Emerson and the History of Rhetoric

Emerson and the History of Rhetoric PDF Author: Roger Thompson
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 080933612X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
Much has been written about Ralph Waldo Emerson's fundamental contributions to American literature and culture as an essayist, philosopher, lecturer, and poet. However, despite wide agreement among literary and rhetorical scholars on the need for further study of Emerson as a rhetorical theorist, not much has been published on the subject. Emerson and the History of Rhetoric fills this gap in our knowledge, reenvisioning Emerson's work through his significant engagement with rhetorical theory throughout his career and providing a more profound understanding of Emerson's influence on American ideology. Moving beyond dominant literary critical thinking about Emerson's public speaking by discussing it in the context of rhetorical history, Thompson argues that for Emerson, rhetoric was both imaginative and nonsystematic. The book covers the influences of rhetoricians from a range of periods on Emerson's model of rhetoric, including Plato, Augustine, Edmund Burke, and Hugh Blair. Thompson analyzes Emerson's application of Plato's search for transcendental truth and democratic access to the means of persuasion; the Ciceronian rhetoric of Edmund Burke, which Emerson conceived as the perfect balance between common and aristocratic speech; and Augustine's idea of submission. Drawing on Emerson's manuscript notes, journal entries, and some of his rarely discussed essays and lectures as well as his more famous works, the author demonstrates not only Emerson's relevance to rhetorical history but also rhetorical history's relevance to Emerson and nineteenth-century American literature and culture. This book bridges the divide between literary and rhetorical studies, expanding our understanding of this iconic nineteenth-century man of letters.

Emerson and the History of Rhetoric

Emerson and the History of Rhetoric PDF Author: Roger Thompson
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 080933612X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 175

Get Book Here

Book Description
Much has been written about Ralph Waldo Emerson's fundamental contributions to American literature and culture as an essayist, philosopher, lecturer, and poet. However, despite wide agreement among literary and rhetorical scholars on the need for further study of Emerson as a rhetorical theorist, not much has been published on the subject. Emerson and the History of Rhetoric fills this gap in our knowledge, reenvisioning Emerson's work through his significant engagement with rhetorical theory throughout his career and providing a more profound understanding of Emerson's influence on American ideology. Moving beyond dominant literary critical thinking about Emerson's public speaking by discussing it in the context of rhetorical history, Thompson argues that for Emerson, rhetoric was both imaginative and nonsystematic. The book covers the influences of rhetoricians from a range of periods on Emerson's model of rhetoric, including Plato, Augustine, Edmund Burke, and Hugh Blair. Thompson analyzes Emerson's application of Plato's search for transcendental truth and democratic access to the means of persuasion; the Ciceronian rhetoric of Edmund Burke, which Emerson conceived as the perfect balance between common and aristocratic speech; and Augustine's idea of submission. Drawing on Emerson's manuscript notes, journal entries, and some of his rarely discussed essays and lectures as well as his more famous works, the author demonstrates not only Emerson's relevance to rhetorical history but also rhetorical history's relevance to Emerson and nineteenth-century American literature and culture. This book bridges the divide between literary and rhetorical studies, expanding our understanding of this iconic nineteenth-century man of letters.

Emerson and the History of Rhetoric

Emerson and the History of Rhetoric PDF Author: Roger Thompson
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809336138
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 175

Get Book Here

Book Description
Much has been written about Ralph Waldo Emerson’s fundamental contributions to American literature and culture as an essayist, philosopher, lecturer, and poet. But despite wide agreement among literary and rhetorical scholars on the need for further study of Emerson as a rhetorical theorist, little has been published on the subject. This book fills that gap, reenvisioning Emerson’s work through his significant engagement with rhetorical theory in the course of his career and providing a more profound understanding of Emerson’s influence on American ideology. Moving beyond dominant literary critical thinking, Thompson argues that for Emerson, rhetoric was both imaginative and nonsystematic. This book covers the influences of rhetoricians from a range of periods on Emerson’s model of rhetoric. Drawing on Emerson’s manuscript notes, journal entries, and some of his rarely discussed essays and lectures as well as his more famous works, the author bridges the divide between literary and rhetorical studies, expanding our understanding of this iconic nineteenth-century man of letters.

