Classical rhetoric has continued to influence the study and teaching of rhetoric in the twentieth century. New editions, translations, commentaries, and studies of the classical texts have been published, with significant advances in understanding of their contents and influence, and the classical tradition throughout western history has been explored in greater and greater detail. An Institute for the Classical Tradition now exists at Boston University, sponsoring congresses, a journal, and other publications. Two major changes mark the role of classical rhetoric in modern thought: a shift from the practical to the theoretical, and from focus primarily on public address to a wide variety of oral and written genres of discourse. But both of these changes have met with some resistance.
From the earliest handbooks of rhetoric in Greece until the Renaissance, classical handbooks and treatises on rhetoric were studied directly as practical aids to oral and written composition. This is particularly evident in reliance on the handbooks On Invention and Rhetoric for Herennius in western Europe, and on the Hermogenic corpus in Byzantium. For a thousand years these were authoritative textbooks on which teachers in schools and universities lectured and wrote commentaries and that provided the rules for composition practiced by students and applied in speaking and writing later in life. Even in the early modern period, when Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and other classical authorities were studied as supplementary sources of skills for public speaking, lectures on rhetoric continued to refer frequently to classical sources for practical advice, and the new rhetoric texts that were published were often heavily indebted to their approach. In addition, as long as Greek and Latin remained required studies in the curriculum of schools and colleges, many students read orations of Lysias, Demosthenes, Cicero, and other orators as examples of eloquence, and their influence can be traced in public address. The use of the “topics” or loci of classical inventional theory had been attacked in the seventeenth century, and the romantic movement of the nineteenth century rejected composition on the basis of traditional rules of invention, arrangement, style, and memory and the use of rote exercises as found in the progymnasmata; free composition, extemporaneity, and individual expression were encouraged instead. The Elocutionary Movement, however, kept alive a classicizing theory of delivery, and students of composition and literature continued to learn the names of tropes and figures as ways of identifying forms of expression.
In the twentieth century classical rhetoricians continue to be studied for their contributions to a theory of discourse and as the basis of analysis of classical, medieval, Renaissance, and modern texts composed by writers who had studied classical rhetoric and were addressing audiences familiar with its conventions. Classical rhetoric is today a common tool of biblical interpretation, illustrated in Chapter 7, and of the interpretation of Renaissance literature in the vernacular languages. Heinrich Lausberg’s widely consulted Handbook of Literary Rhetoric supplies students of European literature with classical concepts for the analysis of postclassical literature. Histories of rhetoric by the present author and others provide students with an understanding of the historical role of speech and speech studies in western society.
The twentieth century has witnessed a vast development of new forms of communication, resulting from the technological advances of radio, television, and electronic media. The development of this “secondary orality,” as it is sometimes called, has been accompanied by the creation of new theory to describe communication to mass audiences, within organizations and small groups, and across cultural lines, often dealing with issues of politics, propaganda, marketing, gender, and other social phenomena. Parallel to this has been the emergence of new linguistic, semiotic, literary, and cultural criticism and theory, some of which can be said to be seeking a general theory of rhetoric. Classical rhetoric, as a theory of discourse, has sometimes directly contributed to these developments, sometimes been an unacknowledged substratum in them, and sometimes been a foil against which writers of new approaches are reacting. A recent book by Richard A. Lanham suggests that technological changes may actually mark a return to some of the conditions under which classical rhetoric flourished, giving it new relevance in the electronic age.1
