Despite its increasing prominence in university syllabi and anthologies, travel writing continues to be excluded from the canon of early modern literature. Its exclusion can be attributed to the ...view, articulated explicitly and implicitly, that its formal and stylistic conventions render it insufficiently 'literary'. Such assessments reveal a tendency to read early modern travel accounts using aesthetic criteria that are anachronistic, disconnected from the discursive contexts in which these accounts were originally written and read. This article examines one of the genre's most distinctive features, one which has shaped its relationship to notions of literary value and canonicity: its preoccupation with particulars, something early modern and modern readers alike characterise as 'tedious'. Focusing on Thomas Coryate's eponymous Coryats Crudities (1611), it situates the particularity of early modern travel writing within the reconstructed contexts of classical rhetoric, early modern poetics, and travel advice, placing special emphasis on the rhetorical quality of enargeia, or vividness. In addition to offering a fresh assessment of the Crudities and modelling a new approach to the study of travel writing more generally, the article reflects on how we can expand our sense of what early modern literature might be said to comprise.
The vividness of Homeric poetry has been admired since antiquity, but has been difficult to pin down with precision. It is usually thought to come about because readers are prompted to visualize the ...storyworld in the form of mental images seen with the mind's eye. But this cannot be right, both because there are serious scientific problems with the concept of ‘pictures in the head’ and because Homer does not offer many detailed descriptions, which are a prerequisite for eliciting detailed mental images. This article presents a different, and cognitively more realistic, take on the imageability of Homeric epic, which is based on recent reader-response studies inspired by the enactivist theory of cognition. These studies make a compelling case for readerly visualization as an embodied response, which does not depend on bright or detailed mental images. An analysis of the chariot race in Iliad 23 identifies specific features of what may be called an ‘enactive style’, notably the description of simple bodily actions. The final part of the article demonstrates that an enactivist take on Homer's vividness is not incompatible with the ancient concept of enargeia, the chief rhetorical term with which Homer's vividness is characterized in ancient criticism.
Cet article essaye d’analyser l’Histoire de la Guerre du Péloponnèse de Thucydide à la lumière des thèses ricœuriennes sur l’épistémologie de la connaissance historique, notamment les trois moments ...essentiels de l’opération historiographique : la preuve documentaire, l’explication/compréhension et l’écriture/représentation. Ce qui nous amène à insérer le texte de Thucydide dans la séquence des trois phases de la mimésis impliquée dans toute mise en discours : préfiguration, configuration, refiguration. Le dialogue que nous établissons entre le philosophe français et l’historien grec nous permet aussi de trouver plusieurs dissimilitudes et similitudes entre les deux, soit en réfléchissant sur la question de la vérité, soit en réfléchissant sur la dialectique entre lire et voir, sous le signe du concept rhétorique de l’enargeia.
Graham Harvey says the new animism is about behaving respectfully toward other persons, 'not all of them human'. The old animism was defined as the 'belief in spirits'. But what if belief itself is ...an animism, not an animism of spirts, but an animism of forces? In his animist writings,
Freud put 'special emphasis' on the 'magical powers' of discourse, stressing the 'uncanny effect' that occurs 'when a symbol takes on the full function and significance of what it symbolises'. A century later, the magic of discourse offers a solution to the impasses of affect theory. Sasha
Newell observes that affect is typically assumed to exceed 'social control,' while signs are associated with closure, fixation, and death. He counters that it is the 'semiotic transmission of affect' that allows the social 'to permeate' consciousness without 'conscious awareness'. The old
animism of belief recurs as a new animism of discursive forces. The strife between semiotics and affect theory revives an aesthetic tradition that grows out of Aristotle's fragment on epic, which affirms that belief is itself a power or intensity. David Hume described it as vivacity. The trick
for conjuring this animating force is enargeia, the trope of vivid description. Edmund Burke linked enargeia to the astonishment that evokes delightful horror; Lucien Lévy-Bruhl racialised it and renamed it the affective category of the supernatural. For it is always the (racialised)
other who believes. Today the question is whether the affectiveness of symbols can be redeemed from this colonial legacy.
Garcilaso de la Vega's "Ode ad florem Gnidi" reflects the poet's heightened interest in classicism that marked his final years in Naples. This article traces the role of classical theories of ...visualization in the ode. I argue that the poem's self-conscious artifice suggests that its primary audience was the community of classicists that Garcilaso encountered in the reconstituted Accademia Pontaniana.
Despite all the attention Puritan sermons have received, no attention has been specifically devoted to the analysis of the two speech acts of blessing and cursing in these sermons from a ...cognitive-pragmatic point of view. This study aims at doing this, focussing on Winthrop’s A Modell of Christian Charity as a case study. I use the framework provided by the Entrenchment and Conventionalization Model – a usage-based and emergentist model of language knowledge and convention – and analyse how the syntagmatic association of the two speech acts contributes to the conformity profile of the sermon. Moreover, I argue that this linguistic lens can add to the understanding of the ‘enargetic’ rhetoric of the text.
Celso presenta numerose obiezioni nei confronti della storicità della resurrezione di Gesù e delle sue apparizioni post-mortem. Egli definisce tali apparizioni phantasiai, pertanto Origene lo accusa ...di essere un epicureo e non un platonico come invece pretenderebbe di essere. Per giustificare le proprie asserzioni Celso si serve del concetto di enargeia. Tale criterio rappresenta un requisito essenziale per considerare ragionevole l’accettazione di un evento. Il presente contributo si propone di esaminare le opinioni di Platone ed Epicuro rispetto al valore filosofico del concetto di enargeia, per poter contestualizzare e giustificare la critica di epicureismo mossa nei confronti di Celso.
Celsus presents several objections against the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus and his post-mortem apparitions. He dubbes these apparitions phantasiai, therefore Origen asserts him to be epicurean and not platonic, as, instead, he claims to be. To prove his allegations, Celsus uses of the concept of enargeia. This criterion represented an essential requirement in order to make the acceptance of an event reasonable. The aim of this paper is to analyse the opinions of Plato and Epicurus regarding the philosophical value of the concept of enargeia, in order to better contextualise and justify the criticism of Epicureanism against Celsus.
This article argues that the modern notion of immersion, a reader being absorbed in a virtual world to such a degree that she experiences it as if it were the actual world, has a predecessor in the ...ancient notion of enargeia, "the power of bringing the things that are said before the senses of the audience." First, it discusses how ancient Greek literary critics theorized about enargeia. Since these critics praise Homer as an author who is particularly capable of achieving enargeia, its second objective is to examine the narrative techniques by which he immerses his audience in his story world.
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