Debra Hawhee
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226398174
- eISBN:
- 9780226398204
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226398204.003.0004
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Ancient Greek, Roman, and Early Christian Philosophy
This chapter considers the sensuous work of fables in the tradition of Aesop or beast fables, a genre largely ignored by rhetorical scholars, owing (perhaps) to its association with children and ...
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This chapter considers the sensuous work of fables in the tradition of Aesop or beast fables, a genre largely ignored by rhetorical scholars, owing (perhaps) to its association with children and trivial matters. But it is exactly that association that makes the genre worth considering in the joint context of rhetoric’s history and of animal studies. Fables exploit the liminal status of children and of storied animals vis-à-vis logos by simultaneously depriving them of logos in the way that Aristotle is thought to have done, while also at the same time conferring on them the capacities of logos. The chapter’s survey of fable’s role in the contexts of political oratory and early rhetorical education therefore continues to show the centrality of sensation to political imagination, this time in the context of deliberative rhetoric.Less
This chapter considers the sensuous work of fables in the tradition of Aesop or beast fables, a genre largely ignored by rhetorical scholars, owing (perhaps) to its association with children and trivial matters. But it is exactly that association that makes the genre worth considering in the joint context of rhetoric’s history and of animal studies. Fables exploit the liminal status of children and of storied animals vis-à-vis logos by simultaneously depriving them of logos in the way that Aristotle is thought to have done, while also at the same time conferring on them the capacities of logos. The chapter’s survey of fable’s role in the contexts of political oratory and early rhetorical education therefore continues to show the centrality of sensation to political imagination, this time in the context of deliberative rhetoric.
Diana Knight
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781789620658
- eISBN:
- 9781789623918
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781789620658.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This essay traces the interconnections between the rhetoric and actuality of Barthes’s proclaimed inability to choose between the polarised forms of the Album and the Livre, the fragmentary ‘note’ of ...
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This essay traces the interconnections between the rhetoric and actuality of Barthes’s proclaimed inability to choose between the polarised forms of the Album and the Livre, the fragmentary ‘note’ of the Diary and the all-embracing Novel. Barthes’s public rehearsal of this indecision, which takes place in the pedagogical context of his lecture course La Préparation du roman, is structured as the theatrical ‘deliberation’ of the writer faced with the obligation to choose. Yet Barthes underlines the appeal of thinking in terms of simplified alternatives, and leaves the formal decision hanging in the balance. I read this artificially constructed deliberation in conjunction with his analysis of Saint Ignatius’s Exercices spirituels, where a new language through which to solicit God’s will is elaborated through the theatrical preparation of an ‘election’. The symbiotic relation that Barthes identifies between Ignatius’s pedagogical Exercices and the personal Journal spirituel – in which Ignatius charts the progress of a practical election – takes me to the relation between Barthes’s Préparation du roman and his own private diaries. His 1979 essay ‘Délibération’ combines a general question (can a Diary be Literature?) with a practical issue to be resolved: should Barthes keep a diary with a view to publication? Less
This essay traces the interconnections between the rhetoric and actuality of Barthes’s proclaimed inability to choose between the polarised forms of the Album and the Livre, the fragmentary ‘note’ of the Diary and the all-embracing Novel. Barthes’s public rehearsal of this indecision, which takes place in the pedagogical context of his lecture course La Préparation du roman, is structured as the theatrical ‘deliberation’ of the writer faced with the obligation to choose. Yet Barthes underlines the appeal of thinking in terms of simplified alternatives, and leaves the formal decision hanging in the balance. I read this artificially constructed deliberation in conjunction with his analysis of Saint Ignatius’s Exercices spirituels, where a new language through which to solicit God’s will is elaborated through the theatrical preparation of an ‘election’. The symbiotic relation that Barthes identifies between Ignatius’s pedagogical Exercices and the personal Journal spirituel – in which Ignatius charts the progress of a practical election – takes me to the relation between Barthes’s Préparation du roman and his own private diaries. His 1979 essay ‘Délibération’ combines a general question (can a Diary be Literature?) with a practical issue to be resolved: should Barthes keep a diary with a view to publication?