For some teachers of English, classical rhetoric has continued to supply a useful theoretical and practical basis for the teaching of written composition. Probably the best known textbook using this approach is Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student by Edward P. J. Corbett.2 Kathleen E. Welch has explored the reemergence of rhetoric in the twentieth century, as well as modern applications of classical rhetoric to teaching composition in The Contemporary Reception of Classical Rhetoric: Appropriations of Ancient Discourse. She distinguishes two “schools.” The “Heritage School,” whose assumptions she finds in rationalism and pragmatism, separates classical rhetoric from the historical circumstances in which it arose to elevate it to a universally applicable theory; it relies on the use of formulas and categories, such as the three species of rhetoric and the traditional parts of an oration, and it may seem elitist in its efforts to maintain standards of formal language use. It is a descendant of technical rhetoric as earlier described but values Aristotle’s Rhetoric as the best statement of rhetorical theory. In contrast, what Welch calls the “Dialectical School” relies “not on discovering a palpable rhetorical ‘reality’ out there,” but concentrates instead “on contemporary epistemological constructions that in turn are capable of producing an interpretation of classical rhetoric.”3 It too values Aristotle’s Rhetoric, but as a description of a flexible, practical, and productive rather than purely theoretical art. The “Dialectical School” distrusts traditional canons, includes television, film, and “secondary orality” within its area of study, and seeks to be pro-active by engaging students in the reading, listening, and writing process. It can be thought of as a modern descendant of the sophistic strand in the history of rhetoric with its relativism, its love of experimentation, and its concern for oral and visual performance. Journals in composition studies, English, rhetoric, and speech continue to carry articles debating the application of classical rhetoric for modern students. The battlefield is largely within English departments where research and teaching, whether of literature or composition, has been affected by issues of politics, race, and gender.
Rhetorical studies have enjoyed a renaissance in the last third of the twentieth century. This can be seen in numerous ways: in the publication of a very large number of books and articles with the word “rhetoric” in the title, though using it in many different senses; in the appearance of new professional societies that hold annual or biennial meetings, including the International Society for the History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric Society of America, as well as interest groups within the major professional organizations in English and communication studies; and the appearance of new journals, including Philosophy and Rhetoric, Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and Rhetorica, which publish many articles and reviews relating to classical rhetoric, its tradition, and its applications. Two recent reference works make accessible a great deal of information about rhetoric, historical and theoretical. The most extensive is the Historische Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, projected to run to eight volumes, edited by Gert Ueding and others from offices in Tübingen. A more compact work is Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition: Communication from Ancient Times to the Information Age, edited by Theresa Enos. Among recent books that assess the revival of rhetorical studies are The Rhetorical Turn: Invention and Persuasion in the Conduct of Inquiry, edited by Herbert W. Simons,4 and The Recovery of Rhetoric: Persuasive Discourse and Disciplinarity in the Human Sciences, edited by R. H. Roberts and J. M. M. Good.5
Among the new approaches to rhetoric in the twentieth century, a few theoretical works not written as textbooks have achieved special recognition among teachers of rhetoric, though these works have been rather less appreciated by contemporary literary critics and philosophers. All can be described as nonclassical, in that they focus on modern discourse and construct a new theory of rhetoric, but they show some debt to the classical tradition, and their authors were thoroughly trained in Greek, Latin, and classical rhetoric.
