Research Article| January 01 2006 Presencing “Communion” in Chaïm Perelman's New Rhetoric Richard Graff; Richard Graff Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Wendy Winn Wendy Winn Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2006) 39 (1): 45–71. https://doi.org/10.2307/20697133 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Richard Graff, Wendy Winn; Presencing “Communion” in Chaïm Perelman's New Rhetoric. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2006; 39 (1): 45–71. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/20697133 Download citation file: 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 Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2006 The Pennsylvania State University2006The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract The rise of prose in Greece has been linked to broader cultural and intellectual developments under way in the classical period. Prose has also been characterized as challenging poetry's traditional status as the privileged expression of the culture. Yet throughout the classical period and beyond, poetry was still regularly invoked as the yardstick by which innovation was measured. This paper investigates how poetry figures in the earliest accounts of prose style. Focusing on Isocrates, Alcidamas, and Aristotle, it argues that although each author distinguishes between the styles of prose and poetry, none is able to sustain the distinction consistently. The criteria for what constitutes an acceptable level of poeticality in prose were unstable. The diverse conceptions of poetic style were tied to intellectual polemics and professional rivalries of the early- to mid-fourth century bce and reflect competing aims and ideals for rhetorical performance in prose.

The rise of prose in Greece has been linked to broader cultural and intellectual developments under way in the classical period. Prose has also been characterized as challenging poetry's traditional status as the privileged expression of the culture. Yet throughout the classical period and beyond, poetry was still regularly invoked as the yardstick by which innovation was measured. This paper investigates how poetry figures in the earliest accounts of prose style. Focusing on Isocrates, Alcidamas, and Aristotle, it argues that although each author distinguishes between the styles of prose and poetry, none is able to sustain the distinction consistently. The criteria for what constitutes an acceptable level of poeticality in prose were unstable. Moreover, the diverse conceptions of poetic style were tied to intellectual polemics and professional rivalries of the early- to mid-fourth century bce and reflect competing aims and ideals for rhetorical performance in prose.

Abstract Aristotle's Rhetoric leaves a number of unanswered questions, among them the nature of the relationship between verbal style and êthos, or character, as a means of persuasion. Statements throughout the Rhetoric suggest a connection between manner of expression and persuasive character, but Aristotle's ideas in this area are underdeveloped. Here we argue that Aristotle's stylistic theory, while not demonstrably inconsistent with the technical proof through character, cannot be made to conform neatly with it in most salient respects. Though Aristotle does not explicit y identify style as a means through which the speaker may convey the impression that he possesses positive intellectual or moral qualities, he does recognize a role for lexis in the expression of generic character traits and is aware that an inappropriate style will damage the speaker's credibility. Hence, attention to style is important for the presentation of a plausible êthos and, in this limited respect, style does contribute to the maintenance of persuasive character. This conclusion must be inferred from passing remarks in the Rhetoric. The absence of a more fully developed theory is curious in light of the availability of examples from the discourse of Attic logographers like Lysias, a speechwriter universally praised by later critics for his mastery of ethopoeia(character portrayal).

Abstract At Rhetoric 3.12 Aristotle describes differences between a “written”; style, which he associates with the epideictic genre, and a “debating”; style suited to deliberative and forensic oratory. This paper argues that this seemingly unproblematic distinction constitutes a crucial indicator of the orientation of Aristotle's style theory as a whole. Passages throughout Rhetoric 3.1–12 offer precepts oriented toward the medium of writing and the reading of texts‐that is, they describe a specifically “written “ style of prose. In contrast, Aristotle largely neglects the agonistic style of practical oratory, a fact that can be taken as another indication of the literary, and literate, bias pervading Aristotle's account of prose lexis. In addition to disclosing nuances in the text of Rhetoric 3, this study contributes to our understanding of the ways in which early rhetorical theory responds to and is constrained by the circumstances of written composition and oratorical performance.

