Jeffrey Walker

The Body of Persuasion: A Theory of the Enthymeme.

he generally prevailing concept of the enthymeme, or the one most frequent in the world of rhetoric and composition studies, tends to define it either as a kind of elliptical, informal syllogism based on probable rather than certain premises and on tacit assumptions shared by audience and rhetor, or as a kind of Toulmin argument, or as a general mode of intuitive reasoning representable in syllogistic or Toulminian terms, or, most simply, as the juxtaposition of any idea with another that is offered as a reason for believing it. All such thinking starts from Aristotles famous dicta that the enthymeme is a kind of syllogism or rhetorical syllogism, and that rhetoric is a counterpart of dialectic (Rhetoric 1.1 [1355a]; 1.2 [1356b]; 1.1 [1354a]). This prevailing definition, however, has recently been put in question (see in particular Conley, Enthymeme; Gage, Theory). And, as we will see, it is inadequate. In what follows, we will first reexamine the primary (and not exclusively Aristotelian) ancient sources from which a more adequate concept of the enthymeme can be derived. Then, we will consider the relevance of that concept to the analysis of modern discourse-specifically, to the analysis of Roland Barthes The World of Wrestling and Martin Luther King, Jr.s Letter from Birmingham Jail, both of which appear in popular anthologies used in composition courses, and both of which provide good examples of modern-but unrecognized-enthymeming.

Aristotle's Lyric: Re-Imagining the Rhetoric of Epideictic Song

Few will disagree, I think, if I say that twentieth-century discussion of the lyric has often granted little recognition, and sometimes none, to the role of argumentation. Indeed, the word argument itself may not appear at all: we are much more likely to be told, instead, that lyric poems contain-and we should emphasize the word contain--such things as subjects, ideas, themes, or even conceptual schemes, and we are just as likely to be told that none of these things are what the lyric is really all about. Such things belong to prose, and in the lyric are merely there, contained, as useful but dispensable accessories and props; the lyric dramatizes or expresses feeling. Or rather, it bodies forth an image of the poets thought as it moves through some phase or phases of an intensely felt experience (Hardy 1-2). It is essentially dramatistic or expressive, rather than, say, discursive, argumentative, or suasory-no matter how much, in the readers experience, it may seem to operate discursively, as an argument intending to create, intensify, or change belief. The feelings the thing. Or so that argument goes, or has gone. This is the average mainstreammodern view of lyric, the view most likely to be taken as a self-evident given in a typical account of this most protean mode of poetry. (Barbara Hardy, for example, is able to simply declare it, as an opening premise for her book, with virtually no recognition of a possible disagreement.) I believe that few will disagree, either, if I say that strong objections to this mainstream-modern version of the lyric are and have been available. We can argue, as did Yvor Winters, that lyric poetry, or any poetry, intends not only representation or embodiment of an act or state of mind but also judgment or evaluation of human experience, and thus is necessarily suasory and involved with argumentation, or what Winters called exposition. Or we can argue, as Gerald Graff has done, that the logos and the pathos projected by a poem are necessarily related, as premise(s) and conclusion(s), what Graff calls ground and consequent: the ground provided by what is said, by logos, makes the speakers represented state of feeling or act of mind both convincing and intelligible-as opposed, say, to self-indulgent, incoherent, and neurotic. Graffs line of objection, then, defines the lyric once more as a form of argument. We

What Difference a Definition Makes, or, William Dean Howells and the Sophist's Shoes

ABSTRACT Starting from a chance quotation in William Dean Howells “Novel-Writing and Novel-Reading,” this essay reflects on the differences (and relations) between what classical tradition would call “grammatical” and “rhetorical” approaches to discourse—and, likewise, what might be called “hermeneutic” and “productive” approaches to rhetoric. The grammatical/hermeneutic approach is oriented towards reaching an understanding of what a text says or means, or what its argument is, while the rhetorical/productive approach is characterized by the questions, How was it done? and How can I do that? It is this latter approach—the orientation toward the cultivation of productive discursive skill—that disciplinarily makes rhetoric, as opposed to a variety of philosophy or literary criticism. This notion is further aligned, on one hand, with a revisionist “sophists history of rhetoric,” and, on the other hand, with a “sophistic” approach to rhetorical education derived from the tradition of Isocrates.

