On EloquenceYale University Press, 2008 M10 1 - 208 pages On Eloquence questions the common assumption that eloquence is merely a subset of rhetoric, a means toward a rhetorical end. Denis Donoghue, an eminent and prolific critic of the English language, holds that this assumption is erroneous. While rhetoric is the use of language to persuade people to do one thing rather than another, Donoghue maintains that eloquence is gratuitous, ideally autonomous, in speech and writing an upsurge of creative vitality for its own sake. He offers many instances of eloquence in words, and suggests the forms our appreciation of them should take. Donoghue argues persuasively that eloquence matters, that we should indeed care about it. Because we should care about any instances of freedom, independence, creative force, sprezzatura, he says, especially when we liveperhaps this is increasingly the casein a culture of the same, featuring official attitudes, stereotypes of the officially enforced values, sedated language, a politics of pacification. A noteworthy addition to Donoghues long-term project to reclaim a disinterested appreciation of literature as literature, this volume is a wise and pleasurable meditation on eloquence, its unique ability to move or give pleasure, and its intrinsic value. |
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Page 2
... becomes autonomous: thought “ceases to be practice.”2 In some degree, because it is never entirely de- tached from things and its responsibility toward them. Alice in Wonderland and Finnegans Wake are nearly detached from them, but not ...
... becomes autonomous: thought “ceases to be practice.”2 In some degree, because it is never entirely de- tached from things and its responsibility toward them. Alice in Wonderland and Finnegans Wake are nearly detached from them, but not ...
Page 9
... becoming phlegmatic, despite local disputes of Whig and Tory that kept it at least intermittently awake. No one thought that the language was secure. In the preface to A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), Samuel Johnson noted ...
... becoming phlegmatic, despite local disputes of Whig and Tory that kept it at least intermittently awake. No one thought that the language was secure. In the preface to A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), Samuel Johnson noted ...
Page 13
... become harder to persuade students that these are real places of interest and value in a poem , a play , a novel , or an essay in the New Yorker . Other issues have asserted themselves . “ What we find in the universities , ” as Hartman ...
... become harder to persuade students that these are real places of interest and value in a poem , a play , a novel , or an essay in the New Yorker . Other issues have asserted themselves . “ What we find in the universities , ” as Hartman ...
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Adorno Aeneas agile with temporal Bartleby blue Browne's Cambridge catachresis chapter claim Collected Poems context culture Dante death Derrida Dido Donne English Language Essays expression eyes feeling Finnegans Wake Flaubert Geoffrey Hill gesture gives Guy Davenport Gweneth Hugh Kenner human Hydriotaphia Ibid imagination John John Donne Kenneth Burke King knock Lady Macbeth last line Latin literary Literature live Locke London Madame Bovary means mind modern night Ophelia Oxford passage passion phrase play pleasure poet poetry Professor Hogan prose quence quoted R. P. Blackmur reader reading reason rhetoric rhyme rhythm seems sense sentence Shakespeare silence song without words soul sounds speak speech stanza Stevens story style sweet syllable T. S. Eliot take the train talk temporal intervals things thought tion trans translation tree University Press verbal W. B. Yeats William Empson Woolf writing Yeats