Rhetoric

RHETORIC

RHETORIC. The term "rhetoric" refers to the art of persuasive discourse or to the presence of rhetorical elements in prose, poetry, or oratory.

THE HERITAGE OF THE MIDDLE AGES

As a discipline, rhetoric crowned education in the culture of ancient Greece and Rome and served in the Middle Ages as one of the three liberal arts of the trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Even though occasions for the practice of live oratory in judicial courts and political forums declined in the medieval period, rhetoric supplied theoretical principles for the arts of preaching, letter writing, and poetry.

RENAISSANCE RECOVERY OF CLASSICAL LITERATURE

Humanists in fourteenth-century Italy began to study newly recovered classical manuscripts, including previously unknown rhetorical works, histories, and other literary texts. At the same time the advent of printing carried forward the pedagogical influence of the most ubiquitous rhetorical manuals of Roman antiquity: De inventione (On invention) by Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.) and the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium (Rhetoric for Herennius). The recovery of De institutio oratoria (On the education of the orator) by Quintilian, a first-century Roman teacher of rhetoric, reinforced and expanded the content of the early works. All of these depicted rhetoric as including five parts or canons: invention, arrangement, memory, delivery, and style; and all envisioned three kinds of oratory: political, judicial, and ceremonial (epideictic).

The discovery around 1400 of Cicero's De oratore (On oratory), a dialogue, and many of his orations and letters to friends inspired scholars to imitate his Latin and to regard as inadequate the medieval form inherited from the Scholastics. Ciceronianism, as the new movement was called, had its critics, who argued against excessive imitation of the vocabulary and syntax of Cicero.

Interest in the language and literature of ancient Greece also arose in the fifteenth century when Greek scholars came to reside in Italy, bringing with them Greek manuscripts of works unknown for centuries. Among these scholars were Manuel Chrysoloras (c. 1353–1415), who taught Greek in Florence, and George of Trebizond (1395–1486), author of a popular rhetoric incorporating the Greek and Byzantine tradition and a translator of Aristotle's Rhetoric into Latin. His was the first of many translations that made Aristotle's teachings available once more.

Prominent among the manuals of rhetoric reviving the whole classical tradition were George of Trebizond's Rhetoricorum Libri V (c. 1433; Five books on rhetoric); Guillaume Fichet's Rhetorica (1471); Lorenzo Guglielmo Traversagni's Nova Rhetorica (1478; New rhetoric); Johannes Caesarius's Rhetorica (1542); and the Jesuit Cipriano Soarez's De Arte Rhetorica (1562), which was reprinted continuously into the eighteenth century. Some very popular textbooks of the Renaissance were devoted entirely to invention and some solely to style.

THE CHIEF ELEMENTS OF RENAISSANCE RHETORIC

As occasions for the use of rhetoric in the city-states of Italy increased at the beginning of the Renaissance, so too did interest in the elements of the art. Invention, the technique of developing arguments on both sides of a subject, was deemed critical to persuasive speech or prose. Rhetoric shared with logic (or dialectic) the need for invention, but dialectic debated philosophical questions while rhetoric argued matters of public concern in order to persuade a general audience.

Invention aided orators in creating arguments when certain knowledge could not be attained, when one could argue only from what seemed probable. The ancient dialectical method of assessing probabilities, "the topics," was used to probe a subject systematically by asking for its genus, species (or definition), accidents, and properties (and its similarities, opposites, and relationships). Rhetorical texts added to the topical lore of invention the topics of persons (ancestry, education, appearance, and character) and action (manner of life, deeds, words). Collectively these were referred to as "commonplaces" in English, koinoi topoi in Greek, and loci communes in Latin. In sixteenth-century England students kept "commonplace books" in which they recorded topical arguments, memorable sayings, and set pieces of eloquence. The topical method permeated creative efforts in poetry and literary prose as well as public discourse. Closely linked to the topics was the canon of style. Its concern with levels of discourse, tone, and the fecundity of figures of speech inspired even more interest than invention in the Renaissance. The figures or "colors" were exploited extensively in oratory, prose, and poetry to appeal to the emotions.

The lines between the provinces of dialectic and rhetoric began to break down in the sixteenth century when more and more philosophical subjects came to the attention of an increasingly educated public. The scope of rhetoric was thus widened beyond the three traditional kinds.

HUMANISM AND CURRICULAR REFORM

The recovery of Quintilian's De institutione oratoria in 1416 confirmed humanists in their efforts to revamp the curriculum to emphasize both literary and practical concerns. The studia humanitatis, which soon replaced the trivium in most Italian schools, included grammar, poetics, rhetoric, history and moral philosophy. Logic was deleted from the new curriculum in reaction to what was deemed Scholastic preoccupation with syllogistic reasoning.

