ARRANGEMENT
Wilhelm Wuellner
Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley, California, USA
Arrangement is the ordering of the substance of what was accomplished in the process of
inventio for the purpose of serving the partiality/utilitas in the discourse's aim. Arrangement is the necessary complement to inventio with focus on arrangement of thoughts or ideas, but also of the order and choice of words, both as to their style elocutio) and their delivery acfto)—in terms of their appropriateness (aptum) for the adopted partiality, and in terms of the “parts of speech”.
The Greeks had several words for arrangement:
The Romans used dispositio/disponere and compositio/componere (on lepos, see Spengel 1863:501 n. 23) for and and ordo for The latter is used for the results of one's arranging activity, whether on the level of (1) sentence syntax, the order of words and phrases, or (2) the traditional “parts of speech” etc.), (3) the discourse unit as a whole, or (4) even the order of a collection of books (narratives, essays, letters, law codes, poems; even the canonical order of sacred writings). Besides compositio the term structura was also used for the structural order of the parts of the sentence (Scaglione 1972:24–26). What Stemmler (1985; see bibliography under Cardauns 1985) does for an overview of Krings (1941/1982) does for ordo, but without attention paid to rhetoric.
The activity of inventing, that is generating, designing an arrangement, is designated by
dispositio/disponere and compositio/componere, as well as another set of terms: the Greek and the Latin collocatio, and their respective verbs. According to Cardauns (1985:10) “it is certain that Greek rhetorics of the 1 c. BC and later used as synonym for
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Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication information:
Book title: Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period : 330 B.C.-A.D. 400.
Contributors: Stanley E. Porter - Editor.
Publisher: Brill.
Place of publication: Boston.
Publication year: 2001.
Page number: 51.
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