Places in the polity of rhetoric : topoi, evolution, and the fragmentation of discourse.

rhetoric;topoi;evolution;fragmentation;political rhetoric;history of rhetoric

Benjamin James Bickel Wetherbee

University:University of Louisville

Department:English

关键词: rhetoric;    topoi;    evolution;    fragmentation;    political rhetoric;    history of rhetoric;   

Others  :  https://ir.library.louisville.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3333&context=etd

美国|英语

来源: The Universite of Louisville's Institutional Repository

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation integrates classical rhetoric with postmodern understandings of textual fragmentation. “Places in the Polity of Rhetoric” follows two mutually constitutive avenues of inquiry, one of which stresses the importance of understanding textual fragments as rhetorical topoi—that is, as generative “places” that allow writers and speakers to economically evoke larger fields of cultural meaning in the space of a single word, phrase, or image. The other stresses the evolution of rhetorical culture that emerges through the interaction between human agents, who use these topoi for rhetorical ends, and discursive agents (topoi themselves) who use human rhetors to propagate among texts. Implicit in this project is a reassessment of the term topos in rhetorical history; in particular, I recover and extend Aristotle’s largely overlooked metaphor of topoi as nodes of spatial orientation. Looking toward the future of rhetorical studies, my work also relates rhetoric to theories of memes and cultural transmission. Because topos remains at once the most momentous and nebulous term in this project’s theoretical arc, I begin with an overview of topos and its variants in rhetorical history. Chapter 1 notes several points of historical confusion about what topoi are what they do before advocating for an essentially functional understanding of topoi as “places” that economically orient audiences among matrices of cultural meaning. I revisit Aristotle’s use of the term in the Rhetoric and the Physics, stressing this overlooked understanding of contextual orientation that underscores Aristotle’s notion of “place”—among which the classifications of “common” and “special” places, or topics, become not a pair of binary categories, but expressions of degree. I proceed through a sort of counter-history of topical theory centered on the idea of place and orientation, noting contributions from figures like Cicero, Quintilian, St. Augustine, Francis Bacon, Vico, and Joseph Priestly, while also stressing the friction implicit in the positions of those like Boethius, Ramus, Descartes, and Hugh Blair. The chapter concludes with a comparative look at Stephen Toulmin, Chaïm Perelman, and Kenneth Burke—three figures who exemplify the current range of available positions on topical invention. Chapter 2, “Anatomy of a Topos: A Terminological Symposium,” places topos in relationship to the keywords of trope, fragment, and, most importantly, evolution. I craft this chapter as a theoretical and conceptual toolbox designed to aid rhetorical critics in analyzing topical fragments as they relate to texts, contexts, human agents, and to other fragments. I bookend chapter 2 with two discussions