Rhetorical Handbooks Research Articles

La geografía de Egipto en Diodoro de Sicilia

This paper attempts to show that the geographical chapters concerning Egypt in the first book of Diodorus’ Bibliotheca are not to be explained, as it is usually done, from the viewpoint of an ethnographical utopia, but from that of the encomium of a country, recognized as such in ancient handbooks of Rhetoric. It also attempts to point out that the ultimate responsibility of these chapters must be ascribed to Diodorus himself, who has described the geography of Egypt in Book I in an encomiastic way quite coherent with the role that it plays in the following books of his Bibliotheca .

Among men—not boys: Histories of rhetoric and the exclusion of pedagogy

Almost all modern historians of rhetoric have undertaken to separate the men from the boys. But while rhetoric itself was talked about among men, it was to boys, and the handbooks that we have inherited-as well as most of those that we have lost-were intended for the instruction of the young. Feminist objections to classical rhetoric as been conducted among men-not women are consonant with this analysis, but I wish to emphasize here the ageism and academic self-hatred that we support when we accept the suppression of the pedagogical aspects of the history of our profession.' The dismissal of earlier pedagogical textbooks by both traditional and revisionist historians of rhetoric seems to me to be part of post-romantic unteachability topos, which assumes that what is most important about education is what least resembles the classroom.2 This topos is reinforced by more recent one that can be equally debilitating: the fear of teaching topos, in which having taught becomes synonymous with having oppressed.3 We can see their suppression of the pedagogical focus of classical rhetoric in the choice of rhetoric texts from earlier eras that traditional historians elevate to authoritative status. At one extreme is the modern canonization of Aristotle's Rhetoric, text that was never popular as pedagogical treatise in the ancient world, and at the other the rejection of Cicero's De invenltione and the Pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herenniurn. two rhetoric handbooks widely used in schools for hundreds of years. It is to the credit of traditional historians of rhetoric who are attempting to reclaim classical rhetoric as viable and important pedagogical alternative that they have been affected by this prejudice against pedagogy more in what they say than in what they do. Corbett's Handbook of Classical Rhetoric, for example, lavishly praises Aristotle's Rhetoric but, as the title reveals, presents its pedagogical material in fashion much closer to that of the Ciceronian tradition. Thomas Sloane, making passionate appeal in College English for the reclaiming of Ciceronian invention, dismisses De inventione as a famous and regrettably enduring handbook (462) before proceeding to extrapolate pedagogical content readily available in De invenhtione from the more diffuse and less pedagogically relevant De oratore.4

Young, Becker and Pike's "Rogerian" Rhetoric: A Twenty-Year Reassessment

It has been twenty years since Richard Young, Alton Becker and Kenneth Pike brought out their challenging and revolutionary book, Rhetoric: Discovery and Change. Though cast in the mold of a rhetorical handbook, Rhetoric: Discovery and Change (like many of the best rhetorical handbooks, including Aristotle's Rhetoric) attempted to do more than relay the accumulated rhetorical wisdom of its age in a predigested form suitable for students. It was an attempt to synthesize a complete rhetorical system, a system that in some ways built on and in some ways departed from the classical model. Arguing that Profound changes are taking place in the system of Western values that has for centuries guided conduct (8), Young, Becker and Pike wanted to rethink rhetoric from its foundations, using concepts borrowed from problem-solving theory, game theory, dialogic communication, linguistics, and Carl Rogers' nondirective therapy. Out of these materials they created a rhetoric that they claimed offered new goals, new ways of creating ideas, and new ways of managing the rhetor-audience relationship. I would like to focus primarily on Young, Becker and Pike's use of principles. I see this as their most interesting, possibly most enduring, and certainly most controversial contribution to modern rhetoric, a contribution that escapes the bounds of the eighteen pages in which they explicitly discuss Rogers and subtly but pervasively dominates the entire work. The propriety and the pedagogical utility of Young, Becker and Pike's Rogerian rhetoric has been debated before, by Andrea Lunsford, Diane C. Mader, and Lisa Ede among others. This debate has centered chiefly on two questions: whether rhetoric as developed by Young, Becker and Pike is genuinely different from Aristotelian rhetoric and on whether it is fair to its main source, therapy. This debate is far from trivial and it is far from closed; this article to some extent will continue it. But it is time to step back and, from our twenty-year vantage point, ask some larger questions that enclose and put into perspective these more local questions of fairness to sources. To do so, let us look at Young, Becker and Pike's version of rhetoric both in its historical context and in the context of the larger rhetorical sys-