Reviews Jeffrey Walker, Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), xii + 396 pp. In this lengthy, densely argued volume, Jeffrey Walker engages two particularly contentious issues in the history of rhetoric, offering a novel reconstruction of rhetoric's origins and a revised account of the relation­ ship between rhetoric and poetics in Classical Greece and Rome. This dual focus is reflected in the organization of the study. Parts I and II (ch. 1-4) concentrate primarily on a reading of the rhetorical tradition originating in pre-Aristotelian sources and extending to the "second sophistic" of im­ perial Rome. In Parts III and IV (ch. 5-11), Walker uncovers the rhetorical dimensions of archaic Greek poetry and then traces the tension between grammatical and rhetorical elements in the major (and several minor) Greek and Latin poetic theories. In the first two chapters, Walker advances three claims that are defended at length in the remainder of the book: (1) that the distinction between rhetoric and poetics featured in the standard histories is illusory and has resulted in distorted characterizations of both arts; (2) that the fundamental or "primary" manifestation of rhetorical art is not deliberative or forensic oratory, but rather the various verse and prose forms of epideictic discourse; (3) that accounts of rhetoric's periodic decline in the face of restricted op­ portunities for "practical", political oratory neglect the vital socio-political significance assumed by epideictic eloquence in nearly all periods. Cen­ tral to Walker's argument, then, is an expanded conception of "epideictic". Developing an insight of Chaim Perelman, Walker rejects the traditional characterization of epideictic as a decorative genre, simple entertainment or "mere display", and attributes to it broad suasive and ideological functions: epideictic, for Walker, is "that which shapes and cultivates the basic codes of value and belief by which a society or culture lives" (p. 9). Thus conceived, the epideictic category cuts across the prose-poetry divide, as Walker would include much poetry—including archaic lyric poetry—within it. This enlarged conception of epideictic enables Walker to locate the ori­ gins of rhetoric in discourse practices that predate by centuries the theoretical conceptualization of the art of persuasive oratorical speech (this is the thrust of ch. 2). In this respect, Walker's study represents a healthy alternative to the recent work of scholars such as Thomas Cole and Edward Schiappa which identifies the "birth" of rhetoric with the fourth-century advent of a prop­ erly technical and theoretical vocabulary or "metalanguage". If Walker's 125 126 RHETORICA redescription of epideictic gives grounds for rejecting the narrow concep­ tion of rhetoric offered by Cole and Schiappa, it also confounds the wellknown distinction between "primary" and "secondary" rhetoric. In George Kennedy's formulation, primary rhetoric is associated with practical oratory, with speeches delivered orally in deliberative and forensic settings. This for­ mulation encourages epideictic's treatment as secondary, textual, literary and aesthetic. Walker reverses this narrative and the impoverished notion of epideictic it inscribes: "the epideiktikon is the rhetoric of belief and desire; the pragmatikon [dikanic and demegoric genres] the rhetoric of practical civic business...that necessarily depends on and appeals to the beliefs/desires that epideictic cultivates" (p. 10). Viewed in this frame, epideictic becomes "the 'primary' or central form of rhetoric" while deliberative and forensic speeches are derivative, applied forms of a more general logon techne (p. 41). In Part II (ch. 3-4), Walker considers the fortunes of rhetoric in the Hel­ lenistic and Roman imperial periods. Opposing the traditional characteriza­ tion of these periods as marking rhetoric's decadence and decline, Walker offers a more complicated narrative of a competition between two relatively distinct rhetorical traditions. The first version is that founded by the early sophists and given fullest expression in Isocrates' logdn paidea; it stresses the broad, culture-shaping function of poetic-epideictic eloquence. This tradi­ tion, Walker contends, is preserved in the fragments of Theophrastus and in later authors as diverse as Demetrius, Hermagoras, Dionysius, and Cicero (in De oratore). The second version of rhetoric is more narrow and technical, and by the late Hellenistic period focused almost exclusively on the practice of judicial oratory. This is...