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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... Poets (editor) The Sovereign Ghost: Studies in Imagination Poems of R. P. Blackmur (editor) Ferocious Alphabets The Arts Without Mystery We Irish: Essays on Irish Literature and Society Selected Essays of R. P. Blackmur (editor) Reading ...
... Poets (editor) The Sovereign Ghost: Studies in Imagination Poems of R. P. Blackmur (editor) Ferocious Alphabets The Arts Without Mystery We Irish: Essays on Irish Literature and Society Selected Essays of R. P. Blackmur (editor) Reading ...
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... poets from Wordsworth , Coleridge , Keats , and Hopkins to Geoffrey Hill . It was taken up , too , by philologists and lexi- cographers , the Oxford English Dictionary their most telling achievement in historical recovery . The problem ...
... poets from Wordsworth , Coleridge , Keats , and Hopkins to Geoffrey Hill . It was taken up , too , by philologists and lexi- cographers , the Oxford English Dictionary their most telling achievement in historical recovery . The problem ...
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... poem , a play , a novel , or an essay in the New Yorker . Other issues have asserted themselves . “ What we find in ... poems— was he a Fascist ? Conrad versus Chinua Achebe — was Conrad complicit with Imperialism ? T. S. Eliot's anti ...
... poem , a play , a novel , or an essay in the New Yorker . Other issues have asserted themselves . “ What we find in ... poems— was he a Fascist ? Conrad versus Chinua Achebe — was Conrad complicit with Imperialism ? T. S. Eliot's anti ...
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... poem as the mockingbird ; demon and brother because it is not yet clear whether the deliv- ered word death is entirely creative or not — though in the end it is , “ the word up from the waves , ” death being in Whitman's terms a part of ...
... poem as the mockingbird ; demon and brother because it is not yet clear whether the deliv- ered word death is entirely creative or not — though in the end it is , “ the word up from the waves , ” death being in Whitman's terms a part of ...
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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