Oratorical Skill Research Articles

Art of preaching

"An orator", Cicero famously said, "is a good man, trained in the art to speak well." The difference between orators and actors, he continues, is that orators are "players that act real life" whereas, actors are "players who only mimic reality".Preaching is not only an oratorical skill but also a theological art. All of this suggests a deep awareness and sensitivity to aesthetics. Both preachers (or orators) and actors usually have, or should have, something of this sensitivity. Both preachers and actors are intent on weaving words into patterns that both make sense and stimulate the senses. The often-quoted idea that"beauty will save the world" (from Dostoevsky's The Idiot) feeds into a perception that somehow aesthetics in itself has some or other redemptive quality. Or translated into the context of preaching: that it will somehow by itself elevate, enhance or redeem the act of preaching. There is no doubt that this idea is a misrepresentation of what Dostoevsky had in mind. The decisive factor in preaching is not the reality of beauty but the beauty of reality. Both preaching and beauty are deeply grounded in reality. However, preaching as a theological art is not only grounded in the reality as our senses experience it, but more so in the reality of Jesus Christ.

Pericles of Athens by Vincent Azoulay

Pericles of Athens, by Vincent Azoulay, translated by Janet Lloyd. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2014. xiv, 291 pp. $35.00 US (cloth). Pericles of Athens is Janet Lloyd's fluid translation of the French original, Pericles: La democratie athenienne a l'epreuve du grand homme (Paris, 2010), into the English language. In this book, Vincent Azoulay offers a sensitive and wide-ranging treatment of the scant evidence for the life of the Athenian statesman. Azoulay uses the biographical tradition to discuss not only Pericles but also the period in fifth-century Athenian history that has come to be associated with his name. Azoulay begins with an overview of the political advantages Pericles enjoyed, both those he was born with, like family wealth, and those he acquired, like oratorical skill (chapters one to three). He then describes Athens in the fifth century, focusing on imperial policy and the economy, and probes the extent to which these spheres were Periclean (chapters four and five). Pericles' political liabilities are considered, including reciprocal ties of philia, hierarchical ties of eros, and his relationship to state religion (chapters six to eight). Azoulay next tests the idea of an Age of Pericles, showing that the death of Pericles did not constitute a definitive historical break, and he outlines the extent to which Pericles as a politician was constrained by the Athenian democratic construct (chapters nine and ten). Finally, Azoulay enters into territory that will likely be less familiar to scholars in the field, and moves rather quickly through six hundred years of post-classical reception, documenting periods of obscurity, disrepute, and renown in Pericles' nachleben (chapters eleven and twelve). As Azoulay himself says at the beginning of his study, A project centered on Pericles has to walk a tightrope (4), and indeed this one does. Azoulay's book offers a portrait of Pericles that is balanced almost to a fault. Azoulay scrupulously reveals both sides of every issue he examines--for example, the benefits and pitfalls of being politically connected, or that Pericles both was and was not responsible for the conception and execution of Athens' imperial policies--to the point that it is difficult to draw any conclusions based on what is presented. Indeed, at times this book can feel formulaic. Most issues are discussed by first rejecting one unlikely extreme and then its opposite, only to arrive at the inevitable conclusion that the truth must lie somewhere in the middle but is, in most cases, impossible to specify. While some readers will be frustrated by the conspicuous absence of definitive assertions, this approach does have its merits. …

The company he keeps: a history of white college fraternities

contrast to boyishness. Masculine identity was therefore enacted through independence, oratorical skill, and an undying loyalty to one’s peers. The second chapter, titled “The Sacred, the Secular, and the Manly,” discusses the ways in which fraternities in the antebellum period quickly became a way for students to distinguish themselves on campus. Although many colleges were focused on preparing men for the ministry, a disproportionally small percentage of fraternity members were headed for the ministry. Syrett provides several explanations for this, including economic class (fraternities were expensive, and those entering the ministry were often poor or on scholarship), and a general ministerial opposition to secret societies. However, Syrett begins to build his central argument with a more unconventional explanation: the fraternity members sought a more “manly” image than that of their religious peers. The most handsome, athletic, social, and confident students were invited to join fraternities. During this period of the 1810s through the 1850s, fraternities also allowed members to set themselves apart from a small but growing population of “others” on campus, particularly women and African Americans. Chapter 3 focuses on the national aspects of fraternity membership in the 1800s. As fraternal organizations began to expand in the 1840s and 1850s, the benefits of membership in a nation-wide, elite, and White network of alumni became apparent. Business and social connections were substantial among fraternity alumni, and provided a sense of stability during the upheaval of Reconstruction. Alumni clubs became well-established following the Civil War, and alumni became more involved with The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities Nicholas L. Syrett Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009, 432 pages $30.00 (hardcover)

