Rhetoric
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Rhetoric (from Greek ρητωρ, rhêtôr, "orator") is one of the three original liberal arts or trivium (the other members are dialectic and grammar). While it has meant many different things during its 2500-year history, it is generally described today as the art of persuasion through language. Rhetoric can describe a persuasive way in which one relates a theme or idea in an effort to convince.
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History
In Western thought, several periods of history have seen particular interest paid to rhetoric as a discipline. Its origins as a science and art can be traced to ancient Greece. The philosophers of ancient Rome expanded the study and descriptions of rhetoric they had inherited from the Greeks. During the Renaissance, writers and thinkers studied the Classical texts closely, and again there were significant works produced on the subject.
Ancient Greece
Western thinking about rhetoric grew out of the public and political life of Ancient Greece, much of which revolved around the use of oratory as the medium through which philosophical ideas were developed and disemminated. For modern students, it can be difficult to remember that the wide use and availability of written texts is a phenomenon that is only a few hundred years old. In Classical times, many of the great thinkers spoke their words; in fact, many of them are known only through the texts that their students and followers wrote down. As has already been noted, rhetor was the Greek term for orator.
Rhetoric thus evolved as an important art, one that provided the orator with the forms, means, and strategies of persuading an audience of the correctness of the orator's arguments. Today the term rhetoric is generally used to refer only to the form of argumentation, often with the pejorative connotation that rhetoric is a means of obscuring the truth. Classical philosophers believed quite the contrary: the skilled use of rhetoric was essential to the discovery of truths, because it provided the means of ordering and clarifying arguments.
The Sophists
Organized thought about rhetoric began in ancient Greece. The first written manual is attributed to Corax and his pupil Tisias. Their work, as well as that of many of the early rhetoricians, grew out of the courts of law; Tisias, for example, is believed to have written judicial speeches that others delivered in the courts.
Rhetoric was popularized in the 5th century BC by itinerant teachers known as sophists, the best known of whom were Protagoras, Gorgias, and Isocrates.
Aristotle
The rhetoric developed by Plato's student, Aristotle. In the first sentence of The Art of Rhetoric, Aristotle says "rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic". By this, he means that, while dialectical methods are necessary to find truth, rhetorical methods are required to communicate it.
Aristotle's treatise on rhetoric was an attempt to systematically describe rhetoric as a human art or skill (techne). He identified three different types of rhetorical proof:
- ethos: how the character of a speaker influences an audience to consider him to be believable.
- pathos: the use of emotional appeals
- logos: the use of language in constructing an argument.
He also identified three different types of rhetoric: forensic (concerned with determining truth or falsity of events that took place in the past), deliberative (concerned with determining whether or not particular actions should or should not be taken in the future), and epideictic (concerned with praise and blame, demonstrating beauty and skill in the present).
While Western philosophy has tended to emphasize logos, Aristotle's three bases of evidence provide a philosophical foundation for the broadly conceived psycho-social or behavioral sciences where accounting for non-rational factors in human behavior is necessary for explanatory completeness. Especially professions or occupations in applied social sciences, such as psychotherapy are based in the practice of persuasion, or rhetoric in Aristotle's broad conception.
Roman Rhetoricians
The Romans, for whom oration was also an important part of public life, saw much value in Aristotle's rhetoric. Cicero and Quintilian were chief among Roman rhetoricians, and their work is an extension of Aristotle's.
Latin rhetoric was developed out of the Rhodian schools of rhetoric. In the second century BC, Rhodes became an important educational center, particularly of rhetoric, and the sons of noble Roman families went there to study.
Although not widely read in Roman times, the Rhetorica ad Herennium (sometimes attributed to Cicero, but probably not his work) is a notable early work on Latin rhetoric. Its author was probably a Latin rhetorician in Rhodes, and for the first time we see a systematic treatment of Latin elocutio. Although the Ad Herennium was not known in its time, it provides a glimpse into the early development of Latin rhetoric, and in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, it achieved wide publication as one of the basic school texts on rhetoric.
Whether or not he wrote the Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero contributed several other works on rhetoric: De Oratore, the Brutus, and the Orator are major works; De Optimo Genere Oratorum, Topica, and De Partitione Oratia are additional minor works. Cicero, of course, was also a renowned orator, and his orations and epistles are themselves exemplars of rhetoric, and were much imitated.
Along with Cicero, the most influential Roman rhetorician was Quintilian. His career began as a pleader in the courts of law; his reputation grew so great that Vespasian created a chair of rhetoric for him in Rome. The culmination of his life's work was the Institutio oratoria (or Institutes of Oratory), a lengthy treatise on the training of the orator.
In it, Quintilian codified rhetorical studies under five canons that would persist for centuries in academic circles:
- Inventio (invention) is the process that leads to the development and refinement of an argument.