The least classicizing, and in many ways the least satisfying, of these three approaches is found in The Philosophy of Rhetoric by I. A. Richards, which originated as a series of lectures at Bryn Mawr College in 1936. Richards claimed that rhetoric should be “a study of misunderstanding and its remedies,”6 and rejected Campbell, Whately, and others who approached the subject philosophically, but he never developed the philosophical, political, or psychological implications of his definition. Richards’ book is almost entirely a discussion of “misunderstanding” at the linguistic level, especially as resulting from metaphor. Perhaps the most influential innovation of Richards’ study was his introduction of the terms “tenor” and “vehicle” to describe the workings of metaphor: the “tenor” is what is meant by the comparison inherent in the metaphor; the “vehicle” is what is literally said by the words used. Since Richards wrote, many scholars from a variety of fields, especially linguistics, have tried to describe the workings of metaphor and its relationship to other tropes, and all have in varying degrees become victims of letteraturizzazione. Roman Jakobson, a great linguist with little knowledge of rhetoric, was responsible for the view that there are only two basic tropes: metaphor, based on a relationship of equivalence, and metonomy, based on a relationship of contiguity.7 In 1970, six scholars at the University of Liège, calling themselves Groupe μ, published a work rather presumptuously entitled Rhétorique générale, which is a complex, scientific study of troping, utilizing the term “rhetoric” in its narrowest sense.8 A voice of sanity in the field of rhetorical linguistics was that of Gérard Genette in Figures of Literary Discourse, working in the French tradition from Du-Marsais,9 but probably the finest modern discussion of metaphor, and certainly the one most heavily indebted to classical rhetoric, is Paul Ricoeur’s The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language.10
A broader understanding of rhetoric is found in the writings of Kenneth Burke, especially in Counterstatement (1931), with its “Lexicon Rhetoricae,” Grammar of Motives (1945), and Rhetoric of Motives (1950). Burke is a difficult, sometimes quirky writer, whose ideas developed over a long lifetime, but his work is more deserving of being called a “philosophy of rhetoric” than are some other writings with that title in that it has strong dialectical, political, ethical, and psychological foundations. His most classicizing book is probably The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology,11 which is a rhetorical analysis of Augustine’s Confessions and chapters of the Book of Genesis. In Grammar of Motives12 Burke describes his best known critical tool, the pentad of act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose, concepts that go beyond Aristotle’s original identification of speaker, speech, and audience, though Aristotle is the authority most cited by Burke in this work. In Rhetoric of Motives13 (p. 43) Burke defines the “realistic” function of rhetoric as “the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols.” This, he thought, was “rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic, and is continually born anew.” Whereas Richards saw rhetoric as a source of misunderstanding, Burke saw it as the hope of understanding, working through “identification,” and a potential basis of peace.
A third innovative writing on rhetoric in the mid-twentieth century was La Rhétorique nouvelle, by Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, first published in 1958.14 Perelman was a student of jurisprudence and he approached rhetoric from a philosophical and legal position rather than as a purely linguistic and literary phenomenon. Both in this sense and in the details of its presentation this is the most classicizing, primarily Aristotelian, of the works discussed in this section. Perelman distinguished argumentation, which is always addressed to an audience, from formal proof, which is not, and unlike most modern rhetoricians he makes significant use of a theory of loci, or “topics,” as sources of argument, divided into those of quantity and quality and those that help to identify and exemplify facts. Figures of speech, in his theory, are not only literary devices of vividness and variety but have a cognitive function in establishing connections between things. Like Burke, he saw rhetoric as a force for better understanding in a world that suffered from bigotry, oppression, and war: “The theory of argumentation will help to develop . . . the justification of the possibility of a human community in the sphere of action” (p. 514).
The rhetorics of Richards, Burke, and Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca are all strong reactions to the circumstances of the 1930s and 1940s: economic depression, fascism, and the Second World War. Whether they will continue to be regarded as rhetorical classics is unclear, but it should be remembered that the rhetoric of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian and those of the French and British rhetoricians of the neoclassical period were also very much products of the circumstances of the time of their composition.
A few words can be said here about some other critical movements of the twentieth century that influence modern approaches to rhetoric. Most have some roots or analogies in Greco-Roman thought.
Semiotics is the study of signs, primarily linguistic signs, but any system of codes that convey meaning. The modern founders of semiotics at the beginning of the century were an American philosopher, Charles Sanders Pierce, and a Swiss scholar of linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure. The study of signs, however, began in Greece, where Plato’s Cratylus is an important early text, and where interest in the subject was continued by Aristotle and Hellenistic and later philosophers. Semioticians have always been aware of the history of their discipline and have often included some discussion of classical approaches in their writings.15 Their interests, however, have been primarily linguistic and cognitive, and they rarely provide for rhetoric in their semiotic systems. One exception is Umberto Eco. In A Theory of Semiotics he describes rhetoric as “over-coding,” that is, a network of associations invoked by linguistic usages or by the switching of codes, and he discusses “rhetorical labor” in terms of the classical concepts of invention, arrangement, and style.16 What his discussion lacks is a consideration of how rhetorical “over-coding” as he understands it can accomplish ethical and emotional persuasion.
