De coniuratione principum neapolitanorum, a history of the 1701 Neapoli­ tan Conspiracy of Macchia that was unpublished and unacknowledged by Vico, although it was probably in circulation, as Marshall discovered through manuscript research at the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, within months of the event itself (p. 33 n. 3). This document turns out to be crucial be­ cause in it one sees the driving question that would give shape to Vico's entire scholarly initiated at the University of Naples in 1699 as professor of rhetoric and continuing through the posthumously published 1744 edi­ tion of the Scienza Nuova, for which Vico is justifiably famous. Frustrated, Marshall speculates, by the limited utility of rhetorical historiography tra­ ditionally conceived, Vico asks in light of the Conspiracy "What would it take to reconfigure rhetorical inquiry for Neapolitan conditions?" (p. 32) given that Naples lack the conditions for immediate politics imagined by the rhetoricians of classical antiquity. And from this seemingly simple ques­ tion emerges a transformative moment for Vico in the history of rhetoric. Marshall summarizes that "Vico's oeuvre takes on a new unity...

436 RHETORICA disputation plainly shows. But debate—genuine debate— may seem both alien and undesirable to those whose recent histories have been marked by verbal coercion, deception, confrontation, and the exercise of mute power. "Debate" brings to mind not a means to arrive at consensus, but a zero-sum game with one winner who seeks victory "by any means necessary." That sort of "debate" is empirically real, of course; and not only in a post-dictatorship Europe or Africa. Even when consensus seems to have been attained, it is a fragile thing that more often than not deteriorates and turns into conflict. Think of the aftermath of the selection of Havel; or of the fact that it was not very long ago that the Polish parliament saw fit explicitly to forbid its members to carry firearms in the assembly chamber. I hasten to add that the actual practices of the United States Congress—or, for that matter, the British Parliament—are hardly paragons of the "civility" that is so important a part of civic virtue. So simply extolling "debate" as the preferred method of decision-making and conflict-resolution is not enough. We seem, then, to be brought to the verge of the sort of cynicism (if that is not too strong a word) that Professor Axer and his co-contributors want to purge from contemporary politics—particularly in countries that desire to put dictatorship behind them and foster democracy. We seem also to have stumbled on the old question of whether the humanities can humanize. But the answer to that question can be learned only if all of us, in good faith, do what we can to make sure that they do, even if we suspect that the answer we get may not be the one we wanted. It is to be hoped, then, that Axer and his colleagues will continue to teach and encourage us. Thomas Conley University of Illinois, Urbana JosefKopperschmidt, ed., RhetorischeAnthropologie: Studien zum Homo rhetoricus. München: Fink, 2000. 404 pp. Stefan Metzger and Wolfgang Rapp, eds., Homo inveniens: Heuristik und Anthropologie am Modell der Rhetorik (Literatur und Anthropologie 19), Tübingen: Narr, 2003. 274 pp. Peter D. Krause, ed., Rhetorik und Anthropologie (Rhetorik: Ein inter­ nationales Jahrbuch 23), Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004. viii + 201 pp. Recent rhetorical anthropology built on the model of philosophical an­ thropology faces an inherent dilemma: what one hand wishes to deliver homo rhetoricus in terms of universal capacities, the other hand snatches away. In fact this tension shapes the three rich collections reviewed here, which in combination mark what editor extraordinaire Josef Kopperschmidt considers the real reason for current interest in rhetoric: namely its anthro­ pology (Kopperschmidt, p. 13), and especially its sophisticated treatments Reviews 437 of the whole man constituted in a culturally situated language and in the interanimation of body and mind (a long-standing strength of German scholarship and popular culture, 1 should add). After ambitiously titling his collection Rhetorische Anthropologie: Studien zum Homo rhetoricus, for instance, Kopperschmidt backpedals from the project's apparent "ontological ambi­ tions" (Kopperschmidt, pp. 22-23). Although, Kopperschmidt protests, the "homo-" formula such as "homo-faber" and "homo-ludens" might imply claims about mankind's essential nature, it does not have to. We should simply consider homo rhetoricus one useful heuristic for characterizing hu­ mankind from a particular, and in this case rhetorical, perspective (p. 22). Metzger and Rapp rightly insist that the rhetorically informed homo inveniens is a modern creature distinguished by a focus on the new and the creative (Metzger/Rapp, pp. 7-9), but they also must struggle against their essentializing rubric, as well as the contribution of someone like Peter L. Oesterreich, who has flatly argued in these two venues ("Homo rhetori­ cus (corruptus): Sieben Gesichtspunkte fundamentalrhetorischer Anthropologie ", Kopperschmidt, pp. 353-70; "Selbsterfindung: Zur rhetorischen Entstehung des Subjektes", Metzger/Rapp, pp. 45-57) and elsewhere that man is a rhetorical being ideally subject to a universal, rhetorical anthropology (Kopperschmidt, p. 355). Then the eclectic and individually interesting articles in Volume 23 of Rhetorik: Ein internationales Jahrbuch collected by Peter D. Krause under the rubric "Rhetoric and Anthropology" introduce questions of appropriate scope. Is the "rhetoric of x...

