Understanding Rhetoric

A Guide to Critical Reading and Argumentation

Eamon M. Cunningham

• Publisher: BrownWalker Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781627347051
• eBook ISBN: 9781627347068
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

Understanding Rhetoric: A Guide to Critical Reading and Argumentation is a composition textbook that outlines three essential skills – rhetoric, argument, and source-based writing – geared towards newcomers and advanced students alike. Though comprehensive in its coverage, the book's focus is a simple one: how to move beyond a 'gut reaction' while reading to an articulation of what is effective and what is not, while explicitly answering the most important question of 'Why?' This text gets at this central concern in two fundamental ways.First, the text teaches composition as a cumulative process, coaching you how to question, challenge, and expand on not just the readings you hold in your hands, but also how to interrogate the internal processes of writing and thinking. The book's blend of composition methods detail the cross-point of product and process to turn reading and writing from a matter of coming up with answers to questions to learning what type of questions need to be asked in the first place. The 'right' questions, the text argues, are fundamentally rhetorical in nature.Second, the content of the practice-based chapters is framed into a larger mesh of intellectual history to show how the writing and thinking you are doing today is continuous with a long history of writing instruction that goes back to the ancient world. This book provides equal representation from classical and contemporary theory with the recognition that theory cannot be fully grasped without practice, and practice cannot be fully understood without its theoretical antecedent. After all, you can't write 'outside the box' until you know where the box is and what it looks like. REVIEWS and WORDS OF PRAISE 'Understanding Rhetoric is a timely resource. The challenge for good, careful writing and logical speaking and argumentation remains a task for postmodern education. This historically and philosophically grounded work is well written and presented in a way that is most helpful to both student and teacher alike. Understanding Rhetoric deserves a place in every high school and college classroom and resource library.'
James B. Flynn, Ph.D., is a philosopher of education at Framingham State University in Massachusetts. 'Spanning centuries of writing from classical philosophers to modern US Presidents, the text systematically addresses analysis and composition using both the technical, formal terms of writing as well as colloquialisms.… The text not only explains the process of analysis and writing, it provides detailed and varied examples of both. User-friendly, this text could readily be adopted and used for both college and high school-level composition courses; the teacher need only to begin on page one and the course curriculum would be complete.'
Susanne Bronstein is the English Department Chair at Ashland High School in Massachusetts 'Understanding the importance and power of language is more relevant than ever. Cunningham's book -- part informational text, part historical narrative, part handbook--is a critical guide for all students of rhetoric. Each chapter builds on those which precede it, encouraging readers to break away from formulaic processes to really understand, respond to, and control language in the process. The skills in this book are not important just in English classes but in all disciplines.'
Erin Timlin is an AP English Language & Composition teacher at Marshfield High School in Massachusetts 'Cunningham provides teachers and their students with tools to discern the deepest levels of meaning situated within the domain of authorial intent through technique, style, and argument. This approach, grounded in theory, structured in application, re-asserts the why of critical reading and writing as processes instead of mere products.'
Tom O'Toole, Ed.D, is the Director of Humanities at Essex North Shore Agricultural and Technical High School in Massachusetts 'Understanding Rhetoric is a helpful resource for any instructor of composition and will serve as an excellent textbook for college-level writing courses. In clear, student-friendly chapters, the book lays out the history and practice of rhetoric, argument, and source-based analytical writing, with plentiful examples from Aristotle up to the present day. Students will find it entertaining and engaging, and instructors will appreciate the developmental progression from reading and analyzing critical sources to creating and composing original work.'
Kelly Matthews, Ph.D, is a Professor of English at Framingham State University in Massachusetts

Unit 1

Rhetoric

Chapter one

A Brief History of Rhetoric

“We will no longer accept politicians who are all talk and no action, constantly complaining but never doing anything about it. The time for empty talk is over. Now arrives the hour of action.”

—Inaugural Address, Donald J. Trump, January 20, 2017

Whether he knew it or not, Donald Trump’s inaugural address re-cast an age-old skepticism towards rhetoric into a modern context: language is used not to reveal the truth but to conceal it. Check “rhetoric” in a thesaurus, and you’ll find its synonyms are universally negative: bombast, grandiloquence, pomposity, and so on. Turn on the T.V. and you’ll hear things like “actions speak louder than words” and “that’s just empty rhetoric” as insults aimed to slash at credibility and character. For Trump, and for most of contemporary culture, language is seen as the tool by which ambitious politicians weasel their way into public office, weenie out of an accusation, or work around public interest. Language is the weapon of the liar to reverse the order of reality and illusion. If language is the weapon, rhetoric is often thought to be the battle plan for its strategic deployment. But Trump’s incredulous stance towards rhetoric – trotted out before the nation on January 20, 2017 – is as old as the subject itself. What is the origin of this skepticism and has this attitude changed over time? Let’s find out.

