Reference:
Review Excerpts 'The rhetorical view of life ... begins with the centrality of language. It
conceives reality as fundamentally dramatic, man as fundamentally a role player.
It synthesizes an essentially bifurcated, self-serving theory of motive. We play for
advantage, but we play for pleasure, too.... Homo rhetoricus cannot, to sum up,
be serious.... And if he relinquishes the luxury of a central self, a soul, he gains
the tolerance, and usually the sense of humor, that comes from knowing he -- and
others -- not only may think differently, but may be differently' (4-5).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | bifurcated | language |
reality |
role |
soul |
theory |
'The recurring attempts to make rhetorical training respectable in serious
terms all go astray. The contribution rhetorical reality makes to Western reality as
a whole is greatest when it is most uncompromisingly itself, insists most
strenuously on its own coordinates' (6).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | reality | western |
Lanham comments upon the philosophy of Plato, saying 'How flattering that
we, at whatever brave cost to ourselves, penetrate to the way things are, look, at
the end of our quest, upon the true face of beauty'. Then he contributes his own
view: 'How humiliating to be all this time only looking in a mirror' (7).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | face | philosophy |
'Perhaps we can see now why the Western paideia has always been a
mixed one. The Sophists cannot have grounded it alone, nor the philosophers.
The best education has always put the two views of life into profound and fruitful
collision. Divorce and domination present equal dangers' (8).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | education | western |
'Context ... is crucial in rhetorical literary documents. What seems a sublime,
if superficial, interruption may be a profound comic corrective. Only a sense of
context can show how the best history builds into itself a dialogue between the
two ways of knowing' (12).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | context | dialogue |
history |
literary |
'We come again and again to a motive essentially neither selfish nor
patriotic but simply dramatic.... Kenneth Burke has supplied a phrase for such a
motive -- "pure persuasion", the actor's attitude toward his audience'
(13-4).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | audience | persuasion |
phrase |
'If reality is rhetorical, dramatic, then " serious" literature is no longer serious,
realistic literature no longer realistic. Lewis Carroll becomes a realist, George
Eliot a surreal abstractionist' (18-9).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | reality | 'Any truly comprehensive critical theory will have to plot a continuum of
reality from rhetorical to serious' (19).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | plot | reality |
theory |
'Of all the unexamined premises rhetoric took over from serious philosophy,
clarity has perplexed the most. Since Aristotle it has figured as a central goal for
verbal expression. Theorists, without giving the matter special thought, seem to
have considered clarity a property of the text. Yet clarity describes many styles
and audiences. Used to describe a particular verbal configuration, clarity cannot
mean anything at all....The most intellectual, conceptual, scientific virtue of style
turns out to be entirely emotional. If everyone is happy, clarity has arrived....
Clarity is at least partly, and often predominantly, a temporal phenomenon, a
problem of period. One century's brightness becomes murk for the next. Clarity
no more permits objective standards than custom itself' (20-1).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | clarity | expression |
objective |
philosophy |
problem |
rhetoric |
style |
temporal |
text |
thought |
verbal |
'The real deceiver is the plain stylist who pretends to put all his cards on the
table. Clarity, then, is a cheat, an illusion. To rhetorical man at least, the world
is not clear, it is made clear. The clear stylist does it with a
conjuring trick. For this trick we return thanks. We are reassured. The world is
made like our minds' (22).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | clarity | world |
'The rhetorical stylist has no central self to be true to.... He feels at home in
his roles and to live must play them. When he poses, he is being himself.
The more artistic his performance, the more authentically representative it is.
Rhetorical man is an actor and insincerity is the actor's mode of being. The wider
his range of impersonations, the fuller his self. The more smoothly he can
manage a sudden role-change, the more genuine the effect and the effort'
(27).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | actor | effect |
mode |
range |
'The task of the critic, as of the cultural or literary historian, is not to choose
sides and then ignore the other half. Nor is it to try, however tempted, to
adjudicate the dispute, decide who is right and then simplify....We must ...
rehearse again the quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric. And this time
around, we must do more than use philosophy to debunk rhetoric, as the
scientific world view has done.... Seeing Western literature correctly depends on
controlling these two contradictory theories of knowledge, of self, of style.... Upon
seeing Western literature aright depends our ability to hold together the two
different ways of knowing which together make us human' (34-5).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | knowledge | literary |
philosophy |
rhetoric |
style |
western |
world |
'Plato would not have been troubled by the old charge that he was rigging his
dialogues. He would have admitted it cheerfully. Why not? The world was not
being constituted but reconstituted, illustrated in a hopelessly inferior medium.