- Once arguments are developed, dispositio (disposition, or arrangement) is used to determine how it should be organized for greatest effect.
- Once the speech content is known and the structure is determined, the next steps involve elocutio (style) and pronuntiatio (delivery).
- Finally, memoria (memory) comes to play as the speaker recalls each of these elements during the speech.
This work was available only in fragments in medieval times, but the discovery of a complete copy at Abbey of St. Gall in 1416 led to its emergence as one of the most influential works on rhetoric during the Renaissance.
Quintilian was reacting in part to the growing tendency in Rome to value ornamentation over substance in rhetoric. However, his masterful work was not enough to curb this movement, and the second century AD saw rhetoric fall into decadence.
One other figure worth mention, although he is not commonly regarded as a rhetorician, is St. Augustine. However, he was at one time a teacher of Latin rhetoric and after his conversion to Christianity, became interested in using these "pagan" arts for spreading his religion. This new use of rhetoric is explored in the Fourth Book of his De Doctrina Christiana, and laid the foundation of what would become homiletics, the rhetoric of the sermon.
Rhetoric from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment
After the Roman Empire, the study of rhetoric went into decline for several hundred years. Where it survived was primarily in the arts of letter writing (ars dictaminis) and writing sermons (ars praedicandi). As part of the trivium, rhetoric was secondary to the study of logic, and its study was highly scholastic: students were given repetitive exercises in the creation of discourses on historical subjects (suasoriae) or on classic legal questions (controversiae).
Sixteenth Century
One influential figure in the rebirth of interest in classical rhetoric was Erasmus. His work, De Duplici Copia Verborum et Rerum (1512), was widely published (it went through more than 150 editions throughout Europe) and became one of the basic school texts on the subject. Its treatment of rhetoric is less comprehensive than the classic works of antiquity, but provides a traditional treatment of res-verba (matter and form): its first book treats the subject of elocutio, showing the student how to use schemes and tropes; the second book covers inventio. Much of the emphasis is on abundance of variation (copia means "plenty" or "abundance", as in copious or cornucopia), so both books focus on ways to introduce the maximum amount of variety into discourse. For instance, in one section the De Copia, Erasmus presents two hundred variations of the sentence "Semper, dum vivam, tui meminero".
Juan Luis Vives (1492 - 1540) also helped shape the study of rhetoric in England. A Spaniard, he was appointed in 1523 to the Lectureship of Rhetoric at Oxford by Cardinal Wolsey, and was entrusted by Henry VIII to be one of the tutors of Mary. Vives fell into disfavor when Henry VIII divorced Catherine of Aragon and left England in 1528. His best-known was a work on education, De Disciplinis, published in 1531, and his writings on rhetoric included Rhetoricae, sive De Ratione Dicendi, Libri Tres (1533), De Consultatione (1533), and a rhetoric on letter writing, De Conscribendis Epistolas (1536).
It is likely that many well-known English writers would have been exposed to the works of Erasmus and Vives (as well as those of the Classical rhetoricians) in their schooling, which still required the learning of Greek and Latin and placed considerable emphasis on rhetoric.
The mid-1500s saw the rise of vernacular rhetorics — those written in English rather than in the Classical languages; adoption works in English was slow to take hold, however, due to the bias toward Latin and Greek. A successful early text was Thomas Wilson's The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), which presents a traditional treatment of rhetoric. For instance, Wilson presents the five parts of rhetoric (Inuention, Disposition, Elocution, Memorie, and Utterance). Other notable works included Angel Day's The English Secretorie (1586, 1592), George Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie (1589), and Richard Rainholde's Foundacion of Rhetorike (1563).
During this same period, a movement began that would change the organization of the school curriculum and lead to rhetoric losing its central place. A French scholar, Petrus Ramus, dissatisfied with what he saw as the overly broad and redundant organization of the trivium, proposed a new curriculum. Breaking with the traditional divisions of the liberal arts, he proposed something similar to the contemporary division of universities into multiple schools and departments of study (in fact, Ramus is the ultimate source of this organizational scheme). The five components of rhetoric no longer lived under the common heading of rhetoric. Instead, invention and disposition were determined to fall under the heading of philosophy, while language, delivery, and memory were all that remained for rhetoric.
One of Ramus' followers, Audomarus Talaeus (Omer Talon) published his rhetoric, Institutiones Oratoriae in 1544. This rhetoric provided a simple presentation of rhetoric that emphasized the treatment of style, and became so popular that it was mentioned in John Brinsley's (1612) Ludus literarius; or The Grammar Schoole as being the "most used in the best schooles." Many other Ramist rhetorics followed in the next half-century, and by the 1600s, their approach became the primary method of teaching rhetoric.
Once stripped of its more substantial elements, rhetoric became a much less prestigious topic of study. Much as Plato originally condemned the rhetoric of the sophists for its lack of concern for truth, rhetoric again threatened to be divorced from logic and critical thinking.