Quotation Marks, the Gramophone Record, and the Language of the Outlaw

Quotation Marks, the Gramophone Record, and the Language of the Outlaw Damien Keane (almost voicelessly) Excuse me. I am suffering from a severe chill, have recently come from a sickbed. A few wellchosen words. (U 15.998–99) Taken from Leopold Bloom's trial sequence in "Circe," the words of my epigram have a claim to being the first in Ulysses actually spoken by John F. Taylor, the nationalist barrister renowned in Dublin for his oratorical skill. While Taylor is more commonly associated with "Aeolus" and its famous analogy between the Israelites enslaved in Egyptian bondage and the Irish oppressed under British rule, the speech in which the analogy is elaborated in the earlier episode is presented as a lengthy quotation, recited from memory by Professor MacHugh to the assembled pressmen and hangers-on in the offices of the Freeman's Journal. Thus, although Taylor's words have appeared in the novel prior to "Circe," it is only in the fifteenth episode that the reader can finally identify a moment in the text when Taylor himself might be the speaker of words—and, quite aptly, words about choosing words—that have been attributed to him. Even so, it would seem at best naively literal, and at worst outrageous, to advance such a claim on the evidence of "Circe," particularly when the episode is understood as a hallucinatory or textual unconsciousness. Considered as an archive (in the Foucauldian sense), however, "Circe" serves to expose and illuminate aspects left inchoate or underdeveloped in earlier moments of the novel, bringing out what had been latent in the narrative and re-casting acts of interpretation as part of an ongoing process of misrecognition and limitation. As in "Aeolus," Taylor's appearance in "Circe" inheres precisely in the enunciation of words attributable to him; in "Circe" alone, though, this relation pivots explicitly on the textual apparatus framing the identity of the speaker. A capitalized dramatic tag immediately preceding the words names their speaker as "J. J. O'MOLLOY" (U 15.997), although the tag itself is preceded by an italicized stage direction describing O'Molloy's assumption of Taylor's ragged, phthisical features (U 15.993–96). Immediately [End Page 400] following the tag, someone approximating the great orator speaks—"almost voicelessly," the reader is informed parenthetically—before becoming yet another semi-materialized figment of Aeolian rhetoric. Taylor's ineluctable last gasp—the word "words"—thus gestures not toward his oratorical distinction or colloquial reputation, but toward the availability and adaptability of his own words in the public sphere. Why this "archival" series of lines in "Circe" manifests these "few wellchosen words" in the form it does is determined by the political interplay of authority and appropriation subtending the citation of Taylor's speech in "Aeolus." This is to say that the moment of Taylor's appearance in "Circe" dramatizes a highly mediated relation of authority, citation, and attribution that, in "Aeolus," remains unspecified and occluded, even as the features of the relation strongly inform the significance of the seventh episode. In light of the severely bared fictional device of their Circean reenactment, then, the reporting and reception of Taylor's words in "Aeolus" are themselves revealed to be a reenactment, pointing not to some prior section of the novel, but to the textual archive (in the material or institutional sense) of early twentieth-century Irish political culture. By fictionalizing the historical conditions in which it simultaneously participates, "Aeolus" thus opens up the question of the relationship of the singular work of art to mediated reproducibility and propagation. It is to this final question that the present essay will attend. The problem of textual authority in Joyce's works remains an enduring and vital aspect of Joycean criticism, one dependent as much on the works' formal difficulty and technical recalcitrance as on their tortuous histories of composition and publication.1 That such a byzantine configuration of interpretive dilemmas has resulted in a certain methodological balkanization is unsurprising, and it is therefore fitting that this question of textual authority is perhaps most critically dynamic in relation to Ulysses, a book written partly in the somewhat literally Balkanized city of Trieste. What is surprising is how frequently...

George W. Bush and the Unrhetorical Rhetorical Presidency

This essay applies Tulis's work on the rhetorical presidency to one modern example—George W. Bush and his tax cut plan of 2001. In his book The Rhetorical Presidency, Tulis examines Woodrow Wilson's reinterpretation of presidential leadership, examining how Wilson reimagined the presidency as an office dedicated primarily to popular leadership through rhetoric. Since prior to the events of 9/11 George W. Bush's reputation was not that of a brilliant rhetorician, does that mean Tulis's construct did not apply to him? In fact, no—for the rhetorical presidency is at heart a constitutional problem, not a problem of oratorical skill. The modern presidency-centered system requires the president to be a policy activist and to resist compromise as he sets rhetorical markers of success. Yet the other branches of government still retain all of their traditional institutional weapons to fight presidential success. Even though Bush was not known for being a rhetorically gifted popular leader in his first months in office, he still found himself operating according to the rules of Wilson's rhetorical presidency. Thus, Bush experienced every potential weakness of the rhetorical presidency identified by Tulis.

