Definitions of rhetoric
29 September 2009
- “’Rhetoric’ has come down to us today simply as high-flown, windy and empty talk. It had a completely different meaning to the Greeks. Rhetoric was a crucially important technical discovery of the way language actually works and can be manipulated: ‘What is it that makes language so persuasive to us?’ Rhetoric was the investigation of this question, related to logic and the foundation of semiotics (in Greek, the ‘study of signs’) that we still use today” (Robinson and Groves, Introducing Plato 157).
- “Rhetoric: the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols. . . . the basic function of rhetoric [is] the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents” (Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives 43 & 41).
- “Rhetoric is a form of reasoning about probabilities, based on assumptions people share as members of a community” (Lindemann).
- “In short, rhetoric is a mode of altering reality, not by the direct application of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action” (Bitzer, The Rhetorical Situation)
- “The faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion” (Aristotle, Rhetoric 181).
- “Rhetoric, taken as a whole, is an art of influencing the soul through words, not merely in the law courts and all other public meeting places, but in private gatherings also” (Plato, Phaedrus 48).
Robert Hass on Edward Taylor
26 September 2009
Two quotations from Hass’ “Edward Taylor: What Was He Up To?” in the March/April 2002 issue of The American Poetry Review:
The term baroque was introduced into critical discourse about art by the German scholar Heinrich Wolfflin. He used it to describe the difference between what he saw as the harmonies of the high Renaissance and what came after. “The Baroque,” he observed, “never offers us perfection and fulfillment, or the static calm of ‘being,’ only the unrest of change and the tension of transience.” It was this perhaps, that the form of the meditative lyric allowed Taylor both to explore and to fend off, just as the worldly specifics in his poems, the processes of brewing and baking and metallurgy, the unguents, and powders and medicines, the children’s’ games and gambling games, allowed him to celebrate a world he was bound in conscience to deplore. (51)
Might Greenblatt see Taylor’s exploration and fending off of the baroque as an example of mobility and constraint? Where did the baroque come from for Taylor? Are there examples in the Preparatory Meditations of Taylor using the “form of the meditative lyric” as this kind of tool for exploring and fending off?
From the same essay by Hass,
So this was a Puritan minster in the 1680s on the remotest American frontier writing an often ecstatic poetry in a style strongly reminiscent of George Herbert but verging on a continental, Roman Catholic baroque, a minister who also, it should be added, was the author of a number of virulently anti-Papist works. The Puritans of Boston recognized the baroque style when they saw it. Michael Wigglesworth, the author of New England’s most popular poem, Day of Doom, sternly rebuked a poetry made of ”strained metaphors, far-fetch’t allusions, audacious & lofty expressions . . . meer ostentation of learning & empty flashes of a flourishing wit,” declaring that such writers “daub over their speech with rhetorical paintments” and “winding, crocked, periphrasticall circumlocutions & dark Allegoric mysteries.” This tells us that there was something un-Protestant about this adamantly Calvinist cleric.
Given how little known Taylor’s work was during his lifetime, who exactly was Wigglesworth rebuking? Were his remarks public enough that Taylor would have been aware of them? Did he seem to feel constrained by his peer’s attitudes toward language? Why not? Finally, is the baroque in Taylor an example of transculturation? What examples from Taylor and Herbert (or other similar writers and writings) might support or refute this idea?
Becoming Puritan
15 September 2009
Edmund S. Morgan’s Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea
Changes to the MLA documentation system
15 September 2009
The online writing lab at Purdue University summarizes the most important changes this way:
- No More Underlining! Underlining is no more. MLA now recommends italicizing titles of independently published works (books, periodicals, films, etc).
- No More URLs! While website entries will still include authors, article names, and website names, when available, MLA no longer requires URLs. Writers are, however, encouraged to provide a URL if the citation information does not lead readers to easily find the source.
- Continuous Pagination? Who Cares? You no longer have to worry about whether scholarly publications employ continuous pagination or not. For all such entries, both volume and issue numbers are required, regardless of pagination.
- Publication Medium. Every entry receives a medium of publication marker. Most entries will be listed as Print or Web, but other possibilities include Performance, DVD, or TV. Most of these markers will appear at the end of entries; however, markers for Web sources are followed by the date of access.
- New Abbreviations. Many web source entries now require a publisher name, a date of publication, and/or page numbers. When no publisher name appears on the website, write N.p. for no publisher given. When sites omit a date of publication, write n.d. for no date. For online journals that appear only online (no print version) or on databases that do not provide pagination, write n. pag. for no pagination.
Some examples can be found by scrolling down here. “Son of Citation Machine” seems to have kept up with these changes, but be sure to use the correct documentation system and the correct type of source.
English 3510 readings . . .
12 September 2009
will be posted in links to the right, by title. I may group them together as the semester continues. The first is “The Cultural Dynamics of American Puritanism” by David M. Robinson.
Contact zones and transculturation
03 September 2009
English 3510
Contact zones and transculturation
(from American Passages)
Has Pablo Tac written an example of transculturation? What evidence from his text might defend that idea?
Transculturation: A term coined by Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz that refers to a process in which “members of subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted by a dominant culture.” Transculturation emphasizes the agency involved in cultural change, as well as the loss that accompanies cultural acquisition. In these ways, “transculturation” differs from the older terms “assimilation” and “acculturation,” which emphasize a more one-way transmission of culture from the colonizer to the colonized, from the dominant to the marginalized.
Contact zone: Term coined by scholar Mary Louise Pratt to describe the space of meeting between two cultures that had previously been separated geographically and historically. As Pratt putts it, a contact zone is an area in which previously separated peoples “come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict.” Although unequal power relations characterized contact zones in the New World, with Europeans usually asserting dominance over native peoples, contact is never a one-way phenomenon. The interactive, improvisational nature of contact necessarily creates subjects who are impacted by relations with one another within mutually constituted experience.
Are there examples from our reading of contact as a two-way phenomenon?
