October 27th, 2010
I contend that we do not now know Isocrates’ rhetorical theories well enough, because we have not understood classical Greek rhetoric and writing practices for our electrified time. (33)
Welch, Kathleen E. Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and a New Literacy. The MIT Press, 1999.
In this Chapter 2 of Electric Rhetoric, Welch argues that the classical rhetoric set forth by interpretations of Aristotle and Plato is “categorical and highly ordered” (p. 33) and does not account for our “electrified time.” While it may be categorical and ordered, that helps for classification. She also contends that Isocrates’ rhetoric is by nature misogynistic and exclusionist. While this may be true, that was an unfortunate condition of the period. Applied today, Aristotelian and Platonic rhetorical theory need not be exclusionist or misogynist. This is a point Welch understands well, as she goes to great lengths to vindicate Isocrates’ rhetoric and find application for it in the “next rhetoric” (Chapter 4) that she proposes.
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October 23rd, 2010
Spoken words are events, engaged in time and indeed in the present. Plato’s ideas were the polar opposite: not events at all, but motionless “objective” existence, impersonal, and out of time. (34).
Ong, Walter J. The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. The Terry Lectures. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967.
While I have written in the past on Plato’s view and detailed various arguments from The Phaedrus, it is worth again addressing here, since Ong discusses it in this text. What we get from Plato is, essentially, a solid commitment to the spoken word and a strong aversion to the written word, believing it an approximation of the spoken word, which is actually an approximation of thought. He did write down certain things, such as some of Socrates’ teachings. However, the style was very unlike that of oral, and he strongly affirmed that “one cannot not put what is really essential to wisdom in writing, for this is to falsify it, and noting in The Phaedrus (274) that writing serves merely recall, not memory or wisdom” (55). Read the rest of this entry »
June 21st, 2010
“A drug of ambiguous power may heal or poison.”
- highly paraphrased Derrida
O’Donnell, J. J. (2000). Avatars of the word: From papyrus to cyberspace: Harvard University Press.
A point that O’Donnell raises early in this text is the public-vs-private setting of the pre-Gutenberg writer, who wrote, copied, and distributed his texts in hand-written manuscript form. “There was no divorce between private and public” (11). In this way, the writer was quite in the public, as opposed to the printed book one now buys off the shelf, which has no physical tie to the author; although penned by he or she, it has gone through an editor, and an elaborate printing-publishing-packaging-distribution process. With the arrival of printing, the idea of the “author” was born: one who sits alone, working through the manufacture of the text and then turning it over to a publisher. Read the rest of this entry »