Among the later humanists, Desiderius Erasmus (1466?–1536) was probably the best known in his lifetime. His influence spread across the Continent to England, where his De Ratione Studii (1512; On a course of studies) and De Copia (1512; On copiousness), a treatise on style, were adopted by John Colet (1467–1519) for use in St. Paul's School in London. Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540), educated at the University of Paris, also carried humanist studies to England. Soarez's De Arte Rhetorica (1562), mentioned earlier, circulated from Portugal to Italy and to Jesuit schools throughout the world. Philipp Melanchthon's (1497–1560) rhetorical works extended his humanistic approach to Germany and other northern areas.

RISE OF THE VERNACULAR

Although Latin remained the predominant language for scholarly communication, during the sixteenth century the vernacular increasingly became the preferred medium for familiar letters, preaching, publications, and oratory aimed at a general audience. As consciousness of national differences increased in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, so also did attention to the perfection of national languages and a desire to make them equal to classical Latin. Textbooks of rhetoric soon appeared in the vernacular, for example, Thomas Wilson's The Art of Rhetorique (1553) in English and Bartolomeo Cavalcanti's La retorica (1555) in Italian.

RAMISM

The Dutch humanist Rudolph Agricola (1444–1485) and the French scholar Petrus Ramus (1515–1572) suggested changes in the curriculum that reversed earlier humanist alterations. Teaching at the University of Paris, Ramus followed the lead of Agricola in returning attention to the study of dialectic, making it the master discipline. Attempting to eliminate overlap in the curriculum, he allocated invention, organization, and memory to dialectic and gave style and delivery to rhetoric. The effect was to attribute to dialectic his own methods of analysis and composition and to equate rhetoric with stylistic artifice, neglecting entirely its aim of persuasion. Ramism was most popular in northern Europe and England during the last half of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

SCIENCE AND RHETORIC IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

The rise of interest in scientific induction and experiment in the seventeenth century brought with it a concern for clearer, more succinct prose. Francis Bacon (1561–1626) called for a more analytic approach to the coloration of meaning in expression. René Descartes (1596–1650) and John Locke (1632–1704) deplored stylistic artifice. Invention, which Bacon saw as primarily associated with science, diminished in importance. Emphasis in teaching style moved from stress on elegant figures and extensive elaboration to that on precision in diction and clarification of meaning in open, familiar expression.

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY TRENDS IN RHETORIC

Four major and enduring trends in the study of rhetoric can be discerned in the eighteenth century: neoclassicism, elocution, belletrism, and philosophical-psychological theory. Neoclassicism and elocution both flourished in the first part of the century. Neoclassicism called for renewed study of the Greek and Latin classics of rhetoric. Bernard Lamy (1640–1715) and François Fénelon (1651–1715) in France and John Lawson (1709–1759) and John Ward (1679?–1758) in England were foremost in this movement. Elocution, the old canon of delivery concerned with voice and gesture, came into vogue as a separate art because critics believed that proficiency in pulpit and political oratory had seriously declined. Thomas W. Sheridan (1719–1788) successfully promoted this new trend in education.

The latter half of the eighteenth century saw the rise of belletrism and the philosophical-psychological approach to rhetoric. Neither of these retained invention, their focus being analysis of the written word. Growing out of the Scottish Enlightenment, the belletristic movement engaged such disparate figures as Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782), Adam Smith (1723–1790), Edmund Burke (1729–1797), Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), George Campbell (1719–1796), and Hugh Blair (1718–1800). They stressed interpretation of literary texts and such concepts as taste, the sublime, and the beautiful. George Campbell approached the study of rhetoric from the standpoint of the new theories of the human mind, termed faculty psychology. His Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776) treats the aims of discourse and the creation of effects on the mind. All four of these views of rhetoric were transported to North America.

See also Descartes, René ; Education ; Erasmus, Desiderius ; Humanists and Humanism ; Locke, John ; Melanchthon, Philipp ; Ramus, Petrus .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fumaroli, Marc. L'age de l'éloquence: rhétorique et "res literaria" de la Renaissance au seuil de l'époque classique. Geneva, 1980.

Howell, Wilbur S. Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700. New York, 1961.

Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains. New York, 1961.

Miriam Joseph, Sister. Rhetoric in Shakespeare's Time: Literary Theory of Renaissance Europe. 1947. Partial reprint, New York, 1962.

Ong, Walter J. Ramus: Method and the Decay of Dialogue from the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason. Cambridge, Mass., 1958.

Vasoli, Cesare. La dialettica e la retorica dell'Umanesimo: "Invenzione" e "Metodo" nella cultura del XV e XVI secolo. Milan, 1968.

Vickers, Brian. In Defence of Rhetoric. Oxford, 1988.

Jean Dietz Moss