As weeks go on in this class and we continue to discuss different perceptions and takes on rhetoric, many different ideas have flown around the room. But, as time goes by our ideas of rhetoric have gone from a giant endless abyss of confusion and wonder, to a less giant, less endless abyss of confusion and wonder. Which is great! But then I read this text...and personally, things got a little weird.
So the overviews and synopses of the texts that Whately includes seemed to be really great and helpful to me in the beginning, I mean...who doesn't love a quick refresher? But as I continued reading his overviews of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian defining rhetoric I felt like as he was taking us two steps forward by showing us the basics of these works and what they are communicating, he takes us one step back by also proving that one work contradicts the next in its functions! With each paragraph I felt as though I gained new knowledge on the subject it was covering and polished up the lessons I had already learned, but then had the whip lash of taking a body of work side by side with another and showing me how the different meanings of rhetoric in each of the two texts contradict each other!
What's a girl to do? This is so exciting to me because it presents a brand new way of viewing these texts in relation to each other, but at the same time I feel like I am further behind then where I started! Take this piece of the text for example:
"...Thinking it necessary to include, as belonging to the art, everything that could conduce to the attainment of the object proposed, introduced to their systems, Treatises on Law, Morals Politics, &c., on the ground that a knowledge of these subjects was requisite to enable a man to speak well on them: and even insisted on virtue as an essential qualification of a perfect orator; because a good character which can in no way b e so surely established as by deserving it, has great weight with audience....These notions are combated by Aristotle who attributes them either to the ill-cultivated understanding of those who maintained them, or to their arrogant and pretending disposition..."
You see?! Right there! It informs us of the ways in which a certain rhetorician describes rhetoric and gives you a great understanding of that work and then it moves onto the next by refuting everything the work before it said! What to take from this? I take two steps forward and one step back.
I understand and relate to your confusion. I think that we are fortunate, however. What this (and all our readings-disagreements-refutations so far) has given us is more openness. All the Rhetoricians we have read really show us that we get to make rhetoric what we need it to be (to a degree). Rather, it represents what we find value in. As an aspiring, wanna-be creative (fiction) writer, rhetoric provides me the tool of eloquence, as well as agumentation-in-style from which eloquence thus becomes a means of saying something in the shape and combination of the words I choose. So, in my fiction, I can say something without saying it for the sake of something nice to read, that may say something as well. Does any of that make sense? To sum, rhetoric might just be what you need it to be, within the bounds of what it can do. Utility...
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