Obdurate brilliance : exteriority and the modern long poem

Working from a broad knowledge of modern poetry, Baker proposes an original interpretation of the long poem based on the notion of exteriority. Readers of the 20th-century long poem must discard the traditional idea of a lyric speaker, or Romantic I, he argues. Modern and postmodern poetry turns outward, toward the experience of others, and deliberately de-emphasizes an inner or personal life. His analysis, informed by postmodern literary theory, focuses on both American and French long poems. Obdurate Brilliance is the only major critical study in English of the poetry of Saint-John Perse, whose works are examined in depth throughout each of the major phases of his poetic career. In addition Baker presents significant new readings of Rene Char, Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, Michael Palmer, Bernadette Mayer and Clark Coolidge, as well as a fresh discussion of Leon-Paul Fargue, Valery Larbaud, Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, and John Ashbery. Baker steers headlong into a number of critical debates on history, subjectivity and politics, and offers one of the few attempts to relate feminism to comparative or genre studies.

Of Brains and Rhetorics.

Periodically in recent years, neurological research has been invoked as an emerging and important source of knowledge for the rhetorician and the writing teacher. In principle, at least, we can certainly agree. No discourse theory, and no practice that wants to be informed by theory, can afford to ignore whatever might be known about the neural substrate of the processes involved in thought and writing. Every rhetoric presupposes a psychology, and every psychology presupposes an account of brain function, a psychobiology. Neurology, however, has been emphasized primarily in the form of hemisphericity theory, more specifically the version popularized in the 1970s by Robert Ornstein and Julian Jaynes. In the invokers use of it, that theory has functioned as a means of arguing against the supposedly traditional emphasis-or overemphasis-on argumentation and deductive linear logic in rhetorical theory and in writing instruction. This emphasis has been represented as half-brained: focusing attention on left-hemispheric modes of cognition (logical, abstract, analytic, temporal, linear), while ignoring or suppressing right-hemispheric modes (emotive, intuitive, synthetic, holistic, spatial, imagistic, simultaneous, appositional) that are essential for creativity, discovery, and the development of a genuine voice. And finally, this supposed overemphasis tends to be identified with an Aristotelian tradition, or with a Western rationalist tradition that generally gets traced to Aristotle and portrayed as psychologically and culturally repressive. A pedagogy that serves to cultivate the prerational creativities of the right hemisphere (usually through more of what is called personal and/or poetic writing) thus comes to be seen as liberating, and at times is even identified with a Freirean pedagogy of the oppressed. (See, for example, Emig 46-53, 110-21, 126-27, 152-53; Weiss; Glassner; Winterowd 36, 129-57; DAngelo; Brand; Fulwiler and Peterson; TenHouten; Rico. For somewhat different applications of neurology to literary theory, see also Holland; and States.) A skeptic might say that the invokers (and to some extent the inventors of hemisphericity theory themselves) have leapt to conclusions that the available neurological evidence may not warrant. As Mike Rose has said, the invokers seem to have taken a whole array of cultural beliefs about analytic vs. synthetic thinking and logic vs. creativity and applied them in blanket fashion

Epideictic Rhetoric: Questioning the Stakes of Ancient Praise, by Laurent Pernot

This useful, clearly written, and highly satisfying book is Laurent Pernot’s second major English-language contribution to rhetorical scholarship, after his 2005 Rhetoric in Antiquity (originally L...

Michael Psellos: the Encomium of his Mother

The extraordinary eleventh-century scholar, teacher, rhetor, and courtier Michael Psellos is one of the most important intellectual figures in the 1,000-year history of Byzantium, but he is scarcely known to students and scholars of rhetoric today. The chief reason is that almost none of his many surviving works have been translated into English (or any other modern language). The only important work by Psellos available in English is the Chronographia — an acknowledged masterpiece of Byzantine historiography, and in itself a rhetorical and literary masterpiece as well — in which he portrays fourteen Byzantine emperors from Basil II to Michael VII Doukas (976-1078), a series of (after Basil) mostly inept fools who brought the empire to disaster, and most of whom he had personally known or served. In the course of that work he also sketches and implicitly justifies his own intellectual and pedagogical project, which was to reunite rhetoric and philosophy, and to revive the whole spectrum of secular (pagan Greek) learning, as a basis for wise

Mime, Comedy, Sophistry: Speculations on the Origins of Rhetoric

(2005). Mime, Comedy, Sophistry: Speculations on the Origins of Rhetoric. Advances in the History of Rhetoric: Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 199-209.