Whether poetry gives knowledge or not is a question that has been debated from a variety of perspectives, depending on how a society or a culture defines knowledge, and on the function it ascribes to poetry in relation to that definition. The civilizations of Asia and the Middle East have generally taken the line that poetry deals primarily with affects, emotions and feelings. The West has had a more complicated history of responses. One way of making sense of this history (...) is to map rival claims as split over the idea of scientific knowledge, where it affects notions of the poetic function. The mapping, through all its manifold branches, gives clear indications that claims to knowledge – both those made on behalf of poetry, and those denied to poetry – depend more on assumptions, predispositions and cultural conditioning than on rational argument or critical debate. The resulting variety also suggests that the cultural relativism that affects such debates is unlikely to arrive at resolutions except of the contingent kind. (shrink)

Freud uses paradoxical and conflictual rhetoric to create an unstable and conflictual picture of the mind. Thus he diverges from both dominant traditions of thought in the West: the Judeo-Christian way of filling all gaps in meaning by putting a single omnipotent divinity in charge of them, and the Enlightenment quest for a final, causal language to describe reality. By both suggesting and displacing a plurality of perspectives on the unconscious, Freud’s text mirrors what it claims happens in our minds, (...) in which unconscious impulses undermine the pretense of total rational self-control. Though Freud suggests that a mechanistic description of the mind may bring us nearer to the reality of the unconscious, he also explains that this reality will remain dark. He not only develops an ostensibly mechanistic vocabulary for unconscious mental processes, but also clarifies that his terminology is most fictional precisely when it seems most scientific. Hence, Freud’s science of the unconscious cannot be assimilated to an empiricist position; its philosophical underpinnings are both Kantian and Nietzschean, with metaphors and analogies playing a crucial role. Two dramatic images, in which the mind appears as a domain of warring gods and a realm of political conflict, demonstrate that Freud did not regard the unconscious as some kind of true inner self. He depicts the mind in general and the unconscious in particular as a pagan, conflictual universe over which no god or goddess can gain exclusive control and where no rigid dictatorship is possible. (shrink)

This article explores a German philosophy of metaphor, which proposed a close link between the body and the mind as the basis for metaphor, debunked the view that metaphor is just a decorative rhetorical device and questioned the distinction between the literal and the figurative. This philosophy of metaphor developed at the intersection between a reflection on language and thought and a reflection on the nature of beauty in aesthetics. Thinkers such as Giambattista Vico, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean Paul (...) and others laid the foundations for this philosophy and it was successively refined by Gustav Gerber, Alfred Biese and Friedrich Nietzsche. It influenced in its turn in various ways the linguistic study of metaphor and the psychology of metaphor as elaborated, for instance, by a lesser-known American scholar, Gertrude Buck. All these thinkers contributed to a philosophy and psychology of the metaphoric according to which metaphors are not only nice, but necessary for the structure and growth of human thought and language. Obvious parallels between this 19th-century philosophy of metaphor and the 20th-century theory of metaphor developed by Lakoff and his followers are examined throughout. (shrink)

Now over a decade since the publication of John Michael’s Anxious Intellects (2000), many rhetoric scholars are no less anxious about the relevance of scholarship to public affairs. Recent exchanges concerning rhetorical criticism, public intellectualism, and academic engagement continue to provide evidence of a prominent felt need to prove public relevance, explain away the lack of readily apparent public engagement, or adopt a more activist posture. That academic work should have political consequences is broadly assumed within a dominant strain of (...) rhetorical scholarship owing to what is doubtless an incontrovertible feature of reality—words have political consequences. From this fact, many rhetoric scholars .. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between Roman school texts and the socialization of the student into an elite man. I argue that composition and declamation communicated social values; in fact, the rhetorical education of the late republic and the empire was a process of socialization that produced a definite subjectivity in its elite participants. I treat two genres of Roman school texts: the expansions on a set theme known as declamation and the bilingual, Greek and Latin, writing exercises known as (...) the colloquia amid the collections of hermeneumata. This article is more broadly concerned with the attitudes toward language use that are learned along with specific literacy skills. Habits of reading and writing and speaking are learned in scenes and contexts that contribute to concepts of the self and more widely of gender and social roles. The encounters and verbal interactions recurrently plot a deviation from violence or a return to civil and familial order through the proper verbal display of the elite speaker. The student speaker's assumption of roles, his training in fictio personae, is a strong training in memory and imagination-pretending to be someone else, pretending to talk like someone else, or pretending to talk on behalf of someone else. That someone else is most important as the schoolboy becomes the voice of or for prostitutes, the raped, slaves, freedmen, women. His was not a neutral ventriloquism in the styles of Latin but a training in the master's mode toward the ready conviction that the speaker can and must speak for others, his subordinates. Roman rhetorical education was a process of persona building, shaping the schoolboy in his future role while excluding others from the very right to become speaking subjects. (shrink)

As a still quite young professor of classical philology at the University of Basel, Nietzsche taught a rather traditional, almost antiquarian, course on ancient rhetoric. The title of his 1872–73 lecture notes—"Presentation of Ancient Rhetoric" —clearly indicates that this time Nietzsche did not spoil for a fight or set out to uncover the hidden hybridity of origins as he did in his controversial book of the same year in which the origin of Greek tragedy is revealed as miscegenation between the (...) Dionysian and Apollonian principles. Rather his lecture notes exhibit an apparent commitment to following the traditional rhetorical... (shrink)

Google Ngram metadata reveal that the English phrase “rhetorical theory” is not that old, appearing on the scene in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and then picking up dramatically with critical and literary theory in the 1960s. How do we square this with familiar arguments that rhetorical theory is much, much older? In this forum contribution I argue that the long view applies to our contemporary rhetorical theory only if we equivocate. Much of what currently falls under the (...) heading “rhetorical theory” has little or nothing to do with the systematic conceptualization of persuasive discourse (i.e., the long view)—general, posthuman, eco-, and materialist rhetorics are the most prominent counterexamples. Instead, around 1900, Gertrude Buck develops what I call the short and sharp view that prevails to this day: rhetorical theory offers reality figured by way of its alternatives. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Friedrich Nietzsche offers different opinions of the ancient Skeptics. On certain occasions, he praises them as philosophers of intellectual integrity, because they constantly question dogma and continue to inquire (ζητϵῖν) into the truth. He insists, however, that it is indispensable for every individual to adopt her own perspective in specific conditions, rather than suspend judgment as the Skeptics do. On other occasions, Nietzsche criticizes the ancient Skeptics because they separate their academic investigations from their philosophy of life and only (...) comply with conventions or apparent phenomena observed through sensations. Furthermore, he ridicules their ultimate goal – tranquility of mind (ἀταραξία) – as a product of feeble exhaustion. He himself is ready to embrace torments of life as part of the will to power. Although some similarities can be traced between Nietzsche and the ancient Skeptics, Nietzsche is more consistent in connecting his theoretical investigation and his philosophy as a way of life. (shrink)