1,721,002 research outputs found
Shakespeare's wavering geography: Religious topographia in Cymbeline
No full textAs forms of vivid description, or enargia, the figures of topographia, topothesia, and chorographia feature prominently in Elizabethan rhetoric manuals. This article considers Cymbeline's wavering geography as a confluence of these tropes. It reads the multiple rhetorical constructs of Shakespearean topographia in Cymbeline as instances of dislocation between the strictures imposed by a national identity project and the ever-present longing for a traditional religious past. In this respect, Cymbeline, whose Christian intimations are still the subject of contention, may also be said to dramatise and interrogate the precarious settlements (cultural, religious, and geographical) brought about by the Henrician reformation
Poisonous Language: Timon of Athens and the Scope of Invective
No full textRecent research on Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens has addressed mainly the nexus between usury, gold and excess within an aristocratic system of patronage that was fostered in early modern England by the emerging paradigms of commercialism. While the issues of money and debt are certainly relevant, I would shift focus on the titular theme of misanthropy, by reflecting on vituperation as a key element in the rhetorical and dramatic economy of the play. Rhetorical invective, rooted in the tradition of argumentative exclamatio, was kept alive in late-medieval manuals of rhetoric and in the educational setting of Shakespeare’s time. Yet, by the second half of the 16th century, the scope of invective was being seriously challenged by Elizabethan and Jacobean legislation against libel. I submit that Timon of Athens should also be read as a theatrical response to this fraught rhetorical and political juncture. Its staging of unregulated invective is the dramatization of emotion, a radicalized instance of ecphonesis, the figure “of vehement affection or passion”, ill-fitted to the cultural priorities of efficiency and analytical thinking on the rise at the time
Revisiting Kenneth Burke: Rethoric, Metaphor, History
No full textThe work of American rhetorician Kenneth Duva Burke (1897-1993) continues to exercise the attention of critics and spark controversy on account of its bewildering scope and its stylistic obscurity. This essay rereads two early works by Burke: Permanence and Change (1935) and Attitudes toward History (1937), for cues to a more articulate understanding of history and historiography through the lenses of poetry and rhetoric, and vice versa. The analysis of these two seminal texts aims to show how Burke’s eclectic approach, based on a keen eye for the workings of rhetoric over a wide and somewhat hazy cultural expanse, greatly enhances our awareness of the ways in which language as a symbolic strategy operates through and across discursive practices (in literature and history first but also, for instance, in the social
sciences). Accordingly, the study reasserts the immediate relevance of the Burkean method (or lack thereof) for liberal academic studies today
Reading (with) Kenneth Burke: A Primer
No full textThis primer probes the wide-ranging work of American rhetorician Kenneth Duva Burke (1897–1993) for cues to a keener understanding of what is involved when we read literature, read history and or engage in translation. It reflects on Burke’s lasting significance, interrogates some features of his eccentric method and considers the breadth of his speculations across the disciplines. In the troubled context of liberal academic studies, within the humanities and inside the ongoing debate on what it means to be human, Burke’s dramatism marks an alternative path that is undoubtedly worth exploring
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