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Values, Pierre Schlag

Pierre Schlag

No abstract provided.

Review Essay: John C. Briggs, Francis Bacon And The Rhetoric Of Nature, Thomas Willard

Quidditas

John C. Briggs, Francis Bacon and the Rhetoric of Nature, Harvard University PRess, 1989, xii, 285 pp., $35.00.

The Dialectical Convergence Of Rhetoric And Ethics: The Imperative Of Public Conversation, Lawrence Kimmel

Philosophy Faculty Research

Man is a rule-making, rule-governed creature—he is, as Aristotle put it, an animal defined by and within a community of speech. The two disciplines of ethics and rhetoric and the cultural activities they engage are instrumental to this defining activity of human life. If moral life is riddled with ambiguities, theoretical understanding of it is no less plagued with an ambivalent relationship which rhetoric and ethics have to each other, despite their mutual concern with the practical affairs of human beings. To argue a necessary convergence of rhetoric and ethics for an understanding of moral life, it is ironic and …

Narrative Description In Marco Polo's Travels: A Nonfictional Application Of Bakhtin's Chronotope, Ute Margarete Saine

Quidditas

Throughout the text of Marco Polo's Devisement du monde, the reader is repeatedly enjoined to believe the narration. Such a captatio benevolantiae – the rhetorical convention inviting reader interest – typically takes the form of assertions, such as "I am telling nothing but the truth"; "Everybody ought too believe this"; "This is how it was"; "This is how Marco Polo saw it," and the like. The narrator even proposes to uphold the sophisticated distinction between eyewitness information, gathered firsthand, and accounts obtained from others:

We will set down things seen as seen, things heard as heard, so that our …

Failure And Expertise In The Ancient Conception Of An Art, James Allen

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

The ancient notion of an art (τέχνη) embraced a wide range of pursuits from handicrafts like shoemaking and weaving to more exalted disciplines not excluding philosophy (cf. Plato Gorgias 486b; Hippolytus Refutatio. 570,8 DDG; Sext. Emp. Μ II13). Nevertheless, there was a sufficient amount of agreement about what was expected of an art to permit debates about whether different practices qualified as arts. According to the conception which made these debates possible, an art is a body of knowledge concerning a distinct subject matter which enables the artist to achieve a definite type of beneficial result. Obviously, the failure of …

The Punctator's World: A Discursion (Part Two), Gwen G. Robinson

The Courier

Part One of this serialized survey (Courier 23.2, Fall 1988) dealt with the emergence of a late-Classical and early-Christian interest in eliciting, with 'euphuistic' punctating techniques, the voice patterns inherent in text. Part Two, herewith, gives attention to the Middle Ages. In this haphazard era, logical punctuation, which concentrates on syntactical structures and is therefore more appealing to eye than ear, begins its faltering growth.

Intertextuality In The Anglo-Norman Lyric, Carol J. Harvey

Quidditas

The rhetorical formulae that permeate the poetry of the Middle Ages are not always used in a conventional or consistent manner. On the fringes of the main literary movements are works that raise doubts as to the very nature of medieval poetics. Some texts challenge accepted criteria with respect to genre, tone, or interpretation; others appear unfamiliar and heterogeneous in comparison with accepted poetic concepts; still others use the language and imagery of established poetics as a polemic strategy. Such problematic texts are found among the lyric poems composed in England during the Anglo-Norman era, particularly among the macaronics. These …

John Skelton: Courtly Maker/Popular Poet, Nancy A. Gutierrez

Quidditas

The eight poems in Latin and English written at the time of the English victory at Flodden Field in 1513 are various combinations of praise, vituperation, satire, and polemic, reflecting the attitudes of their authors. John Skelton, Thomas More, Peter Carmelianus, and Bernard André. These courtly makers, homogeneous in both their humanist background and court employment, see the battle essentially the same way–as an occasion to celebrate their royal employer and to abuse his enemy–thus the differing verse forms and slanted treatments are grounded in a common point of view. However, John Skelton, as author of three of the eight …