Rhetoric and Irony: Western Literacy and Western Lies

ISBN-13: 9780195063622 / Angielski / Twarda / 1991 / 344 str.

C. Jan Swearingen

Opis

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.

Recenzje

'The classical debate about language has been re-argued so often that it would now be useful to have a summary of where we stand, what ideas from the ancients persist, and why they make such an attractive screen on which to project modern controversy. Professor Swearingen does just this... Her knowledge of the field makes her as good a commentator as (Eric Havelock, Wayne Booth and Walter Ong) are theoreticians.' Robert Pattison, author of On Literacy, (OUP,1982).