Emerson's Rhetoric of Revelation

Emerson's Rhetoric of Revelation PDF Author: Alan D. Hodder
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Throughout the history of American literature, Emerson's Nature, his little book of 1836, has remained something of an anomaly. Is it a naturalist's monograph or a metaphysician's scheme? In this provocative study of the development and discourse of Emerson's first book, Alan Hodder supersedes the characterizations of previous scholars, as well as Nature's own feints and calculated misrepresentations, in showing that its closest affiliations are actually with the Christian Bible, and in particular the Book of Revelation. Tracing the development of Nature from Emerson's earliest letters, journals, and sermons, this book documents the persisting apocalypticism in Emerson's thought and, in contrast to the received view of Emerson as a radical religious innovator, shows how in regard to questions of religious piety he remained a quite conservative religious thinker. Survival of the distinctive themes and imagery of apocalyptic vision in Emerson's essays and later writing suggests that its crucial movement was for him the double one of the destruction of the world and the creation of the new heaven and earth. Nature, Hodder argues, is the showpiece of this vision and presents for the first time the formula for Emerson's revelation that the essays of the next decade will continue to develop. Though conceived increasingly as Emerson's paradigm for poetic creation and the practical basis for his emerging doctrine of Self-reliance, this apocalyptic formula has its origins in an apocalyptic sensibility and a traditional form of piety modeled after Christ's kenosis and conditioned for him by Mary Moody Emerson, his Calvinist forebears, and the Quaker Friends. Leading his own readers through an exploration of Nature's biblical designs and revisions, close analyses of its rhetorical strategies and multivalence, and a consideration of the impact of these upon Emerson's reader, Hodder evokes a fresh reading of this elusive classic and demonstrates how it repeats and revises the revelations of Saint John through an internalization of its vision.

Emerson and the Climates of History

Emerson and the Climates of History PDF Author: Eduardo Cadava
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804728140
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
This book brings together a wide range of materials from history, religion, philosophy, horticulture, and meteorology to argue that Emerson articulates his conception of history through the language of the weather. Focusing on Emerson's persistent use of climatic and meteorological metaphors, the book demonstrates that Emerson's reflections on the weather are inseparable from his preoccupation with the central historical and political issues of his day. The author suggests that Emerson's writings may be read as both symptomatic and critical of the governing rhetorics through which Americans of his day thought about the most important contemporary issues, and that what has often been seen as Emerson's retreat from the arena of history into the domain of spirit is in fact an effort to re-treat or rethink the nature of history in terms of questions of representation. What distinguishes this book from the work of other critics who are reassessing Emerson's relation to history is its attempt to think through the way in which the figures of Emerson's rhetoric—figures (like frost, snow, the auroras, and nature in general) which often seem to have nothing to do with either history or politics—are themselves traversed by the conflictual histories of slavery, race, destiny, revolution, and the meaning of America. It differs, that is, in proposing a textual model for reading Emerson that measures his engagement with changing historical and political relations in terms of the way he works to revise the language he inherits. There can be no reading of Emerson, the author suggests, that does not trace the movement of his figures and tropes as they become something else, as they open onto questions of history.

Rhetoric and Kairos

Rhetoric and Kairos PDF Author: Phillip Sipiora
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791489388
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
This collection offers the first comprehensive discussion of the history, theory, and pedagogical applications of kairos, a seminal and recently revised concept of classical rhetoric. Augusto Rostagni, James L. Kinneavy, Richard Leo Enos, John Poulakos, and John E. Smith are among the international list of scholars who explore the Homeric and literary origins of kairos, the technologies of time-keeping in antiquity, the role of "right-timing" in Hippocratic medicine, the improvisations of Gorgias, as well as the uses of kairos in Isocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and the New Testament. Broad in its scope, the book also examines the distinctive philosophies of time reflected in Renaissance Humanism, Nineteenth-Century American Transcendentalism, Oriental art and ritual, and the application of kairos to contemporary philosophy, ethics, literary criticism, rhetorical theory, and composition pedagogy.

A Liberal Education in Late Emerson

A Liberal Education in Late Emerson PDF Author: Sean Ross Meehan
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 1640140239
Category : Education, Humanistic
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
Counters the view of the late Emerson's decline by rethinking his engagement with liberal education and his intellectual relation to Whitman, William James, Charles Eliot, and Du Bois.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson PDF Author: Lloyd Rohler
Publisher: Greenwood
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
This critical analysis identifies the different rhetorical strategies and techniques that Emerson used first as a traditional New England preacher and then as he became a widely renowned public lecturer. Ten texts illustrating his different kinds of speeches on a wide array of subjects, such as prayer, manners, eloquence, the American scholar, the genuine man, and the fugitive slave law, accompany the analysis. A speech chronology and bibliography pointing to important primary and secondary materials further enrich this Great American Orators reference tool for students, scholars, and professionals in rhetoric, history, and American studies.

The Rhetoric of Saint Augustine of Hippo

The Rhetoric of Saint Augustine of Hippo PDF Author: Richard Leo Enos
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : la
Pages : 420

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Book Description
It will remain the standard for a long time to come.

Olivier de La Marche and the Rhetoric of Fifteenth-century Historiography

Olivier de La Marche and the Rhetoric of Fifteenth-century Historiography PDF Author: Catherine Emerson
Publisher: Boydell Press
ISBN: 9781843830528
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
How reliable are La Marche's Memoires of the fifteenth-century Burgundian court? Examination of key issues proves their validity.

Nature

Nature PDF Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description