Comments on: On Booth 1

By: mike

mike — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 21:11:57 +0000

Well, yeah, and the Renaissance rhetoricians eventually threw subject matter out of the picture entirely, following Ramus. There’s a whole sort of interesting intellectual swirl around U of C, with really curious interlinks among the various hermeneutic approaches — thanks for the note on McKeon.

By: David

David — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 20:25:56 +0000

McKeon claimed to be more in the sophistic tradition than either the Aristotelian or Platonic (the olde folks around UofC insisted that he had been far more of a Platonist in the old days and that is certainly believable). He would characterize Aristotle’s Rhetoric as a progress toward the concrete rhetorical production, from the contexts of rhetoric through the functions of the rhetorician to the eventual product. I continue to value his insistance in the ‘universality’ of rhetoric in Aristotle…that it is not tied to or limited to a specific subject matter. He always claimed that the Renaissance rhetorician ditched that in favor of a specific subject matter for rhetoric (of course they disagreed on what that might be).

By: Collin vs. Blog

Collin vs. Blog — Sat, 26 Feb 2005 21:42:31 +0000

Rhetrickery = Cookery?
Mike caught me in a bit of sloppiness in a comment over at his site this past week, and I thought I’d see if I couldn’t redeem myself here. While I can’t claim the background in classical rhetoric that Mike has, I’d like to explore my intuition tha…

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 03:58:31 +0000

Unfortunately, Dick, it seems as if Quintilian might have been something of a spineless and sycophantic toady to despots: his fawning praise of the vicious Domitian may tell us more about rhetoric's relation to power than his borrowings from Cato. What would Candidia say?

By: Dick Minim

Dick Minim — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 03:21:43 +0000

“A good man speaking well.” I well recall being taught as much at Groton. I took the lesson to heart and live by it, post by post. I wish everyone did.

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 24 Feb 2005 20:06:11 +0000

Collin, I think it’s interesting to look at the context: on page 13, Booth contends that he is “strongly on the ‘Platonic’ side” regarding “whether some value judgments deserve to be added to this category of hard, unchangeable fact” (13). And given that, I think I’d definitely temper my language; in some ways, he does seem to be more on the Platonist side. (Interestingly, he characterizes McKeon as neither Aristotelian nor Platonist.) So now I’m tempted to go back and take a look at The Rhetoric of Fiction again — but that’s gonna have to wait until after the dissertation.

And, hey, Joanna — I’m happy to share the luxury. Docere, delectare, et flectere, to paraphrase the man himself.

By: joanna

joanna — Thu, 24 Feb 2005 13:00:10 +0000

Thanks for posting this stuff. One of the things I like about blogging is that I can keep up with theory without having to go to grad school–which isn’t always feasible.

By: collin

collin — Thu, 24 Feb 2005 06:36:14 +0000

Mike,

I’d planned on taking a look at Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, which I’ve both read as a student and taught in a couple of courses, for the same reason. I was a little surprised to hear him identify himself as Platonic–like you, I guess I’ve always thought of him as more Aristotelian. He’s always been fond of McKeon and Burke, both of whom get serious play in his “rescuers” chapter, and I’ve always thought of the Chicago crew as largely neo-Aristotelian.

I’ve got more to think about and say, too, but I’ll save it for a longer entry. Thanks for the thoughts here…

cgb