© Roger M Tagg 2016
Jennifer Richards (JR) is Professor of English at Cambridge, and also Visiting Prof at Newcastle University, England. Her range of publications is a most interesting one.
For those wanting a quick run-down on what constitutes 'rhetoric' as a traditional course of study, I feel the main text is not as useful as the Glossary at the end of the book. The text itself is more devoted to discussing what all the different writers over history have said about rhetoric - comparing, contrasting and criticizing these views.
I see the best value of this book as charting fashions in views about rhetoric from IA Richards to Kenneth Burke via Paul de Man and the French post-structuralists.
| Chapter | Page | Highlight |
|---|---|---|
| Intro | 4 | JR regrets "... our dismissive conception of rhetoric as political spin ..." |
| Cicero, by contrast, thought that a "great and wise man" was needed to gather scattered peasants and "through reason and eloquence" transform them "from wild savages into a kind and gentle folk". [RT: "Friends, Romans, Countrymen"? Churchill in WW2? In today's terms, maybe the 'great men' too often let their personal agendas (like keeping their job, or making money) over-ride wisdom as what is best for all; and the 'scattered peasants' have all attended school but are still 'peasants' in terms of thinking for themselves.] | ||
| 5 | The purpose of rhetoric (according to Aristotle) was "to persuade someone to an action, to acquit or condemn a defendant, and to praise or blame a public figure". | |
| 6 | The whole idea of rhetoric got attacked in the 18th and 19th centuries, in favour of enlightenment, science and "dispassionate methods". [RT: Presumably in the (over-optimistic) hope that ordinary people would listen and read intelligently, then - overcoming their baser emotions - make their own minds up.] | |
| 7 | The old 'rhetoric' was regarded as being like 'sophistry' [RT: like 'spin', or trickery]. | |
| 10 | But science still contains rhetorical elements, and some element of persuasion is still usually on the agenda. [RT: Like angling for more research grants to keep the researchers in a job.] | |
| 13 | According to Cicero's 'De Oratore', "speakers modify or change position ... they do so to illustrate the key argument of the text, that argument on different sides is the shared method of the orator and the philosopher". [RT: I interpret this as JR's preferred emphasis.] | |
| 1 - | Chapter title 'The Classical Art'. [RT: I have not written this up except for the following.] | |
| Cicero's 'De Oratore' also suggests, according to JR, that the opposition between rhetoric and philosophy is itself "rhetorically" constructed. [RT: I take this to mean that she thinks some authors want to 'hype up' the difference as an issue.] | ||
| 2 - | Chapter title "Rhetoric Revived" - meaning after the Renaissance. | |
| 71 |
Jan Luis Vives thought "rhetorical training has no utility for women ... because to engage in public debate is to compromise one's sexual modesty". [RT: I guess that attitude was the norm in those days - I suppose JR mentions it because she has herself written about women in politics and 'courtliness' in Renaissance times.] | |
| 73 | Hobbes wanted to see a greater role for evidence in rhetoric. | |
| 80 | Adam Smith wanted a greater emphasis on clarity and conciseness. | |
| 89 | JR notes "Shakespeare's interest in training his audience to become careful and sceptical auditors of rhetorical display throughout his drama". [RT: I wonder how many in the audience took this on board. And we may be no better in modern times.] | |
| 91 | A very good example of the above is in 'Julius Caesar', between the speeches of Brutus and Mark Antony after the murder of Caesar. Notably, the mob went for Mark Antony's passion rather than Brutus's fairness but authority. | |
| 97 | JR also compares the eloquence of Frankenstein and his 'creature' in Mary Shelley's novel. | |
| 99 | "Shelley manages to make the reader suspicious of eloquence." | |
| 101 | "It [the Frankenstein story] illustrates the danger of a failure to listen to others who do not possess the 'authority' of the novel's indulged and privileged male narrators." | |
| 102 | "Rhetoric ... is advantage seeking ..." and "It is too prescriptive." | |
| 103 | "Ordinary people using ordinary language do not conform to the conventions instilled by education." [RT: That suggests to me that a danger of education is that it instills conventions - and I suspect far too many of us don't go any further than that.] | |
| 105-6 | JR asks about "the sublime" which language struggles in vain to pin down. The purpose of writing or talking about it is more to lead others to "wonder" rather than to be convinced. | |
| 3 - | Chapter title "From Rhetoric to Rhetoricality" | |
| 114 | Modern students in the West only learn about Rhetoric via Classical Studies, or in the USA in 'Rhetoric and Composition', following a text by EPJ Corbett. | |
| 114-5 | Corbett: "Every day, we either use rhetoric or are exposed to it. Everyone living in community with other people is inevitably a rhetorician". | |
| 115 | Corbett: A study of rhetoric "will make us more persuasive ...". | |
| But, JR says, it is on the decline - one reason being "distrust of the orator's emotive manipulation of linguistic effects". | ||
| 116 | But it doesn't quite "go away". | |
| 118 | IA Richards, who wrote 'Philosophy of Rhetoric', said that metaphor should not be regarded "as a sort of happy extra trick with words". | |
| Rather, it is "a borrowing between and intercourse of thoughts, a transaction between contexts". | ||
| "... he [IA Richards] is redesigning the 'art' of rhetoric as a 'philosophy' of language." [RT: Not surprising since he was co-author of 'The Meaning of Meaning'.] | ||
| "... the focus of Richards' analysis is not 'verbal matter', but our thought processes." | ||