Seventeenth Century
In England, several writers influenced the course of rhetoric during the seventeenth century, many of them carrying forward the dichotomy that had been set forth by Ramus and his followers during the preceding decades. Of greater importance is that this century saw the development of a modern, vernacular style that looked to English, rather than to Greek, Latin, or French models.
Francis Bacon, although not a rhetorician, contributed to the field in his writings. One of the concerns of the age was to find a suitable style for the discussion of scientific topics, which needed above all a clear exposition of facts and arguments, rather than the ornate style favored at the time. Bacon in his The Advancement of Learning criticized those who are preoccupied with style rather than "the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgment." On matters of style, he proposed that the style conform to the subject matter and to the audience, that simple words be employed whenever possible, and that the style should be agreeable.
Thomas Hobbes also wrote on rhetoric. Along with a shortened translation of Aristotle's Rhetoric, Hobbes also produced a number of other works on the subject. Sharply contrarian on many subjects, Hobbes, like Bacon, also promoted a simpler and more natural style that used figures of speech sparingly.
Perhaps the most influential development in English style came out of the work of the Royal Society, which in 1664 set up a committee to improve the English language. Among the committee's members were John Evelyn, Thomas Sprat, and John Dryden. Sprat regarded "fine speaking" as a disease, and thought that a proper style should "reject all amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style" and instead "return back to a primitive purity and shortness" (History of the Royal Society, 1667).
While the work of this committee never went beyond planning, John Dryden is often credited with creating and exemplifying a new and modern English style. His central tenet was that the style should be proper "to the occasion, the subject, and the persons." As such, he advocated the use of English words whenever possible instead of foreign ones, as well as vernacular, rather than Latinate, syntax. His own prose (and his poetry) became exemplars of this new style.
Modern Developments
At the turn of the twentieth century, there was a revival of rhetorical study manifested in the establishment of departments of rhetoric and speech at academic institutions, as well as the formation of national and international professional organizations. Theorists generally agree that a significant reason for the revival of the study of rhetoric was the renewed importance of language and persuasion in the increasingly mediated environment of the twentieth century. The rise of advertising and of mass media such as photography, telegraphy, radio, and film brought rhetoric more prominently into people's lives.
Current state of rhetorical study
Rhetorical theory today is as much influenced by the research results and research methods of the behavioral sciences and by theories of literary criticism as by ancient rhetorical theory. Early rhetorical theorists attempted to turn the study of rhetoric into a social science that allowed predictive analyses of human behavior. Interdisciplinary scholars of symbol systems, such as Hugh Duncan, Ernst Cassirer, and most notably Kenneth Burke, influenced a new generation of rhetorical scholars who drew from various disciplines to more fully comprehend the phenomenon of human communication in all its aspects. While ancient rhetorical scholarship had focused only on rhetoric as oral speech, contemporary rhetorical theorists are interested in the panoply of human symbolic behavior—both the spoken and written word as well as music, film, radio, television, etc. Thus Kenneth Burke, who defined the human being as the "symbol-using animal," defined rhetoric as "the use of symbols to induce cooperation in those who by nature respond to symbols." Current rhetorical theory also draws heavily from cultural studies and design studies.
Outline
- Classical (Greek)
- Corax (5th century BC) -- produced first written manual of rhetoric
- Empedocles (490-430 BC)
- Gorgias (c. 483-376 BC) -- father of systematic study of rhetoric
- Isocrates (436-338 BC) -- foremost teacher of oratory in the ancient world
- Plato (427-347 BC) -- outlined the differences between true and false rhetoric
- Lysias
- Aristotle (384-322 BC) -- created most influential systemization of rhetoric ever written -- The Art of Rhetoric
- Classical (Roman)
- Cicero (106-43 BC) -- Great Roman orator and philosopher
- Quintilian (35-100) -- Imperial professor of rhetoric, complete system of rhetorical education
- Libanius (314-394) -- prominent practitioner and teacher in the Later Roman Empire
- Aelius Festus Aphthonius -- 3rd century practitioner and author of a progymnasmata (a book of practical exercises for developing creative thought in writing)
- Medieval
- Augustine of Hippo (354-430) -- Christian, promoted use of rhetoric in preaching
- Renaissance
- Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466-1536) -- Dutch scholar, wrote on style and composition
- Joannes Susenbrotus (c. 1484-c. 1542) -- collected tropes and figures for his wide-spread rhetorics textbook Epitome troporum (used by Shakespeare)
- Juan Luís Vives (1492-1540) -- established pattern of rhetorical education in English schools
- Thomas Wilson (c. 1525-1581) -- neoclassicist, wrote most popular English Renaissance rhetoric handbook - The Arte of Rhetorique (1553)
- Leonard Cox -- produced first rhetoric handbook in English --Arte or Crafte of Rhetoryke (1530)
- Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) -- recognized that language shaped genius and not the reverse, well known for the New Science and On the Study Methods of Our Time.