Reviews 329 Analyse verdeutlicht sich die zentrale Stellung von Hirschvelders modus epistolundi ." (S. 71). Auch hier wird der Begriff "überlieferungsgeschichtlich" falsch verwendet, und die Behauptung einer Spannung zwischen Latinitàt und Humanismus laPt sich wohl nur als unsinnig qualifizieren. Ich breche an dieser Stelle ab, ohne auf Details weiter einzugehen ("Ausgew àhlte Folii (!)", S. 287; "Peter Zainer" statt Johann Zainer, S. 326; kein Nachweis von GW-Nummern bei Inkunabeln, GW fehlt auch im Literaturverzeichnis ; Überbewertung von Wasserzeichenbefunden für Datierungsfragen , S. 55 u.ô.; unbrauchbarer Vergleich mit Sangspruchdichtung Boppes, S. 84). Letztlich bleibt als Mehrwert der Arbeit gegentiber der bisherigen Forschung allein der Textabdruck, der einen für Germanisten und (Bildungs-) Historiker interessanten Textbestand verfügbar macht und dem einen oder anderen die Reise nach München oder die Bestellung eines Microfilms erspart . Auch hier wird man allerdings fragen dürfen, ob der Hinweis auf die Richthnieii fiir die Edition lundesgescluchtlieher Quellen von Walter Heinemeyer (2. Aufl. Hannover: Selbstverlag des Gesamtvereins der Deutschen Geschichts- und Altertumsvereine, 2000) als editionstheoretische Grundlage für eine germanistische Edition ausreichend ist. Insgesamt genügt das Buch den Anforderungen, die an eine historisch-philologische Arbeit gestellt werden müssen, nicht. Albrecht Hausmann Georg-Angust-Universitat Gottingen Michel Meyer, Lu rhétorique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004), 130 pages, ISBN 213053368X. As its title Lu rhétorique suggests, this little book has large ambitions only the most seasoned rhetorician can entertain seriously. And Michel Meyer is certainly that. Successor to Chaim Perelman in the Rhetoric Chair at the Brussels Free University and author of at least 16 related books (4 of which have been translated into English), Meyer is unarguably a leading figure in the fields of rhetoric and argumentation, especially in continental Europe. So Meyer clearly has the authority to take on such an ambitious project. The question is how successful is he in this case. Clearly the book is a success insofar as it succinctly summarizes and updates the original theory of rhetoric Meyer has been working on for at least twenty-five years. Judged on its novelty in comparison to his previously published work and judged by its potential impact in the field of rhetorical studies and beyond, my assessment is less rosy. First the strengths, which are substantial. Written for the popular series "Que sais-je?" (PUF) that seems to greet you just inside the door of every French bookstore, Lu rhétorique covers the field in a manner well designed for the educated nonexpert, and it does so in the systematic fashion that has become a hallmark of Meyer s work. After 330 RHETORICA defining rhetoric on page 10 as "the negotiation of the difference between individuals on a given question" (la rhétorique est la négociation de la différence entre des individus sur une question donnée), Meyer then recasts the entire history and theory of rhetoric from this point of view. And he does so with the confidence that can only come well into a lifetime of focused inquiry, when relevant hot points have been thought and rethought in a variety of contexts and with a variety of audiences in mind. Ancient rhetoric is recast to highlight Aristotle's placement of ethos, pathos, and logos on equal footing (versus those who would privilege the audience, the orator, or the speech); rhetoric's later history is briefly traced as it is "metastasized" in literature, politics, poetics and so on; a call is made for rhetoric's reunification in a systematic theory; and then Meyer delivers that theory with a final demonstration of how it can be used to recast our understanding of the human sciences, the study of literature, and the modern phenomena of propaganda and publicity. Quite a project in 123 pages! And no wonder it is not entirely successful. But let me further elaborate the strengths. Most important is Meyer's thorough commitment to question-andanswer as the motivating structure of all discourse. This perspective trulv sets him apart from both the classical rhetoricians he most admires, such as Aristotle, and his more immediate influences in the field of argumentation theory, such as Stephen Toulmin and Chaim Perelman, it is this perspective that leads to Meyer...

Nicolaus Caussin’s Eloquentia sacrae et humaneae parellela (1619) forges a distinctly modern history of rhetoric that ties discourse to culture. What were the conditions that made this new history of rhetoric possible? Marc Fumaroli has argued that political exigency in Cardinal Richelieu’s France demanded a reconciliation of divergent religious and secular forms of eloquence that implicated, in turn, a newly “eclectic” history of rhetoric. But political exigency alone does not account for this nascent pluralism; we also need to look at the internal dynamics of rhetorical theory as it moved across literate cultures in Europe. With this goal in mind, I first demonstrate in this article how textbooks after the heady days of Protestant Reformation in Germany tried in vain to systematize the passions of art, friendship, and politics. Partially in response to this failure, I then argue, there emerged in France a new rhetoric sensitive to the historical contingency of passionate situations. My claim is not simply that rhetoric is bound to be temporal and situational, but more precisely that Caussin initiates historical rhetorics: the capacity to theorize how discourse is bound to culture in its plurality and historical contingency.

Abstract: Vico's theory of metaphor is best understood as a monster in the tradition of classical rhetorical invention. It is the mutant offspring of metaphor characterized as “necessary” (an “ear” of com, for example) and metaphor characterized in terms of analogy. From the perspective of his method. Vico marries these apparently incompatible forms inherited from Aristotle and thereby identifies a third type of linguistic metaphor. I argue that the metaphor identifies a stipulatory definition taken out of context. In order to situate this claim, I outline Vico's genetic analysis and elaborate in general terms what metaphor and definition share. Most importantly. Vico insists that beings, actions, and events are linguistically identified in some particular diseursive context. Indeed, in many cases that context alone determines whether the expression can be called a definition or a metaphor. Like Cicero's ideal jurist, Vico's hero employs motivated words and realizes possibilities available to common sense. Henee Vico's theory of metaphor is both “constructivist”—language has the power to makes things—and “humartist”—it must do so in a form appropriate to history and culture. Vico's theory is consequently important to us because it challenges the proper/figurative distinction championed in the philosophy of language and adds a pragmatic dimension to contemporary views of metaphor at work in literary theory.