Paul Ricoeur: Tradition and Innovation in Rhetorical Theory (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Paul Ricoeur: Tradition and Innovation in Rhetorical Theory Barbara Warnick Paul Ricoeur: Tradition and Innovation in Rhetorical Theory. By Andreea Deciu Ritivoi. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006; pp ix + 186. $68.50cloth; $22.95 paper. Andreea Deciu Ritivoi seeks to draw the attention of rhetoricians to how Paul Ricoeur's works on history, collective memory, epideictic, epistemology, ideology, textual interpretation, and other topics might contribute to rhetorical theory. In her conclusion, she notes that she sought to identify in Ricoeur's work concepts that elucidate rhetorical action in response to culturally situated problems. Throughout the book she consistently connects concepts directly related to the use of rhetoric to a set of premises or questions originally formulated by Ricoeur. Each of her major chapters focuses on a classical concept that has been taken up into a broader and more contemporary framework. I will explain each of the main chapters briefly while emphasizing chapter 4, which I found to be the most original and interesting. After an introduction and an intriguing chapter on Ricoeur's life, Ritivoi in chapter 2 on doxa takes up the question of how rhetorical agents challenge and change the taken-for-granted assumptions of communities. The chapter engages Ricoeur's work on the role of imagination in constructing community, and it considers the importance of critical consciousness in reflecting on ideology. How do beliefs rigidify into conventions and how do rhetors step outside those conventions and enable audiences to contemplate new ways of resistance? Ritivoi ends the chapter by discussing how Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" reframed audience perceptions of the future. She takes issue with some previous studies of this speech and concludes that King succeeded partly through encouraging his audience to engage in utopian reflection as a means of gaining perspective and distancing themselves from a present informed by racist practices. [End Page 363] Chapter 3 deals with phronesis, or practical reasoning. This chapter draws on Ricoeur's extensive work on the use of history in later documents. Here Ritivoi focuses on instances when a course of action needs to be chosen in response to a particular problem. The discourses selected for discussion in this chapter are the Lincoln-Douglas debates and President Clinton's speech in Memphis in which he invoked the voice and authority of Dr. King to support his proposals for the revival of African American community. Drawing upon Ricoeur, Ritivoi notes that history is a source of wisdom when sharing it gives life to the past, and she focuses on the link between practical reasoning and historical reflection. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates, for example, she maintains that Douglas looked to history to pin down the founders' intentions and thus make a case for the perpetuation of slavery, whereas Lincoln was interested in how ideas inherited from history revealed a vision of the future. Since extensive work on these speeches has been done by John Murphy, David Zarefsky, and others, however, it is unclear how much her use of Ricoeur in this chapter further illuminates these discourses. In chapter 4, Ritivoi provides an excellent illustration of the usefulness of Ricoeur's views on the epideictic genre of rhetorical speech. She compares two speeches that were given under similar circumstances yet addressed the same issue in very different ways. The first speech was given at the Bitburg cemetery in Germany by President Ronald Reagan in 1985. The second speech was delivered on the same day at the German Bundestag by President Richard von Weizsäcker. Ritivoi takes the position that Ricoeur's theories about justice, collective identity, and the use of history in public address help us to understand better why one of these speeches is viable and the other is not. In discussing the relationship between public speech and national identity, Ritivoi considers a situation in which the past actions of a nation were condemnable and therefore a problematic resource for the formation of collective identity by its citizens and allies. She observes that such was the case with Germany in the post–World War II period. To compare the speeches of Reagan and Weizsäcker, she draws upon certain tenets of...