- Modern
- Contemporary
See also
- Civic humanism
- Visual rhetoric
- Critical thinking
- Dialogue
- Persuasion
- Public speaking
- Related theory
- Technical communication
- History
- List of speeches
- Classical Writers on Rhetoric
- Major Elements of Classical Rhetoric
- Rhetorical Canon
- Figure of speech
- Miscellaneous
Rhetorical remedies
- Literary topos
- Logical fallacies
- Rhetorical figure
- Ad captandum
- Allusion
- Ambiguity
- Aphorism
- Apologue
- Aposiopesis
- Archaism
- Atticism
- Brachylogy
- Cacophony
- Circumlocution
- Climax
- Conceit
- Eloquence
- Enthymeme
- Ethos
- Euphemism
- Figure of speech
- Formal equivalence
- Hendiadys
- Hysteron-proteron
- idiom
- Innuendo
- Ipsedixitism
- Kenning
- List of pejorative political slogans
- Merism
- Mnemonic
- Negation
- Overdetermination
- Parable
- Paraphrase
- Paraprosdokian
- Pericope
- Period
- Perissologia
- Praeteritio
- Proverb
- Soundbite
- Synchysis
- Synesis
- Synonymia
- Tautology
- Tertium comparationis
- Trope
- Truism
- Word play
References
Primary Texts
- Aristotle. The Art of Rhetoric. (Translated by J. H. Freese) Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, .
- Rhetorica ad Herennium. (Unknown author, sometimes attributed to Cicero, trans. Henry Caplan) Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1954.
- Quintilian. Institutio oratoria. (In five volumes, trans. Donald A. Russell) Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2002.
- Quintilian. Institutio oratoria. (In four volumes, trans. H.E. Butler) Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA 1922
see the External Links section for online editions of several important works, including"
- Rhetorica ad Herennium
- Cicero's De Inventione
- Quintilian's Institutio oratoria
- Thomas Wilson's The Arte of Rhetorique
Criticism and Analysis
- Baldwin, Charles Sears. Ancient Rhetoric and Poetic: Interpreted from Representative Works. Peter Smith, Gloucester, 1959 (reprint).
- Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. 1950. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.
- Corbett, Edward P.J. Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student Oxford University Press, New York, 1971.
- Kennedy, George. Art of Persuasion in Greece. Princeton Univ Press, 1969 (4th printing).
- Mackin, John H. Classical Rhetoric for Modern Discourse. Free Press, New York, 1969.
External links
- rhet.net--an internet portal for rhetoricians (http://rhet.net/)
- Silva Rhetoricae (http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/silva.htm)
- EServer Rhetoric and Composition (http://rhetoric.eserver.org/)
- Figures of Speech (http://www.godstruthfortoday.org/Library/bullinger/FiguresOfSpeech.html) by E.W. Bullinger Systematically Classified
- A Glossary of Rhetorical Terms with Examples (http://www.uky.edu/ArtsSciences/Classics/rhetoric.html) by Division of Classics at The University of Kentucky.
- PDF edition of Janice Lauer's Invention in Rhetoric and Composition (http://wac.colostate.edu/books/lauer%5Finvention/)
- PDF edition of Michael S. Kochin's Five Chapters on Rhetoric: Character, Action, Things, Nothing, and Art (http://www.geocities.com/mskochin/workinprogress/fivechapcurr.PDF)
Online Primary Texts
- Online Greek and English editions of Aristotle's Rhetoric (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=Aristot.+Rh.+1.1.1)
- Online Latin edition of Rhetorica ad Herrenium (http://dobc.unipv.it/scrineum/wight/herm1.htm)
- Online Latin edition of Cicero's De Inventione (http://dobc.unipv.it/scrineum/wight/invs1.htm)
- Online Latin edition of Cicero's De Oratore (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=Cic.+de+Orat.+1.1)
- Online English edition of Demosthenes' orations (http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=9060)
- Online Greek editions of Demosthenes' orations (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=Dem.+21+1)
- Online Greek and English editions of Isocrates' Against the Sophists (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=Isoc.+13+1)
- Online edition of 1576 edition of Susenbrotus' Epitome troporum (http://visualiseur.bnf.fr/Visualiseur?Destination=Gallica&O=NUMM-83897)
- Online edition of 1593 edition of Henry Peacham's The Garden of Eloquence (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.03.0096)
- Online edition of George Puttenham's The Arte of Poesie (http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/displayprose.cfm?prosenum=17)
- Online edition of Thomas Wilson's The Arte of Rhetorique (http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/%7Erbear/arte/arte.htm)bg:Реторика
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