Isocrates

Against the backdrop of the Greek history of rhetorical theory, this book accentuates contemporary critical and Marxist theories of resistance, domination, knowledge, and systems of ideological control.

Some of the finest Greek writers - Demosthenes, Lysias, Antiphon - were also great orators. However, a number of other Greek writers who specialized purely in oratory have largely been overlooked by classicists. Dr. Stephen Usher addresses this imbalance by showing the diversity of the inherited rhetorical tradition, and by demonstrating through close critical examination how the individual characteristics of the orators were developed.

In this groundbreaking new book, Steven B. Katz conducts a philosophical critique of Reader Response Criticism from an "aural point of view" afforded by classical rhetoric, the philosophy of language, and music theory. Simultaneously, he assesses the scientific empiricism and technological rationalism that control the parameters of reading and writing theory, research, and pedagogy. In doing so, Katz examines the possibility and desirability of teaching reading and writing as "rhetorical music" to supplement the formalistic, logocentric imperatives that underlie current methods of reading and writing instruction. This book will interest not only theorists and teachers in rhetoric, composition, and literature but also scholars and teachers of oral interpretation, literature and science, and poetics.

Theopompus of Chios was one of the most important ancient Greek historians of the fourth century BC. Although his work has survived only in fragments, it is still a rich and vital source of information for Greek political, social, and intellectual history during the age of Philip of Macedon. This book explores both Theopompus's historical method and the intellectual milieu in which he worked, while placing the fragments themselves in "context" by examining where and why they are cited by later authors. Flower's illuminating and original study leads up to some important new conclusions about historical writing in the fourth century BC--that there was no so-called Isocratean school of rhetorical history; that Theopompus used moral explanations typical of Greek thought to account for historical changes; and that oral tradition, as opposed to rhetorical invention, was still vibrant in the fourth century. All Greek in the book is translated.

In the past twenty years the study of Sparta has come of age. Images prevalent earlier in the 20th century, of Spartans as hearty good fellows or scarlet-cloaked automata, have been superseded by more complex scholarly reactions. As interest has grown in the self-images projected by this most secretive of Greek cities, increasing attention has focused on how individual Greek writers from other states reacted to information, or disinformation about Sparta.The studies in this volume provide new insights into the traditional historians' question, "What actually happened at Sparta?". But the implications of the work go far beyond Laconia. They concern preoccupations of some of the most studied of Greek writers, and help towards an understanding of how Athenians defined the achievment, or the failure, of their own city.

Since its early history in Greek culture, traditional rhetorical study has focused primarily on persuasive language used in the public sphere. There has been little study, however, of what Jean Nienkamp calls internal rhetoric, which "occurs between one aspect of the self and another" inside one's mind. Nienkamp opens the study of internal rhetoric by discussing how the concept developed alongside traditional classical and modern rhetorical theory.

Nienkamp shows how we talk to ourselves, or more specifically, how we talk ourselves into things: justifications, actions, opinions, theories. She explains that just because we see ourselves as divided, as torn in different directions by conflicting desires, duties, and social mores, it does not mean that we are split into discrete identities that neither interrelate nor interact. In this groundbreaking study, Nienkamp identifies two major aspects of internal rhetoric: "the conscious 'art' of cultivated internal rhetoric" and "the unconscious 'nature' of primary internal rhetoric."

Selecting a small number of figures from the history of rhetoric -- including Isocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Lord Shaftesbury, Richard Whately, Kenneth Burke, Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, George Herbert Mead, and Lev Vygotsky -- Nienkamp argues for a "version of the rhetorical self that takes into account both the ways we are formed by and formulate internal and external rhetorics and the ways our physical bodies act as a contributing scene -- an agora -- for internal rhetoric."