Rhetoric and Irony: Western Literacy and Western LiesOxford University Press, 1991 M09 5 - 344 pages This pathbreaking study integrates the histories of rhetoric, literacy, and literary aesthetics up to the time of Augustine, focusing on Western concepts of rhetoric as dissembling and of language as deceptive that Swearingen argues have received curiously prominent emphasis in Western aesthetics and language theory. Swearingen reverses the traditional focus on rhetoric as an oral agonistic genre and examines it instead as a paradigm for literate discourse. She proposes that rhetoric and literacy have in the West disseminated the interrelated notions that through learning rhetoric individuals can learn to manipulate language and others; that language is an unreliable, manipulable, and contingent vehicle of thought, meaning, and communication; and that literature is a body of pretty lies and beguiling fictions. In a bold concluding chapter Swearingen aligns her thesis concerning early Western literacy and rhetoric with contemporary critical and rhetorical theory; with feminist studies in language, psychology, and culture; and with studies of literacy in multi- and cross-cultural settings. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 68
Page vii
... speak to the issues embedded in Western concepts of irony , rheto- ric , and literacy , and illuminating the continuing centrality of those concepts to the ethics of language use and teaching today . This work joins a group of recent ...
... speak to the issues embedded in Western concepts of irony , rheto- ric , and literacy , and illuminating the continuing centrality of those concepts to the ethics of language use and teaching today . This work joins a group of recent ...
Page ix
... speaking and writing ; revisionist interpretive anthropologies attending to the hermeneutic screens that shape the study of traditional and oral societies ; literacy and orality studies , including ongoing appraisals of the nature of ...
... speaking and writing ; revisionist interpretive anthropologies attending to the hermeneutic screens that shape the study of traditional and oral societies ; literacy and orality studies , including ongoing appraisals of the nature of ...
Page x
... speak , and the construction of a shared reality within which understanding and speaking take place . My rereadings of classical and modern treatments of these issues seek to illustrate the degree of overlap , humorous recurrence , and ...
... speak , and the construction of a shared reality within which understanding and speaking take place . My rereadings of classical and modern treatments of these issues seek to illustrate the degree of overlap , humorous recurrence , and ...
Page xi
... Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition , drawing on and integrating Derrida's and Ong's work , suggested additional nuances in the treatment of narrative , aphorism , hiding , and disclosure , and provided a model for merging ...
... Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition , drawing on and integrating Derrida's and Ong's work , suggested additional nuances in the treatment of narrative , aphorism , hiding , and disclosure , and provided a model for merging ...
Page xiv
... speaking , writing , reading , knowing , and believing . I received from my mother an estimable eloquence and wisdom . Always well- read and well - spoken , she has a conscientious and resolute attention to moral discourse and reasoning ...
... speaking , writing , reading , knowing , and believing . I received from my mother an estimable eloquence and wisdom . Always well- read and well - spoken , she has a conscientious and resolute attention to moral discourse and reasoning ...
Contents
3 | |
Proem | 20 |
Logos and Logic Among the Preplatonics | 22 |
Platos Defense of Dialogue | 55 |
A Logic of Terms a Rhetoric of Motives | 95 |
Defining the Value of Literacy | 132 |
Augustines Critique of Mendacity | 175 |
6 Inscriptions of Self and the Erasure of Truth | 215 |
Epi Dia Logos | 255 |
Notes | 259 |
297 | |
315 | |
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Common terms and phrases
Academica Aeschylus appraisals argument Aristotelian Aristotle Aristotle's audience Augustine Augustine's Categories characterization Christa Wolf Christian Cicero classical concepts copula culture deception defined definition depicted dialectic dialogue diegesis discourse dissembling dissoi logoi eiron Empedocles emphasizes epic epistemology eristic ethical fiction fragment genre Gorgias grammar Greek Havelock Heraclitus hermeneutics Ibid interlocutors Interpretation irony Isocrates kind knowledge language Latin learning linguistic literacy literature logic logos maieutic Manichean Manichees meaning mind models modern modes moral not-being notion object ontology opinion oral Orator Oratore parallels Parmenides Phaedrus philosophical Plato poetic poets practice predicate Preface to Plato Preplatonic Protagoras provides reading relationship rhetoric rhetoricians Scripture secular semantic shaped Socrates Sophist speaker speaking speech statements Stoic style teacher teaching technical rhetoric texts textual Theaetetus theory things thought tion Topics topoi tradition Translated treatises tropes true truth understanding University Press voice Western women words writing written
Popular passages
Page 3 - This is the source from which has sprung the undoubtedly absurd and unprofitable and reprehensible severance between the tongue and the brain, leading to our having one set of professors to teach us to think and another to teach us to speak.