Rhetoric in the Classical Period

It’s the 5th century B.C., and two men are locked in a heated debate inside a Sicilian courtroom. The case: an old man has brought suit against his protégé for refusing to pay him the arranged fee for instruction he provided in a new art, rhetoric. This dazzling new technique – a systematic method to convince others of your point of view – is powerful, pragmatic, and (as this case illustrates) prone to potential misuse. Each man pleads their case to the judge. The young man defends his refusal to pay his teacher, citing a loss in his first court case after his program of instruction in the rhetorical arts. This is prima facie evidence, he argues, of his teacher’s lousy instruction and, thus, a violation of the original agreement. The old man comes back. He turns the young man’s argument around, claiming that if he used oratory in the first place, even unsuccessfully, that merely shows a defect in the young man’s use of the skill, not that it wasn’t taught to him. Things grind to a stalemate. Fed up with the bickering, the jury drops the case and jeer both out of the courtroom, κακο

κóρακος κακòν

óν (a bad egg from a bad crow). So goes the legend of Corax (“the crow”), history’s first rhetorician, and his pupil, Tisias (the “egg,” as it were).

Most popular accounts of rhetorical history begin with the doings of the shadowy Corax and his pupil, Tisias. Everything about these two men is steeped in mystery and legend. The little bit we do confidently know about Corax comes from a number of one-off mentions scattered over approximately one thousand years of fragmented writing. Plato mentions Tisias’s rhetorical art in the Phaedrus (370 B.C.) but only roundaboutly suggests the existence of a Corax-like teacher. Aristotle mentions Corax by name in The Art of Rhetoric (350 B.C.) but does so with careful qualifications regarding his existence. In his commentaries on Plato’s Phaedrus, Hermias of Alexandria suggests that Corax was the teacher of Tisias, though later scholia on the same text, notably P. Couvreur’s Hermia Alexandrini in Platonis, Phaedrum Scholia (1901), argues it was the other way around. Accounts of Corax continued into the Roman world. Sextus Empiricus, Marcus Tullus Cicero, Ammianus Marcellinus all make consistent claims to Corax as the father of rhetoric, though these assertions were recorded almost a millennium after his death. What we can know for sure about him is that Corax is mysterious, to say the least.

From 485 – 465 B.C., in the generation before Corax, Syracuse – a region in southeastern Sicily – came under the control of a succession of tyrannical rulers: Gelon I, Hieron I, and Thrasybulus. Known to history collectively as the Deinomenids, these royals were best known for wresting private property away from the landed aristocracy through a kind of early (tyrannical) form of eminent domain. When Thrasybulus assumed the throne in 466 B.C., enough was enough, and he was quickly overthrown in a popular uprising among the landowners that ushered in a period of democracy that lasted until 405 B.C. Deposing Thrasybulus, however, raised one big question for the citizens of Syracuse: how should all the seized land be rightfully redistributed back into the hands of its rightful owners? This question was to be hashed out in courts of law, but the average citizen had no means to effectively represent himself in such a context, effectively setting the stage for Corax and the democratizing force of his speech. This story is derived almost entirely from Cicero’s Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker (46 A.D.), where the author retells Corax’s story as it was originally laid down by Aristotle.

Aristotle, therefore, informs us, that when the Tyrants were expelled from Sicily, and private property (after a long interval of servitude) was determined by public trials, the Sicilians Corax and Tisias (for this people, in general, were very quick and acute, and had a natural turn for controversy) first attempted to write precepts on the art of Speaking. Before them, he says, there was no one who spoke by method, and rules of art, though there were many who discoursed very sensibly, and generally from written note.

Notice the implications of Cicero’s account. First, it concedes that Corax was by no means the first person to speak rhetorically, but he was the first to systematize rhetoric as a techne, a skill or art that can be taught and learned. Thus, Corax is the first rhetorician, one who teaches others how to persuade on their own behalf: how to seize attention (the “proem”), how to advance a proposition (the “demonstration”), and how to close things out (the “epilogue”). This structure as a model for argumentation is common practice now, but that is only because Corax’s early teachings presumably formed the core of what the great Greek thinkers – Socrates, Plato, Aristotle – eventually had to say on the subject.

The legacy of Corax has had an enduring mark on the history of rhetoric, since it is credited as the foundation for two of the three branches of rhetoric which are still recognized today. One set of scholars maintain Corax was instrumental in the development of “forensic” or “judicial” rhetoric (the type of speech used to discuss past action especially in legal contexts), where others argue him as a key figure in the early development of “deliberative” or “political” rhetoric (the type of speech used in deliberative political bodies, often in service of power). The credit for the third branch, “epideictic” or “display” rhetoric, often goes to Gorgias, a rhetorical giant whom we’ll see much more about later on. Exactly which of these branches Corax had the most influence on and exactly how this occurred has been a longstanding matter of scholarly squabble.