Did the Romans Believe in Their Verdicts?

Abstract: The purpose of the Roman indicia publica (as described by legal, rhetorical, and philosophical texts and even the name of the institution) was to determine whether or not defendants had violated the various “criminal” statutes which established them. Cicero's reports of the outcome of real cases suggest a popular expectation that jurors ordinarily attempted to carry out this task. The proliferation of distinct formal charges over time and the existence of jokes about orators fooling jurors confirm this suggestion. We are thus discouraged from imagining collusion between parties and jurors in which the formal charge is understood by all to be a pretext for a competition of oratorical skill or social standing. Roman jurors wanted to believe in their verdicts. Advocates, of course, did not simply tell the truth. Rather, they responded to popular expectations by going out of their way to emphasize the (purported) truth of their speeches.

Political activity in classical Athens

‘Only the naïve or innocent observer’, says Sir Moses Finley in his bookPolitics in the ancient world, ‘can believe that Pericles came to a vital Assembly meeting armed with nothing but his intelligence, his knowledge, his charisma and his oratorical skill, essential as all four attributes were.’ Historians of the Roman Republic have been assiduous in studyingclientelae,factionesand ‘delivering the vote’, but much less work has been done on the ways in which Athenian politicians sought to mobilise support. There have been studies of family connections and of links between individual politicians; there have been studies of the associations known ashetaireiai; but many questions remain unanswered. W. R. Connor inThe new politicians of fifth-century Athenscontrasted an old style of politics, based on ties ofphiliawithin the upper classes, with a new style, which spurnedphiliaand appealed directly to the people. Even in his old style, the votes of the ordinary, middling-to-poor citizens counted for more in the straightforward Athenian assembly than in the Romancomitiawith their complex systems of block votes. Connor limits political friendship to the upper classes; he pours cold water on Sealey's suggestion that rich families might have brought pressure to bear on their tenants and other dependants (saying, ‘The proud and independent Athenian might be expected to resist intimidation’); but apart from general references to largesse he does not really explain how an old-style Cimon or a new-style Cleon would ensure that the assembly was full of voters willing to elect him as general or approve a motion which he proposed. J. K. Davies has tried to take the matter further inWealth and the power of wealth in classical Athens.

IMPRESSIVE SPEECHES AND PERSUASIVE TALK: TRADITIONAL PATTERNS OF POLITICAL COMMUNICATION IN FIJI'S LAU GROUP FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF PACIFIC IDEAL TYPES

Communication plays different roles in the political processes of groups depending upon tne ways power is distributed within them. Participants in or observers of the politics of Western nations may well think of persuasion as the primary function of all forms of political communication. In the Lau Group of Fiji, however, public speeches, while a prominent feature of political life, are impressive in nature without being persuasive. Like physical force, persuasion is both a source of power and an instrument of it. The fundamental paradox of authority relationships is that the use of a resource that is itself a basis of power implies its absence. The power of a government may rest on the monopoly of legitimate force, but only a very weak government must often resort to force to stay in power. The same argument applies to persuasion. If one must resort to persuasion, that fact implies a lack of power, while at the same time persuasion influences the behaviour of others, which is the essence of power. In some societies the allocation of power among institutions may be stable, but individuals must struggle against one another to gain or maintain place within the framework, and persuasive public speaking may be the normal path to political authority. Not all groups distribute power in this way, however, and in some persuasion is not recognized to any great degree as a correlate of power. In such groups, as in Lau, power may be distributed along largely structural lines, such as seniority or aristocratic descent, and the personal persuasive abilities of leaders may be of little importance. One reason for the connection between public persuasion and fluid power distribution is that oratorical skill is an individual talent, and there is no great likelihood that occupants of particular, structurally ascribed positions would be more able orators than others. As a determinant of power distribution, oratorical skill might fail to support or even compromise the structural pattern. A more basic factor is that persuasion implies the persuasibility of people. That is, what is said to them may or may not have an impact, depending not on who says it, but how well it is said. When status differences are sharply graded, persons in inferior positions do not need to be persuaded. Both considerations point to the predominance of persuasive public speaking in individualistic, egalitarian social groups where fluid power relationships are generalized throughout the political community. This is not to say that hierarchical groups would not place value on public speaking, but a distinction can be drawn between persuasive and impressive speech. Impressive speeches may, as they do in Lau, have a ritualistic function in that they reinforce traditional social structure by ex-