| 119 | "... only we do not have a method of analysis that allows us to address this" - i.e. how "thought and feeling and all the other modes of the mind's activity proceed". [RT: I suppose we can say little since we can't know what goes on within people's minds.] | |
| Richards introduced the terms 'tenor' (the underlying thought) and 'vehicle' (the words actually used, especially if used metaphorically). | ||
| Richards: "... meaning is derived from the 'co-presence of the vehicle and the tenor' " - not just that the vehicle "adorns" the tenor. | ||
| 121 | But Richards did not revive Rhetoric. | |
| "Traditionally, rhetoric is concerned with the affective power of language ... and so sway the judgment of an audience." | ||
| 122 | Saussure: "Meaning is not inherent in words ... but rather is controlled by systematic patterns of similarity and difference." [RT: A bit like Frolio Relationships?] | |
| 127 | Barthes thought of rhetoric as something "which permits the ruling classes to gain ownership of speech". | |
| 128 | A group of Scandinavian grammarians, the 'Modistae', "understood that language begins, not with 'word-sign', but with 'relation as the intersign' ". Erasmus would not have agreed. [RT: Again, that's Frolio-like.] | |
| 129 | Barthes (originally a structuralist) wanted "to develop systems for the analysis of cultural 'signs' ". | |
| 131 | Post-structuralists like de Man thought that "the rhetorical dimension of language interrupts the cognitive functions of grammar", and makes language basically unstable. | |
| Bender & Wellbery: " 'Rhetoricality', by contrast, is bound to no specific set of institutions. It manifests the groundless, infinitely ramifying character of discourse in the modern world". | ||
| 132 | One can't "step outside or transcend linguistic uncertainty ...". | |
| Nietzsche thought "all words are tropes". | ||
| 133 | "Calling a snake a snake is no less 'rhetorical' than calling a person a snake." | |
| Nietzsche: "... our lives are organized around a tissue of lies and ... humanity is intrinsically self-deceiving, so much so that we can never gain a clear understanding of the 'truth' of things". | ||
| "The social fictions we create ensure stability." | ||
| Language is "the only tool we have to comprehend our world." [RT: certainly if we want to talk to anyone else about it. But what about diagrams - or art? Do these get counted as 'language'?] | ||
| 134 | "There is no pure philosophical language ... We have tricked ourselves into thinking that a language divested of tropes and figures can lead us to the truth." [RT: Isn't Maths an exception?] | |
| 146 | "... the conventionality of meaning 'explodes the myth of semantic correspondence between sign and referent'." [RT: Ogden and Richards would agree - the thought processes of both speaker/author and listener/reader intervene.] | |
| 147 | De Man: "Rhetorical figures subvert the "consistent link between sign and meaning." [RT: same comment as above.] | |
| "... an unplanned literal reading can interrupt an intended metaphorical reading ..." In other words, a reader may not see the metaphor and take the words used in their more conventional (from his/her cultural viewpoint) sense. | ||
| 152 | "... there is no privileged discourse ..." [RT: Classic post-modernist comment - see Derrida's 'Il n'y a pas de hors-texte'.] | |
| 153 | Christopher Norris: "... language games circulate without any epistemological warrant." | |
| 157 | "... traditional rhetoric ... emerged from profoundly stratified and exclusionary societies." | |
| 159 | "... our values, beliefs, feelings, and how we express these, are shaped by political structures and the relations of economic exchange which organize our social lives." | |
| 161 | JR leans towards the ideas of Kenneth Burke, who wrote 'Rhetoric of Motives'. Burke also emphasized the role of 'Identification'. [RT: It's worth reading a bit more on this, for example a paper by Brooke Quigley of U of Memphis in American Communication Journal, 1(3), (pp. 1-5).).] | |
| 162 | Burke: "Man is a symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol misusing) animal." | |
| 164-5 | "According to his [Burke's] new rhetoric, acting rhetorically encompasses deliberate attempts to elicit the cooperation of companions, colleagues, customers and so on; however it also includes moments of self-persuasion of which we may not even be aware." | |
| 167 | "Burke argues that pure persuasion is impossible." [RT: It certainly seems like it these days.] | |
| 174 | According to Burke, "Even if we reorder our material world to achieve a more equal distribution of resources ... the impulse to order and prioritize will return in a different form". | |
| 174-5 | Iris Marion Young wanted a "politics of difference" - "an ideal of city life as a being together of strangers in openness to group difference". | |
| 176 | "Its [rhetoric's] most valuable endowment lies in its flexible process of argument, which insists on the reversibility of all positions." [RT: Today's politicians, advertisers, business leaders and shock jocks don't appear to take that on board. They don't like admitting that they might not have got it right previously.] | |
| 177 | "A different tradition ... counters this pragmatic motive, and ... uses argument on different sides to unsettle positions that seem 'natural' and unquestionable." There can be such a thing as 'rhetoric of refutation'. [RT: An argument for encouraging whistle-blowers and 'antitheticians' whose job it is to oppose?] | |
| 178 | "We see Montaigne as representing an alternative tradition of rhetoric that extends from Socrates to Burke, and which understands contrariness as integral to the process of reasoning". |
I like much of the later discussion in this book. But I fear there is so much 'ramification' around that it will be almost impossible to reach consensuses - which I believe are necessary for societies to make significant improvements.
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This version updated on 30th June 2016