Semiotics is concerned with structures and codes, or systems of signs, and has been applied by anthropologists, of whom Claude Lévi-Strauss is the best known, to the study of the structures that can be discovered below the surface in society, for example in systems of kinship or taboo as well as in language. Structuralism is certainly a feature of classical rhetoric, though not so labeled. The conceptualization of rhetoric in Greece was characterized by the identification and naming of codes and structures of speech as social and political functions, seen, for example, in the species of judicial, deliberative, and epideictic rhetoric, in the parts of the oration, and in the kinds of style appropriate to different contexts. Another example of ancient structuralism is allegorical criticism, which interpreted literary and religious texts in terms of certain fundamental ideas symbolized by images in the text, thus explaining obscurities or answering objections raised by a literal reading. Allegorical interpretation in Greece began as early as the sixth century B.C. and often took the form of identifying the actors in Greek epic with the forces of nature, so that the Iliad could be read as a struggle between light and dark, sun and moon, fire and water, rather than between Greek and Trojans, Achilles and Hector; Athene stands for personified wisdom, Aphrodite for sex.17 Allegorical interpretation then became a major tool in Christian exegesis of the Bible, as described in chapter 7, and remained popular throughout the Middle Ages.
Two other modern critical movements that can be connected with structuralism are Marxist criticism, as it has emerged in the twentieth century, and Anglo-American New Criticism. Marxist criticism is structuralist in that it finds in literature signs of class struggle. Ancient historians have much to say about class struggles and slavery, and some modern scholars have applied Marxist principles to the interpretation of classical literature, but ancient critics did not read literature in terms of class struggle. New Criticism, with which both Richards and Burke had some connections and of which the authoritative textbook was Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry, first published in 1938,18 had a dominant interest in discovering structures of imagery that give unity to a work of literature. It has been applied extensively to the interpretation of classical literature by modern scholars, but it was not a form of interpretation practiced by the Greeks and Romans themselves, for all their interest in tropes and figures. New Criticism can be described as formalist; that is, in contrast to Marxism it had more interest in aesthetic forms in texts than in political or social meaning. In this sense it is a descendent of ancient criticism as seen in Aristotle’s Poetics. Aristotle was interested primarily in matters of genre, plot, and language, and had nothing to say about the political, social, or religious meaning of the literature he discussed. Neo-Aristotelianism, which flourished especially at the University of Chicago, applied Aristotelian principles to the study of later literature.19 Wayne C. Booth’s much admired books The Rhetoric of Fiction and A Rhetoric of Irony are a later, more eclectic stage of this approach.
New Criticism was opposed to biographical criticism as it had come to be practiced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, interpreting texts on the basis of the circumstances and life experience of their authors and conversely reconstructing biographies of writers from hints in their texts. Biographical criticism in the latter sense was practiced in the Hellenistic period in Greece by adherents to the Peripatetic School. Satyrus’s biography of Euripides, only partially extant, reconstructed the life of the poet on the basis of incidents in his plays. New Criticism also objected to interpretation on the basis of the intent of the author on the ground that this intention could rarely if ever be known and was in fact irrelevant; the meaning of the work is the meaning found by an intelligent, educated reader in a text. This principle has been further developed in what is called reader-reception theory. Ancient literary critics rarely fell victim to blind application of the “intentional fallacy.” Aristotle, in the Poetics, found the sources of tragedy or comedy within the text of a play, not in the intent of the authors, and other ancient critics seem to follow his lead. This may result from the feeling that poetic texts are in some sense “inspired,” as understood, for example, by Longinus, and thus not altogether the conscious product of a writer’s art. But ancient rhetorical criticism worked with the assumption that rhetorical techniques found in a speech were all a part of the conscious art of the orator in accomplishing persuasive intent.
