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A readable account of the book as an object: a history of the page as well as a history of the book. Drawing an arc from the medieval scriptorium to googlebooks, this volume shows the creative and playful opportunities blank spaces on the page afforded readers and writers.
This wide-ranging and entertaining book explores blank space from incunabula to Google books. Blanks are a paradox—simultaneously nothing and something, gesturing to what was once there or might be there. They are also a creative opportunity for readers as well as writers: readers respond to what is not there and writers come to anticipate that response. Thus, blank space develops literary and ludic applications. Each chapter focuses on one typographical form of what is not there on the page: physical gaps (Chapter One), marks of incompletion such as &c (Chapter Two), and the asterisk as a stand-in for things that cannot be said (Chapter Three). By looking at the early-modern page as a visual unit as well as a verbal unit, this volume shows how the relationship between textual layout and textual content is as productive for writers as it is for readers. Mise-en-page influences readers in the same way that rhetoric influences readers. It is thus possible to speak of 'the rhetoric of the page'.
This wide-ranging and entertaining book explores blank space from incunabula to Google books. Blanks are a paradox—simultaneously nothing and something, gesturing to what was once there or might be there. They are also a creative opportunity for readers as well as writers: readers respond to what is not there and writers come to anticipate that response. Thus, blank space develops literary and ludic applications. Each chapter focuses on one typographical form of what is not there on the page: physical gaps (Chapter One), marks of incompletion such as &c (Chapter Two), and the asterisk as a stand-in for things that cannot be said (Chapter Three). By looking at the early-modern page as a visual unit as well as a verbal unit, this volume shows how the relationship between textual layout and textual content is as productive for writers as it is for readers. Mise-en-page influences readers in the same way that rhetoric influences readers. It is thus possible to speak of 'the rhetoric of the page'.
Forgetting is usually juxtaposed with memory as its opposite in a negative way: it is seen as the loss of the ability to remember, or, ironically, as the inevitable process of distortion or dissolution that accompanies attempts to commemorate the past. The civic emphasis on the crucial importance of preserving lessons from the past to prevent us from repeating mistakes that led to violence and injustice, invoked most poignantly in the call of “Never again” from Holocaust survivors, tends to promote a view of forgetting as verging on sin or irresponsibility. In this book, Bradford Vivian hopes to put a much more positive spin on forgetting by elucidating its constitutive role in the formation and transformation of public memory. Using examples ranging from classical rhetoric to contemporary crises like 9/11, Public Forgetting demonstrates how, contrary to conventional wisdom, communities may adopt idioms of forgetting in order to create new and beneficial standards of public judgment concerning the lessons and responsibilities of their shared past.
Published in five editions between 1621 and 1651, The Anatomy of Melancholy marks a unique moment in the development of disciplines, when fields of knowledge were distinct but not yet restrictive. In Robert Burton’s Rhetoric, Susan Wells analyzes the Anatomy, demonstrating how its early modern practices of knowledge and persuasion can offer a model for transdisciplinary scholarship today. In the first decades of the seventeenth century, Robert Burton attempted to gather all the existing knowledge about melancholy, drawing from professional discourses including theology, medicine, and philology as well as the emerging sciences. Examining this text through a rhetorical lens, Wells provides an account of these disciplinary exchanges in all their subtle variety and abundant wit, showing that questions of how knowledge is organized and how it is made persuasive are central to rhetorical theory. Ultimately, Wells argues that in addition to a book about melancholy, Burton’s Anatomy is a meditation on knowledge. A fresh interpretation of The Anatomy of Melancholy, this volume will be welcomed by scholars of early modern English and the rhetorics of health and medicine, as well as those interested in transdisciplinary work and rhetorical theory.
'Moral character, so to say, constitutes the most effective means of proof.' In ancient Greece, rhetoric was at the centre of public life. Many writers attempted to provide manuals to help improve debating skills, but it was not until Aristotle produced The Art of Rhetoric in the 4th century bc that the subject had a true masterpiece. As he considered the role of emotion, reason, and morality in speech, Aristotle created essential guidelines for argument and prose style that would influence writers for more than two millennia. Brilliantly explained and carefully reasoned, The Art of Rhetoric remains as relevant today as it was in the assemblies of ancient Athens.
Undertaken by one of the most learned and visionary scholars in the field, this work has a comprehensive and culminating quality to it, tracking major lines of insight into writing as a human practice and articulating the author's intellectual progress as a theorist and researcher across a career.
Opening with an overview of the renewal of interest in rhetoric for inquiries of all kinds, this volume addresses rhetoric in individual disciplines - mathematics, anthropology, psychology, economics, sociology, political science and history. Drawing from recent literary theory, it suggests the contribution of the humanities to the rhetoric of inquiry and explores communications beyond the academy, particulary in women's issues, religion and law. The final essays speak from the field of communication studies, where the study of rhetoric usually makes its home.
The first edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction transformed the criticism of fiction and soon became a classic in the field. One of the most widely used texts in fiction courses, it is a standard reference point in advanced discussions of how fictional form works, how authors make novels accessible, and how readers recreate texts, and its concepts and terms—such as "the implied author," "the postulated reader," and "the unreliable narrator"—have become part of the standard critical lexicon. For this new edition, Wayne C. Booth has written an extensive Afterword in which he clarifies misunderstandings, corrects what he now views as errors, and sets forth his own recent thinking about the rhetoric of fiction. The other new feature is a Supplementary Bibliography, prepared by James Phelan in consultation with the author, which lists the important critical works of the past twenty years—two decades that Booth describes as "the richest in the history of the subject."
