This book reassesses the late 3rd-century Greek rhetorician Menander of Laodicea (Menander Rhetor). Menander is generally regarded as a specialist in epideictic, as such, he is often considered an ...exemplary rhetorician of an age which saw the triumph of epideictic eloquence. But detailed examination of the fragments shows that he was an expert on judicial and deliberative oratory whose most influential work was a commentary on Demosthenes. Source-critical analysis of the Demosthenes scholia shows that his commentary can be partially reconstructed. The book presents its reassessment of Menander’s significance in the context of a new reconstruction of the history of later Greek rhetoric, ranging from the theoretical innovations of the 2nd century AD to the comparatively unknown sophists of 5th-century Alexandria. Particular attention is given to the evolving structure of the rhetorical curriculum and to the practices of the rhetorical education, with an emphasis on the practical orientation of training in rhetoric and its predominant focus on techniques of forensic and deliberative oratory. These characteristics of rhetorical teaching raise questions about the nature and functions of rhetoric in this period. It is argued that rhetoric was concerned fundamentally with teaching students how to devise arguments and articulate them in a persuasive way, and that these skills still had a direct application in the subsequent careers of the rhetoricians’ pupils.
Generosity is an ambiguous quality, William Flesch observes; while receiving gifts is pleasant, gift-giving both displays the wealth and strength of the giver and places the receiver under an ...obligation. In provocative new readings of Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton, Flesch illuminates the personal authority that is bound inextricably with acts of generosity. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Mauss, Blanchot, Bourdieu, Wittgenstein, Bloom, Cavell, and Greenblatt, Flesch maintains that the literary power of Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton is at its most intense when they are exploring the limits of generosity. He considers how in Herbert's Temple divine assurance of the possibility of redemption is put into question and how the poet approaches such a gift with the ambivalence of a beneficiary. In his readings of Shakespeare's Richard II, Henry IV, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and the sonnets, Flesch examines the perspective of the benefactor—including Shakespeare himself—who confronts the decline of his capacity to give. Turning to Milton's Paradise Lost, Flesch identifies two opposing ways of understanding generosity—Satan's, on the one hand, and Adam and Eve's, on the other - and elaborates the different conceptions of poetry to which these understandings give rise. Scholars of Shakespeare and of Renaissance culture, Miltonists, literary theorists, and others interested in the relationship between philosophy and literature will want to read this insightful and challenging book.
Bodies of tomorrow Vint, Sherryl
Bodies of tomorrow,
c2007, 20070224, 2006, 2000, 2007, 2006-01-01
eBook
Bodies of Tomorrowargues for the importance of challenging visions of humanity in the future that overlook our responsibility as embodied beings connected to a material world.
Hellenistic poets of the third and second centuries BC were concerned with the need both to mark their continuity with the classical past and to demonstrate their independence from it. In this ...revised and expanded 2005 translation of Muse e modelli: la poesia ellenistica da Alessandro Magno ad Augusto, Greek poetry of the third and second centuries BC and its reception and influence at Rome are explored allowing both sides of this literary practice to be appreciated. Genres as diverse as epic and epigram are considered from a historical perspective, in the full range of their deep-level structures, providing a different perspective on the poetry and its influence at Rome. Some of the most famous poetry of the age such as Callimachus' Aitia and Apollonius' Argonautica is examined. In addition, full attention is paid to the poetry of encomium, in particular the newly published epigrams of Posidippus, and Hellenistic poetics, notably Philodemus.
The Toronto school of communication theory Blondheim, Menahem; Watson, Rita P. M
The Toronto school of communication theory,
c2007, 20080301, 2008-02-01, 2007, 2008, 2008-01-01, 2008-02-23, 20070101
eBook
While never formally recognized as a school of thought in its time, the work of a number of University of Toronto scholars over several decades - most notably Harold Adams Innis and Marshall McLuhan ...- formulated a number of original attempts to conceptualize communication as a phenomenon, and launched radical and innovative conjectures about its consequences. This landmark collection of essays re-assesses the existence, and re-evaluates the contribution, of the so-called Toronto School of Communication.
While the theories of Innis and McLuhan are notoriously resistant to neat encapsulation, some general themes have emerged in scholarly attempts to situate them within the discipline of communications studies that they helped to define. Three such themes - focus on the effects and consequences of communications, emphasis on communications as a process rather than as structure, and a sharp focus on the technology of communication, or the 'medium' - are the most fundamental in characterizing the unique perspective of the Toronto School. This collection not only represents a crucial step in defining the 'Toronto School,' it also provides close analysis of the ideas of its individual members.
Just at the moment when conflicts between critical "isms" are threatening to turn the study of English literature into a game park for endangered texts, Bradshaw arrives with a work of liberating wit ...and insight. His subject is double: the Shakespeare he reads and the Shakespeare whom critics in the ranks of the new historicists and cultural materialists are representing (or misrepresenting).
InThe Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso, Jo Ann Cavallo attempts a new interpretation of the history of the renaissance romance epic in northern Italy, focusing on the period's three major ...chivalric poets. Cavallo challenges previous critical assumptions about the trajectory of the romance genre, especially regarding questions of creative imitation, allegory, ideology, and political engagement.
In tracing the development of the romance epic against the historical context of the Ferrarese court and the Italian peninsula, Cavallo moves from a politically engaged Boiardo, whose poem promotes the tenets of humanism, to an individualistic Tasso, who opposed the repressive aspects of the counter-reformation culture he is often thought to represent. Ariosto is read from the vantage of his predecessor Boiardo, and Cavallo describes his cynicism and later mellowing attitude toward the real-world relevance of his and Boiardo's fiction.The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tassois the first critical study to bring together the three poets in a coherent vision that maps changes while uncovering continuities.
When a poet addresses a living person - whether friend or enemy, lover or sister - we recognize the expression of intimacy. But what impels poets to leap across time and space to speak to invisible ...listeners, seeking an ideal intimacy - George Herbert with God, Walt Whitman with a reader in the future, John Ashbery with the Renaissance painter Francesco Parmigianino? In Invisible Listeners, Helen Vendler argues that such poets must invent the language that will enact, on the page, an intimacy they lack in life. Through brilliantly insightful and gracefully written readings of these three great poets over three different centuries, Vendler maps out their relationships with their chosen listeners. For his part, Herbert revises the usual vertical address to God in favor of a horizontal one - addressing God as a friend.Whitman hovers in a sometimes erotic, sometimes quasi-religious language in conceiving the democratic camerado, who will, following Whitman's example, find his true self. And yet the camerado will be replaced, in Whitman's verse, by the ultimate invisible listener, Death.Ashbery, seeking a fellow artist who believes that art always distorts what it represents, finds he must travel to the remote past. In tones both tender and skeptical he addresses Parmigianino, whose extraordinary self-portrait in a convex mirror furnishes the poet with both a theory and a precedent for his own inventions. By creating the forms and speech of ideal intimacy, these poets set forth the possibility of a more complete and satisfactory human interchange - an ethics of relation that is uncoerced, understanding, and free.
Exploiting Erasmusexamines the legacy of Erasmus in England from the mid-sixteenth century to the overthrow of James II in 1688 and studies the various ways in which his works were received, ...manipulated, and used in religious controversies that threatened both church and state.
The unfolding of words Henderson, Judith Rice
The unfolding of words,
2012, 20130122, 2013-01-22, 2012-12-07
eBook
The Unfolding of Wordsbrings together international scholarship to explore crucial changes in writers' interactions with religious and classical texts.
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