Stephen Pender
5 articles-
Abstract
Abstract: This paper explores the relationships between style and complexion, temperament and disposition, climate and place in seventeenth-century thought. Facility and variation in style not only depend on reason, judgement, and responsiveness, but on the material substrata of the imagination and memory, in turn conditioned by air and temperament, climate and the uneven geographical distribution of environmental and internal, vital heat. This ensemble ofconcernes spurred wide-ranging enquiry in early modern anthropology, ethnography, and rhetoric, which I examine her in order to substantiate the mathematician and rhetorician Bernard Lamy's 1675 claim that "Every Clymat hath its style."
-
Abstract
Reviews Carla Mazzio, The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in the Age of Eloquence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. 349 pp. ISBN 978-0-8122-4138-9 From Longinus to Cicero, Quintilian to Dryden, Susenbrotus to Priestley, vehement emotion was embodied in murmuring and mumbling, fits and starts, paroxysms of the inarticulate: aposiopesis, for example, denoted "some affection" that "breaks off... speech before it be all ended" (John Smith, The Mysterie ofRhetorique Unvail'd [1656], 148); it signified shame, fear, or anger, a "sodaine occasion" rupturing or impugning a speech or a story. An “auricular figure of defect," a "figure of silence, or of interruption," according to George Puttenham, aposiopesis was "fit for phantasticall heads" (The Arte of English Poesy [1589], 139). Should "phantasticall heads" prevail, figures flourish: as Dryden observed, "interrogations, exclamations, hyperbata, or a disordered connection of discourse" naturally convey fervid, enthusiastic, rancorous speech. "By me," the character 'Aposiopesis' says in Samuel Shaw's Words Made Visible (1679), "wise men stop themselves in the very career of their passion," and "do not tell you half of what they'l make you feel" (168). A taut ensemble of figures embody vehemence or incoherence, fre quently asyndeton (acervatio dissoluta), hyperbaton, and aposiopesis, but all staccato, inflamed, or interrupted speech—devoted to 'feeling' rather than 'telling'—has a robust somatic component. Passion is expressed by voice (pronuciatio) and gesture (actio), the fifth, and perhaps most important, canon of rhetorical invention, as some, following Demosthenes, have argued. Deliv ery is a "sort of language of the body" (Cicero, Orator, 17.55), and where but in the theatre might such a language have more power? Orators might learn from actors (see Quintilian, 11.3 ff.): making an effective speech, whether to the pit or in the court, enjoins eloquence of the head and arms, hands and eyes as well as invention, disposition, bold figures (as Joseph R. Roach, The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science ofActing [Cranburgh, New Jersey: Asso ciated University Presses, 1984], has argued). The inarticulate is a species of performance, to which the 'age of eloquence' devotes significant resources. Carla Mazzio's erudite and stimulating The Inarticulate Renaissance does not explore actio or pronunciatio (she cites neither Roach nor Noel Malcolm's The Origins of English Nonsense [London: Fontana, 1998], which treats early Rhetorica, Vol. XXXI, Issue 1, pp. 111-133, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2013 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.2013.31.1.111. 112 RHETORICA modern poetic nonsense). While she briefly engages Thomas Wilson s Ci ceronian Arte of Rhetorique and Abraham Fraunce's Ramist Lawiers Logike (unaware that Fraunce paraphrases rather than 'cites' Ramus [121]), Mazzio s sense of the rich and variegated history of rhetoric in the period is akin to her uneven treatment of humanism—partial or monolithic, jejune or stultifying, depending on her argument. She is rarely sensitive to the revisions underway in rhetorical inquiry in the period, where former vices (aenigma, for example) are redescribed as virtues, by playwrights schooled in humanist rhetorical canons, eager to ignite their increasingly sophisticated audiences. Instead, her focus is "alternative foims of perception, expression, and agency that were occasioned by departures from verbal coherence and efficacy" (216 n. 2). In six parts, The Inarticulate Renaissance deftly and subtly examines an eclectic ensemble of 'departures': Reformation polemic and emergent na tionalism, Ralph Roister Doister and Hamlet, the haptic in Thomas Tomkis' play Lingua (1607) and the politics and poetics of revenge in Thomas Kyd. Her notes and bibliography (more than one third of the text) gather an im pressive array of contemporary scholarship, and her readings of various texts are sophisticated, even virtuoso. Her chapter on Kyd's Spanish Tragedy (1592), for example, suggests that the play "fails to fully synthesize classical and contemporary materials" (95); the resultant "confusion" speaks to the ways in which Kyd exposes the "less than articulate underside of imperial ambition and Protestant proto nationalism" (96) as well as...
-
Abstract
Research Article| January 01 2010 Rhetoric, Grief, and the Imagination in Early Modern England Stephen Pender Stephen Pender Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2010) 43 (1): 54–85. https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.43.1.0054 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Stephen Pender; Rhetoric, Grief, and the Imagination in Early Modern England. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2010; 43 (1): 54–85. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.43.1.0054 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 You do not currently have access to this content.
-
Abstract
Abstract In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that a happy man is “foursquare beyond reproach” (τετράγωνοσ άνευ ψόγου or, in a common Latin translation, quadratus sine probro). To be foursquare, the happy man must bear the chances of life nobly and decorously as well as possess the qualities of the phronimos or good deliberator. That Aristotle moors felicity to prudence and decorum spurs classical, medieval, and early modern commentators, moral philosophers, and poets; by tracing the reception and use of the square man, I explore change and continuity in the relationship between prudence and decorum in some classical, late medieval, and early modern texts in order to suggest that prudent and practical persuasion emerges as a flexible responsive mode of perceiving ethical and political practice in the early modern period.
-
Abstract
In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that a happy man is “foursquare beyond reproach” (τετράγωνος ἄνευ ψόγου or, in a common Latin translation, quadratus sine probro). To be foursquare, the happy man must bear the chances of life nobly and decorously as well as possess the qualities of the phronimos or good deliberator. That Aristotle moors felicity to prudence and decorum spurs classical, medieval, and early modern commentators, moral philosophers, and poets; by tracing the reception and use of the square man, I explore change and continuity in the relationship between prudence and decorum in some classical, late medieval, and early modern texts in order to suggest that prudent and practical persuasion emerges as a flexible responsive mode of perceiving ethical and political practice in the early modern period.