Rhetorical Action in Ancient Athens: Persuasive Artistry from Solon to DemosthenesSIU Press, 2006 - 249 من الصفحات James Fredal’s wide-ranging survey examines the spatial and performative features of rhetorical artistry in ancient Athens from Solon to Demosthenes, demonstrating how persuasive skill depended not on written treatises, but on the reproduction of spaces and modes for masculine self-formation and displays of contests of character.
Studies of the history of rhetoric generally begin with Homer and Greek orality, then move on to fifth-century Sicily and the innovations of Corax, Tisias, and the older Sophists. While thorough and useful, these narratives privilege texts as the sole locus of proper rhetorical knowledge. Rhetorical Action in Ancient Greece: Persuasive Artistry from Solon to Demosthenes describes rhetoric as largely unwritten and rhetorical skill as closely associated with the ideologies and practices of gender formation and expression. In expanding the notion of rhetorical innovation to include mass movements, large social genres, and cultural practices—rather than the formulations of of individual thinkers and writers—Fredal offers a view of classical rhetoric as local and contingent, bound to the physical spaces, local histories, and cultural traditions of place.
Fredal argues that Greek rhetorical skill remained a function of local spaces like the Pnyx, social practices such as symposia or local meetings, cultural ideologies like those surrounding masculine friendship, and genres of performance such as how to act like a man, herald, sage, tyrant, or democrat. Citizen participation, he explains, was motivated by the desire to display masculine excellence in contests of character by overcoming fear and exerting symbolic and bodily control over self, situation, and audience. He shows how ancient Greek rhetoric employed patterns of “action” such as public oratory and performance to establish, reinforce, or challenge hierarchies and claims to political power.
Instead of examining speeches, handbooks, and theory, Rhetorical Action in Ancient Greece examines the origins of rhetoric in terms of performance. The result is a presentation of rhetorical knowledge as embodied in places and practices with spatial and practical logics that are rarely articulated in written discourse. The volume calls on archaeological, literary, and anthropological evidence about the rhetorical actions of Athens’s leading political agents—including Solon, Peisistratus, Cleisthenes, Demosthenes, and the anonymous “herm-choppers” of the Peloponnesian war—to demonstrate how each generation of political leaders adopted and transformed existing performance genres and spaces to address their own political exigency.
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من داخل الكتاب
... Establishing Rhetoric : Solon of Athens I 36 3. Producing a Space : Solon of Athens II 56 4. Staging a Tyranny : Histrionic Rhetoric under the Peisistratids 84 5. Weaving the City : Cleisthenes Binds the Demos 106 6. Smashing Boundaries ...
... established by the dominant paradigm of purely verbal rhetoric ( begin- ning with Tisias and running through Blair and Burke ) and its relentless privi- leging of written records , individual authors , and theoretical positions.3 We ...
... established practice of concentrating cultural value in the performative acquisition and display of masculinity . To persuade in public , you had to ( appear to ) act like a man by showing off your ( acquired ) masculine nature , only ...
... established patterns of rhetorical interaction that would come to define for later generations what it meant to be an Athenian citizen and a rhetorical agent , a good person acting well . I will therefore be examining the persuasive ...
... established spaces for its execution , could read the situational variables that would affect his performance and guide his adaptation of models , and so gain some sense of control over his own actions and the fate of a people , that ...
المحتوى
Rhetorical Performance and the Contest for Fame | 15 |
Seeing Rhetorical Means | 182 |
Notes | 205 |
Works Cited | 225 |
Index | 239 |