Paul Dahlgren
2 articles-
Abstract
Reviews 445 Lancelot en pi ose, la polémique est muselée par les stratégies narratives et une volonté d'édification chrétienne : les opposants à la cour d'Arthur ne reçoivent pour seule réponse qu'une fin exemplaire. Pour le cheik Al-Ansari et son admirateur enthousiaste, la vérité révélée n'a rien d'une fiction. Tant que les points de vue avancés admettent la contradiction et que le débat est permis, même dans ses formes les plus agressives, l'analyse rhétorique reste un outil d'interprétation privilégié pour démystifier le discours polémique. Elle permet en outre à certains contributeurs, comme R. Micheli, Th. Her man, E. De Jonge, ainsi qu'aux directeurs de l'ouvrage, de proposer des hypothèses nouvelles et pertinentes qui pourront servir de jalons pour de futures recherches dans deux domaines, celui du rhétorique et du polémique, qui sont intimement liés autour du sens du combat. Benoît Sans Université Libre de Bruxelles Graves, Michael. Preaching the Inward Light: Early Quaker Rhetoric (Studies in Rhetoric and Religion 9). Waco: Baylor University Press, 2009. 450 pp. ISBN: 9781602582408 Given the challenges of working with early Quaker sermons, it's not surprising that there is relatively little work on Quaker rhetoric. Unlike the Puritans, who seemed to suffer from graphomania, early Quakers believed in impromptu preaching which means that there is a paucity of source mate rial for historians of rhetoric. Perhaps more troubling, early Quaker sermons were often printed by non-Quaker publishers and questions about their authenticity often arise. In Preaching the Inward Light: Early Quaker Rhetoric Graves does an admirable job working with the corpus of seventy-nine surviving Quaker sermons, situating them within a reconstruction of early Quaker theology, rhetorical theory, and die emerging transatlantic printculture . Indeed, this work needs to be read as straddling Quaker studies and the history of rhetoric as Graves speaks to both groups of scholars through out. For that effort alone, this work deserves special attention. Despite this achievement or perhaps because of it, this reviewer has some concerns about Graves's otherwise excellent work. Graves has long been immersed in the literature of early Quakerism and, to his credit as a craftsman, this work establishes a mastery of archival material that is rare even in the best scholarship. This study of early Quaker rhetoric fills a number of important gaps in our historical knowledge. For example, in his discussion of Robert Barclay (1648-1690), one of the most important early Quaker intellectuals, Graves claims that Barclay s under standing of preaching is derived from a very different model of faculty psychology from both Bacon who preceded him and Campbell who came after, which he claims is closer to modern brain science than either (pp· 446 RHETORICA 115-116). Leaving aside the questionable relationship between early modern homiletic theory and postmodern science, Graves's argument suggests that faculty psychology is far more complex and varied than many traditional his tories allow. Furthermore, his reconstruction of Quaker impromptu speaking theory can and should provide a guide for other scholars interested in the impromptu sermon, a genre of considerable importance in America's Great Awakening and subsequent religious revivals. The craftsmanship of this book is impressive. According Graves's on line profile, this work is the product of nearly forty years of research and one can detect the expertise that has gone into every footnote. Alongside the twelve analytic chapters and epilogue are the complete texts of four surviv ing Quaker sermons, five appendixes which examine the remaining corpus of seventeenth-century Quaker sermons, a very thorough bibliography of Quaker studies and three indices. The book is divided into four sections, each focuses on different levels of analysis and context necessary for under standing Quaker rhetoric. It begins with an overview of seventeenth-century rhetoric, continues with an analysis of the evolution of Quaker impromptu preaching theory, and proceeds to an examination of all seventy-nine surviv ing Quaker sermons and then ends with an analysis of works by key Quaker figures including Fox, Crisp, Barclay and Penn. Historians of rhetoric will likely...
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Rhetoric and the Republic: Politics, Civic Discourse, and Education in Early America by Mark Longaker ↗
Abstract
208 RHETORICA appears to have read every relevant primary and secondary text, so that the book serves as an excellent introduction to the topic. A further virtue of Swaminathan's book is that it elegantly models how rhetorical and literary analysis can be interwoven for a nuanced presentation of the complexities of social change. The puzzle about slavery is, as Swaminathan says, that "Great Britain dismantled this profitable trade, albeit unevenly and in a fraught manner, seemingly for the benefit of principle" (p. 213). It is a striking instance of effective rhetoric. Yet, it was not a case of a single text having done that considerable cultural work. Although some texts might have been more popular, and possibly more effective, than others, the abolitionists were successful because of a long series of arguments and counterarguments. They were successful because various topoi were repeated across genres, and not just in what we traditionally think of as "political" discourse. The book usefully reminds us of the breadth of rhetoric, and, hence, the potential breadth of rhetorical scholarship. Patricia Roberts-Miller University of Texas, Austin Mark Longaker, Rhetoric and the Republic: Politics, Civic Discourse, and Education in Early America. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2007. xx + 266 pp. ISBN 978-0-8173-1547-4 While in the past five years we have seen a number of books chal lenging and diversifying our understanding of rhetorical education in late nineteenth-century United States, including David Gold's Rhetoric at the Mar gins: Revising the History ofWriting Instruction in American Colleges, 1873-1947, Jessica Enoch's Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African Amer ican, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865—1911, and Brian Fehler's Calvinist Rhetoric in Nineteenth-Century America. The Bartlet Professors of Sa cred Rhetoric ofAndover Seminary, relatively little work has examined rhetor ical education within colonial America. Indeed, Mark Garrett Longaker's Rhetoric and the Republic is likely the most important work to do so since Thomas P. Miller's The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces. Unlike works bv Gold or Enoch, the primary virtue of Longaker s research does not come from his examining underrep resented communities, nor does his work take us to different parts of the university as does Fehler s. Rather, Longaker's work is important because it asks us to fundamentally reexamine our historiography at the same time that it challenges us to think harder about some of our pedagogical practices. Revising accounts by Miller, Halloran, and Clark (Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Transformations in the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric), Longaker argues that "early American republicanism was a con tested political terrain" which allowed for a number of conflicting peda Reviews 209 gogical ideals and practices to emerge in its name (p. xviii). This historical narrative in turn allows Longaker to demonstrate the anemia of the republi can revival which has been championed by both contemporary American academics and politicians alike. Since at least the 1950s, scholars represent ing various disciplines have called for a revival of civic republican political discourses as a counterweight to the hegemony of liberal political discourse. Indeed, in the United States, civic republicanism represented something of an academic third way between Soviet-inspired communist totalitarianism and American-inspired liberal capitalism. Whereas liberalism promoted negative liberty, legal proceduralism, and the interest of autonomous individuals, re publicanism promoted positive liberty, substantive values, and civic virtue. Finding a way of reviving civic republicanism would help revive active citi zenship, or so we believed. But the truth of the matter has always been that the sharp division between republicanism and liberalism was itself a prod uct of the Cold War, and one that was unsustainable when examining the eighteen and nineteenth centuries, a point Longaker brings home especially well in his analvsis of John Witherspoon. Oddly enough, Longaker never makes that argument explicitly and in stead spends most of his book demonstrating, through the use of Gramscian articulation theory, the various ways early American republican theory lent itself to very different political and economic discourses. So much the better for us, the real value of the book as far as this reader is...