What was obnoxious about the Sophists was not that their arguments were
ornamental, but that the Sophists thought they were not; they pretended to
constitute rather than reconstitute the world' (43).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | medium | thought |
world |
'Socrates never looks beyond his own coordinates. He can speak only one
language. Every humanist from Plato's day to our own has praised Socrates for
trying to know himself. It is legitimate to ask whether his self was especially worth
knowing. Isn't it really the testy, impatient, intolerant self of the religious zealot? It
is not charity to the historical Socrates to accept Plato's allegorical portrait of him
as ... Serious Man.... Socrates would have recognized, had he truly known
himself, the rhetorical ingredient in all human behavior, would have seen his truth
as only half the human truth, half the human self, but only half of it. As it is he did
not found humanism, a knowledge of the self, but only half of it' (45-6).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | knowledge | language |
truth |
'If seriousness can acknowledge Socrates as its saint, the rhetorical ideal
may claim Ovid as its martyr. He suffered as an exile in Tomis, and in modern
commentaries he has suffered yet more. He wrote too much and was too fond of
what he wrote, showed sensibility but no principles, no sincerity, no heart. His
universe was superficial, his religious sense undeveloped, his grasp of abstract
thought shaky at best' (48).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | abstract | claim |
principles |
thought |
universe |
'Begin with illusion. Reality will dependably follow. Contrive external
circumstance. Begin by allegorizing your own behavior. It is the situation which
convinces. Arrange the external coordinates carefully and to your liking. The
reality you desire will be established by them. They are not superficial
embellishments. They are everything' (48-9).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | circumstance |
reality |
situation |
'The Ars read in so schoolmasterly a way is not the poem Ovid wrote, but it
is part of it and the part we must see first. It provides a clear exposition of
rhetorical reality. Critics have often called love, for Ovid, only a pretext. When the
think it a pretext for showing off, the are only partly right. Of course he was a
show-off. Such posing was endemic to the rhetorical view, it created identity. But
beyond this self-conscious cleverness, which runs through everything Ovid wrote,
the poem offers a straightforward exposition of love sub specie rhetoricae'
(52).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | exposition | identity |
reality |
'The only element common to both is Ovid's deplorable, superficial,
excessive, glib show-off style. It is true that without his style Ovid would be
nothing. The Ars's two parts are held together by poetic virtuosity. The same
couplet can compass the high style and the low. For the Ars was intended, we
must remember, to be a showcase of Ovid's talents. He makes a point of playing
every note on the organ, mimicking every effect. The couplet was indeed ...
Ovid's criticism of life. It represented an allegory of control. The two worlds could
be held together by a virtuoso act of style. Such a style had to be opaque, hold us
at a distance, prevent entrance into either orchestration unreservedly'
(56).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | act | allegory |
criticism |
effect |
style |
'Anthropological understanding of myth began when scholars ceased to
force scientific coordinates on it, stopped trying to "make sense of it" and let it
make its own kind of sense. Ovid's Metamorphoses could not be
plainer about the kind of invitation it extends. a poem about changes, it insists on
dynamic rhetorical premises, not static serious ones. Identity is, by nature in this
poem, as fluid as the other categories of life. The underlying assumption here is
unity of life, not aristocratic domination of one species by another' (58).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | assumption |
identity |
myth |
nature |
understanding |
'It was not that Ovid was a bad plotter. The rhetorical view denies that plot is
possible. It was not that Ovid "had no taste for heroes and certainly, no capacity
for creating them", as Brooks Otis charges. He did not believe in heroes, or the
self they were based on. He was not bad at transitions; he
wanted to lose the reader. He was not incapable of
tracing a coherent genealogy for Rome; he did not believe in the Virgilian
conception of history upon which such descent was based. He was not too dense
to master a suitable repertoire of Augustan philosophical clichÈs; he denied the
theory of knowledge from which they grew. Too skeptical to think the whole truth
contained in a single myth, he thought the epic genre a fraud, an obvious
pretense that the world makes more sense than it does' (60).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | conception | genealogy |
genre |
history |
knowledge |
myth |
plot |
reader |
theory |
thought |
truth |
world |
'Ovid saw the fraud implicit in any act of writing and wanted to declare it.
What strikes us is the force of Ovid's sincerity. Formal pleasure represents a
fundamental ingredient in any reconstruction of the past. It is not declared, the
poet is not truly engaged. He has become a propagandist. Ovid's strategy in the
Metamorphoses seems plain. He builds a mythic reality and then
plays sophisticated games with it' (61).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | act | implicit |
reality |
strategy |
writing |
'The moral is clear. Nothing has only one meaning,
context, justification. When all the world is made to converge on and yield up a
single entity-- people, place, or city -- watch out' (62).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | context | meaning |
world |
Last Modified:
July-12-96 10:0:59
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