Rhetoric and Relevance
نویسندگان
چکیده
Let us begin with the paradox. Rhetoric took pride of place in formal education for two millenia and a half. Its very rich and complex history deserves being studied in detail, but it could also be compressed in a few sentences. Indeed, the same substance was inculcated by eighty generations of teachers to eighty generations of pupils. If a general tendency can be discerned, it consists in a mere narrowing down of the subject matter of rhetoric: one of its five branches, elocutio, the study of figures of speech, progressively displaced the four other branches, and in some schools, became identified with rhetoric tout court. (We ourselves will be guilty of this and several other simplifications). This narrowing down was not even compensated by a theoretical deepening. Fontanier's Les Figures du Discours does not radically improve on Quintilian Institutio Oratoria in spite of the work of sixty generations of scholars in between.
منابع مشابه
Rhetoric Andrew Murray
Introduction. This paper constitutes merely an initial exploration into the field of rhetoric, a field that is quite new to me. Its stimulus was the realization, while working with Aquinas, of how rhetorical some of his arguments were despite his apparent rejection of rhetoric. 1 A little reading indicated the perilous state of the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric. Yet the practice ...
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