Elders in the shadow of the Big-Man

Leadership in the South Pacific has drawn the attention of a number of scholars in the last several decades. Following the model given by Sahlins in his much-quoted article, 'Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief (1963), anthropologists could work with a handy dichotomy: leadership based on achieved status in a sphere of egalitarianism (the big-man of Melanesia) versus leadership based on ascribed status of hereditary rank in a sphere of social hierarchy (the chief of Polynesia). These two ideal types apparently left little room for much focus on the many overlapping and divergent types of leaders to be found in the vast areas of the South Pacific. The spectacular Melanesian big-man ? the Songi of Oliver's monograph on the Siuai of the Solomon Islands, who, according to Bronwen Douglas (1979:3), was the inspiration for Sahlins' article ? was threatening to become a caricature. Literature abounded in which the Melanesian big-man's charac teristics of personal ambition, managerial and oratorical skill, and calculated generosity were illustrated. In the meantime, however, one scholar challenged the position of the big-man. The Austrian anthro pologist Justin Stagi, in a relatively unknown article in the German Zeitschrift f?r Politik, juxtaposed the big-man's leadership with that of the elders. In his article, '?lteste und Big Men. Politische F?hrungs rollen in Melanesien' (1971:368-383), the two types of Melanesian leaders were compared and analyzed, and in the end both were merely reduced to an interplay of authority and power inherent in every form of political organization (pp.369,380). This undermining of the big man's theoretical status by bringing the elders into the picture did not make any waves ? not even ripples ? on the sea of anthropological

The Homeric Competitions of Tennyson and Gladstone

In December 1865 the sculptor Thomas Woolner gave a memorable dinner party which, in a Victorian version of the Homeric games, generated a sportive clash between two of the age's heroes. The guests included William Ewart Gladstone, Alfred Tennyson, William Holman Hunt, and the Bristol physician John Addington Symonds. The son of this last entered later in the evening (as did F. T. Palgrave), and it is from the letters of the younger John Addington Symonds that we have a detailed, lively account of the stormy proceedings. The major feature of the evening was the persistency with which Tennyson and Gladstone gravitated toward polar attitudes whatever the topic of conversation, whether the issue under discussion was political or literary. As the younger Symonds entered the dining room, the assembled company had just begun to consider Governor Coote Eyre and his brutal suppression of the Jamaican uprising in which twenty Europeans had been killed and over 600 natives killed or executed. As Gladstone condemned the slaughter with the moral passion and oratorical skill by which he dominated Parliament, Tennyson kept interrupting not with counter-arguments but with obbligato, sotto voce prejudices: “We are too tender to savages, we are more tender to a black man than to ourselves. … Niggers are tigers, niggers are tigers.” Repeatedly the two men differed over this and other matters, “Gladstone with his rich flexible voice, Tennyson with his deep drawl rising into an impatient falsetto when put out, Gladstone arguing, Tennyson putting in a prejudice, Gladstone asserting rashly, Tennyson denying with a bold negative, Gladstone full of facts, Tennyson relying on impressions, both of them humorous, but the one polished and delicate in repartee, the other broad & coarse & grotesque.”

Teaching learning while learning to teach.

joining the Dartmouth College faculty in 1967, George Christian Jernstedt has been teaching a course called Psychology 22: Learning. It has to do with the fundamental principles of learningwith what it is, and with how and why it takes place. As an intermediate course open to undergraduates who have taken Psychology 1 : Introductory Psychology, Jernstedt' s course usually attracts a large number of students, both majors and nonmajors. Enrollment has at times exceeded 200. One way to teach Learning is through the traditional method of lectures and examinations, and Jernstedt has taught it that way. But there are other ways as well, and he has over the years experimented with a good many of them. In fact, he has made the teaching of Learning an experiment in learninga continuous application of laboratory findings to life situations. He says people like himself interested in knowing more about the teaching-learning process have something in common with model-train builders: We're never finished, we never have all the answers, we're constantly making modifications and Jernstedt has built his model train piece by piece, with the help of many of his students. He is still making modifications and adjustments. What has evolved thus far is an intricate system of instruction that includes a specific statement of course objectives, division of course content into units, and sequential mastery of each unit at a flexible, individualized pace. Several factors have encouraged Jernstedt's experimentation. He is, first of all, an experimental psychologist, with a particular interest in human learning and cognition and in behavior modification. These interests have stimulated his curiosity about the learning process, and how best to apply it to individuals as individuals. Second, he realizedthrough the perceptive questions of some of his studentsthat exclusive use of the traditional lecture-examination format in a course on the principles of learning precluded application of the very principles he was seeking to communicate. (If you're trying to teach us about the ways people learn, why are you using only one of those ways yourself?) And finally, finding himself in front of 100 or more students at a time, Jernstedt was dismayed by the lack of opportunity for personal exchange, the heavy dependence upon oratorical skill, the difficulty of gaining and holding the attention of all students, and the essentially passive nature of the students' role.