The Rhetoric Of Topics And Forms

The fourth volume of the collected papers of the ICLA congress “The Many Languages of Comparative Literature” includes articles that study thematic and formal elements of literary texts. Although the question of prioritizing either the level of content or that of form has often provoked controversies, most contributions here treat them as internally connected. While theoretical considerations inform many of the readings, the main interest of most articles can be described as rhetorical (in the widest sense) – given that the ancient discipline of rhetoric did not only include the study of rhetorical figures and tropes such as metaphor, irony, or satire, but also that of topoi, which were originally viewed as the ‘places’ where certain arguments could be found, but later came to represent the arguments or intellectual themes themselves. Another feature shared by most of the articles is the tendency of ‘undeclared thematology’, which not only reflects the persistence of the charge of positivism, but also shows that most scholars prefer to locate themselves within more specific, often interdisciplinary fields of literary study. In this sense, this volume does not only prove the ongoing relevance of traditional fields such as rhetoric and thematology, but provides contributions to currently flourishing research areas, among them literary multilingualism, literature and emotions, and ecocriticism.

First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Aristotle, Rhetoric I: A Commentary begins the acclaimed work undertaken by the author, later completed in the second (1988) volume on Aristotle's Rhetoric. The first Commentary on the Rhetoric in more than a century, it is not likely to be superseded for at least another hundred years.

There is little doubt that Aristotle's Rhetoric has made a major impact on rhetoric and composition studies. This impact has not only been chronicled throughout the history of rhetoric, but has more recently been contested as contemporary rhetoricians reexamine Aristotelian rhetoric and its potential for facilitating contemporary oral and written expression. This volume contains the full text of Father William Grimaldi's monograph studies in the philosophy of Aristotle's Rhetoric. The eight essays presented here are divided into three rubrics: history and philosophical orientation, theoretical perspectives, and historical impact. This collection provides teachers and students with major works on Aristotelian rhetoric that are difficult to acquire and offers readers an opportunity to become active participants in today's deliberations about the merits of Aristotelian rhetoric for contemporary teaching and research.

"The teaching of rhetoric--of how to think together and talk together and read and write together--is the most important of all vocations, and this book is a step toward uniting those of us who, under whatever disciplinary label, see it that way." --from the Foreword by Wayne C. Booth

Contemporary essays address the central problem of power in assent rhetoric.

Gasché expounds on Aristotle, Heidegger, and Arendt in “a major interpretative achievement that underscores what is at stake in political thought” (Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews). As one of the most respected voices of Continental philosophy today, Rodolphe Gasché pulls together Aristotle’s conception of rhetoric, Martin Heidegger’s debate with theory, and Hannah Arendt’s conception of judgment in a single work on the centrality of these themes as fundamental to human flourishing in public and political life. Gasché’s readings address the distinctively human space of the public square and the actions that occur there, and his valorization of persuasion, reflection, and judgment reveals new insight into how the philosophical tradition distinguishes thinking from other faculties of the human mind. “Here Rodolphe Gasche is at his best: rigorous, scholarly, creative, forceful, laser focused on the issues at stake, learned, thoughtful, and original. He demands much of his readers, but reading his work is rewarding in ways that can be profoundly affecting.” —Dennis J. Schmidt, author of Between Word and Image “Rodolphe Gasche has long been one of the most meticulous readers of texts on the philosophical scene and here he once again offers a master class in how to do philosophy through interpretation.” —Robert Bernasconi, author of How to Read Sartre

Since the rise of the "New Homiletic" a generation ago, it has been recognized that sermons not only say something to listeners, they also do something. A truly expository sermon will seek not merely to say what the biblical text said, but also to do what the biblical text did in the lives of its original audience. In Preaching the New Testament as Rhetoric, MacBride looks how at the discipline of rhetorical criticism can help preachers discern the function of a New Testament text in its original setting as a means of crafting a sermon that can function similarly in contemporary contexts. Focusing on the letters of Paul, he shows how understanding them in light of Greco-Roman speech conventions can suggest ways by which preachers can communicate not just the content of the letters, but also their function. In this way, the power of the text itself can be harnessed, leading to sermons that inform and, most importantly, transform.