Figuratively Speaking: Rhetoric and Culture from Quintilian to the Twin TowersAlthough rhetoric is a term often associated with lies, this book takes a polemical look at rhetoric as a purveyor of truth. Its purpose is to focus on one aspect of rhetoric, figurative speech, and to demonstrate how the treatment of figures of speech provides a common denominator among western cultures from Cicero to the present. The central idea is that, in the western tradition, figurative speech - using language to do more than name - provides the fundamental way for language to articulate concerns central to each cultural moment. In this study, Sarah Spence identifies the embedded tropes for four periods in Western culture: Roman antiquity, the High Middle Ages, the Age of Montaigne, and our present, post-9/11 moment. In so doing, she reasserts the fundamental importance of rhetoric, the art of speaking well. |
From inside the book
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... Rhetoric is a Jedi mind trick . Like Obi - Wan Kenobi , the orator sets out to make you see things his way . If we were all Jedi , this book and the history of rhetoric it aims to illuminate would be very short indeed . But we are not ...
... history of rhetoric , Shirley Sharon - Zisser argues at length about the evolu- tionist language that is prevalent in nineteenth - century tracts about rhetoric.8 From this she asserts that rhetoric served to turn its back on the past ...
... Rhetoric bequeathed to the western tradition a sense that rhetoric was associated with order and the rational ... history of rhetoric is , to a large extent , the history of the adaptation of these Roman values . One cannot talk about ...
Contents
Acknowledgements 7 | 9 |
Repetition versus Replication | 19 |
Figures of Speech and Thought in | 39 |
Copyright | |
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