Today

• Finish Vico

• Blair

• Campbell

• Elocution

• Rhetoric in America

New ScienceThinking developed according to 4 tropes

• Metaphor

• Synecdoche

• Metonymy

• Irony

Ages of Societies• Age of Gods

– Metaphor

• Age of Heroes– Metonymy and synecdoche

• Age of Humans– Irony

• Start it all over again

Vico in England and Ireland• Coleridge and

Yeats make references to Vico

• Jocye uses Vico’s sense of the cycles of thought to structure Finnegan’s Wake

Ingenium• A nonrational insight into

similarities or relationships

• more rhetorical than logical

• results in insights rather than in deductions

• new knowledge

Roses are redViolets are blueRhetoric is awesomeAnd so are you

This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,Sails the unshadowed main, The venturous bark that flings On the sweet summer wind its purpled

wings In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren sings, And coral reefs lie bare, Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their

streaming hair.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Hugh Blair (1718-1800)

• Presbyterian preacher

• Appointed to the chair of rhetoric and Belles Lettres at the University of Edinburgh

University of Edinburgh

• Need for social class to match economic power

• Open Admissions policy

• Lectures in English

Taste

• “Taste may be defined ‘The power of receiving pleasure from the beauties of nature and art’”

• “The pleasures of taste refresh the mind after the toils of the intellect, and the labours of abstract study; they gradually raise it above the attachments of sense, and prepare for it the enjoyments of virtue”

Why is Taste Important?

• It is a healthy thing

• It is necessary for social advancement

• It reflects a good mind

George Campbell (1719-1796)

• Rhetoric helps us understand human understanding

• Quintilian might say that a vivid idea is persuasive, Campbell tries to explain why an idea is perceived as vivid

Rhetoric as Psychology

• The focus is on universal human faculties and not local audience values

• Something like the different forums (courts, assembly, etc.) are irrelevant

Campbell and Invention

• Invention focused on understanding how a concept entered the mind

• A speaker hoped to recreate in speech the means by which a concept entered their mind

Belles Lettres and Rhetoric• Belletrism focuses on style, an inheritance of the

Ramist split

• Belletrism shifts rhetoric from persuasion to appreciation

• Belletrism shifts rhetoric from production to reception

• Belletrism shifts rhetoric from public influence to personal improvement

Elocution

• Speech and accent were markers of class and elocution was a solution

• Appears first in Ireland and Scotland

Rhetoric in America

• Ramism in the colonies

• Ciceronianism in the 18th C.

• Belles Lettres in 18th and 19th C. – Helps found modern English departments

Rhetoric in America

The influential textbook author Adams Sherman Hill wrote in 1878, that rhetoric “does not undertake to furnish a person with something to say.” Rather, it “shows how to convey from one mind to another the results of observation, discovery, or classification”