Critical theory in the second half of the twentieth century is often referred to as “post-structural,” found in its most extreme form in de-construction as practiced by Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and their imitators. De Man had much to say about rhetoric in his books and essays, but Brian Vickers has revealed how misinformed and misleading his discussions are.20 Derrida, in contrast, is a powerful thinker, well versed in classical Greek language, literature, and rhetoric. In “Plato’s Pharmacy,” a long section in his book Dissemination,21 he provides a brilliant reading of Phaedrus, deconstructing Plato’s argument against writing by showing that writing is “always already” inscribed in speech, while playing with the meanings of pharmakon in the dialogue as both “cure” and “poison.” The closest analogies to this in classical rhetoric and philosophy are found in sophistry and skepticism—in Gorgias’s argument that “nothing exists,” for example, or in sophistic experiments in making “the worse seem the better cause,” and in sophistic love of paradox and play.
New Historicism, developed by Stephen Greenblat and others in studying Renaissance literature, resembles Marxist criticism in its exploration of political and social issues, to which it adds issues of gender. There are only a few examples of this in antiquity. Augustine uses historicism in Books 2 and 3 of On Christian Learning, including (3.20) an explanation of polygamy in the Old Testament on the basis of practical needs in the age of the patriarchs.
There is a great deal of social criticism in classical literature, including Plato’s attacks on democracy and Tacitus’s critique of the autocracy of the Roman Empire. Slavery was endemic in the classical world and was justified by Aristotle (Politics 1.4) as natural. It was, however, rarely if ever racially based, since most Greek and Roman slaves were racially indistinguishable from the rest of the population. There were some attacks on the institution of slavery as inhumane, for example in the forty-seventh Epistle of Seneca the Younger. Cultural prejudice against foreign groups, especially Asiatics, is evident in Isocrates’ calls for Greek union against barbarians, and even more blatantly in the Satires of the Roman poet Juvenal.
The most striking examples of ancient criticism of the treatment of women are in drama, especially in Euripides’ Hecuba and Medea. There is almost no feminist literary criticism from antiquity; something can be read between the lines in Sappho’s allusions to the Homeric poems, and the sixty-first oration of Dio Chrysostom approaches a feminist reading of the Iliad. Feminist literary criticism emerges in the Renaissance, in the writings of Christine de Pisan, for example, and modern feminists have been exploring women’s voices in ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and modern literature in works cited throughout this book.
Comparative studies have been pursued in a number of disciplines—in anthropology, literature, physiology, and politics, for example—as a method of identifying what is common and what is unique to particular physical or social phenomena. Comparative literature, as a distinct humanistic discipline, began in the 1920s in Europe and has developed in American and foreign universities in the second half of the twentieth century. Its fundamental assumption is that features of literature that would not necessarily be clear to a reader from study of a single text or author or literary movement in one national language can be discovered by comparing texts or movements in two or more national literatures. It has had an interest in the history of criticism, and has usually been eclectic in its utilization of critical methods, depending on what seems to bring the best insights to the texts under scrutiny. Students of rhetoric in recent years have begun to realize that comparative rhetoric has similar possibilities and may be especially important in the rapidly developing world today of cross-cultural communication. There is, of course, a comparative element within the study of Greek and Roman, or ancient and modern rhetoric, but rhetoric as it has been studied in Europe and America is rhetoric as it has been defined and described in Europe and America. What similarities and differences are there to the rhetorical traditions of the rest of the world, in particular to the rich cultural traditions of China, Japan, India, and the Near East, but also to rhetorical practices in traditionally oral cultures in Africa and the South Pacific and among indigenous Australians or Americans? Comparative Rhetoric by George A. Kennedy seeks to provide a starting point for this study, complementing the present work on the western tradition, and seeking to test the general application of concepts of classical rhetoric and revise them as needed for a general theory of rhetoric. Articles and books on nonwestern rhetoric are beginning to increase in number, and professional students of rhetoric are showing increased awareness that there is more to be learned about rhetoric than is found strictly within the western tradition.22