The Literary Emancipation of Juan Rodríguez del Padrón: From the Fictional "Cartas" to the Siervo libre de amor

In the fifty years that followed their publication, the Spanish sentimental romances enjoyed great popularity in the literary world of sixteenth-century Europe. Diego de San Pedro's Carcel de arnor (1492) and Tratado de arnores de Arnalte e Lucenda (1491) were translated into Italian (1513, 1539), French (1525, 1539), and English (1549, 1543). In England, the Tratado de amores was considered not only agreeable reading but also a useful handbook of rhetoric. The Italian (1521) and French (1535) versions of Juan de Flores's romances, Grisel y Mirabella (1495) and Grimalte y Gradissa (1495), left their mark on the writings of Ariosto, Madame de Scudery, and Maurice Sceve.1 Ironically, however, the principal work of Juan Rodriguez del Padron, the creator of the genre and a dominant influence on its evolution in Spain,2 was completely ignored elsewhere in Europe. That his romance, Siervo libre de arnor (c. 1438), and his poetry became better known in Spain was due in part to the erotic legend which associated his name with that of Queen Maria de Aragon, the wife of Juan II. Juan Rodriguez was born in Galicia at the end of the fourteenth century. As a hidalgo, he was very attached to traditional medieval values. As a poet, he was bound to the Galician lyrical legacy of Macias's poetry, and to the European tradition of courtly love. It is impossible to determine whether the Siervo libre de amor, which begins with the story of Siervo's love for an unidentified lady, was inspired by a real love affair. Juan Rodriguez's romance may well be entirely fictional, and the legend linking him with Queen Maria de Aragon may have grown from his book rather than from his life. In fact there are two love stories in the Siervo libre, giving it an interlaced, bipartite design that has puzzled critics. The account of Siervo's love is interrupted by the tragic story of Ardanlier and Liessa, which has traditionally been regarded as chivalresque rather than

Questions and Answers about the Pentad

MAYBE my concern with matters of literary theory might be of some suggestive value to persons concerned with the teaching of literary composition. But what should I say? Having seen a contemporary handbook of rhetoric, language, and literature, The Holt Guide to English by William F. Irmscher and having noted that it puts to good use some terms I worked with in my Grammar of Motives, I see a feasible point of departure there. For my relation to the terms differs somewhat from their role

The Elm and the Vine: Notes Toward The History of a Marriage Topos

Ernst R. Curtius (1886-1956) was the first modern scholar who discussed the traditional rhetorics of the pastoral landscape with both critical insight and an astonishing historical erudition. In Chapter x (pp. 191-209) of his Europäische Liter atur und lateinisches Mittelaller (1st ed. Bern, 1949) Curtius suggests an instructive list of topographical and botanical “stage props” (“inszenierende Staffage”) traditionally employed to describe the happy rural environment of amorous shepherds and pastoral lovers. It is, of course, hardly surprising that in the intricate process of literary transmission, as outlined by Curtius, Vergil fulfills a central task: by his sophisticated use of elements from both Homer and Theocritus, Vergil unfolds, in his Bucolics as well as in the Georgies, the characteristic “pleasant landscape” (“locus amoenus”) which is later reverently systematized in handbooks of medieval rhetoric, eruditely echoed in the Renaissance, and elegantly alluded to in classicist poetry.