Students of Corax saw the practical application of his brand of rhetoric in judicial and political contexts, and it wasn’t long before this skill proliferated into all realms of public life. Teachers of persuasion, “Sophists,” soon began popping up all over the Mediterranean basin to educate anyone on how to argue, given that they had a little extra money on hand to pay for the skill. The greatest transmitter of this practice was a Sicilian named Gorgias (485 B.C. – 380 B.C.), who took Corax’s skills off the island of Sicily and into the big city, Athens.

Less shadowy than Corax, but no less important to the history of rhetoric, was Gorgias of Leontini, Sicily. He was rumored to have known Corax and Tisias personally, and it’s pretty clear from his four extant writings (Athenian Funeral Oration, Palamedes, Encomium on Helen, and On Nature or Not-Being) that the general principles of his rhetoric follow from this earlier tradition, particularly the belief of rhetoric as a techne and the preference of probabilities to immutable truth. He has a compelling personal life, perhaps the most interesting man in the world of his day. In 427 B.C., he was sent as an ambassador by his native city to Athens, and the Athenians liked him so much he never came home. He stayed as an itinerant teacher of rhetoric, traveling from city to city on the Greek mainland, pitching his skill to anyone with a few extra bucks. Never married and with no children, he lived to be 105 years old and made a pretty good living as history’s first successful Sophist. His oratory was truly something to behold, more akin to magic than public speaking. Look no further than the reaction to his Athenian Funeral Oration. Gorgias must have been on his game that night since, following the ceremony, a gold statue of him was erected in the temple of Apollo at Delphi to commemorate the event. He was a regular fixture at festival celebrations (an unusual honor for visitors to the Greek mainland) and his performances became the stuff of legend. His speaking style relied heavily on sonic features – alliteration, assonance, antithesis, parallelism – and his manner of delivery resembled that of a poetic rhapsode or dramatic performer. Some historical accounts describe his ability to “take requests” from the audience to produce an off-the-cuff speech in nearly any oratorical style to the delight and astonishment of those in attendance. Gorgias could lift his audience up and carry them away, turning oration into a rapturous experience that no listener would soon forget. In short, he was good at what he did.

For Gorgias, speech is the attraction, not outcome of it. Deliberative rhetoric may pass laws and judicial rhetoric may mete out justice, but these styles have a common limitation: the speaker must be careful to not call attention to the speech as an act of artifice, elsewise it will blow their cover as a disinterested and selfless rhetor appealing to the greater good. Shakespeare knew this balancing act well. Hamlet makes this point directly in the play that bears his name, yet this hidden gem of a monologue, sitting in the shadow of the “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy from the previous scene, is often overlooked. In Act III, scene ii, Hamlet is backstage speaking to the traveling players. Just before the curtain goes up, Hamlet runs down what makes a convincing performance:

Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion/be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the/word to the action; with this special o’erstep not/the modesty of nature: for anything so overdone is/from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the/first and now, was and is, to hold, as ‘twere, the/mirror up to nature…

Don’t be overblown. Don’t be too dull. Above all, he says, act natural and the audience will eat from the palm of your hand. This is sound advice for the deliberative and judicial rhetorician: call too much attention to the showiness of the performance and the jig is up. Not so with Gorgias. He reveled in the showmanship and his highly stylized speech doubled as a living billboard for what he was selling. Rhetoric that is conscious of itself as rhetoric – known as “epideictic” or “display” rhetoric – became Gorgias’s stock-in-trade and history remembers him as the founding figure of rhetoric’s third major branch.

Plato (428 B.C. – 348 B.C.), the great searcher of Truth in the Ancient world, didn’t take the word games of the Sophists lying down and, in fact, a primary theme of the Platonic dialogues at large is both Socrates’s and Plato’s hostility towards the Sophists. Both viewed them as corrupt teachers who taught young men to argue only for victory and money, and many of Plato’s works contain strong criticisms of the Sophistic project: Euthydemus, Protagoras, Parmenides, Republic, Sophist, Statesman, Ion, and Phaedrus. His greatest head-on attack against this practice appeared in his dialogue Gorgias (380 B.C.), which contains the first appearance of the term “rhetoric” in published literature. Socrates, the main character of Plato’s dialogues, saw Gorgias as a corrupter of the young men who studied rhetoric with him since he propagated a Coraxian form of persuasion to his students: “Rhetoric is the art of persuading an ignorant multitude about the justice or injustice of a matter, without imparting any real instruction.” Plato saw this as the mere appearance of wisdom, a façade for deception through gestures of pseudo-cleverness in the way one speaks. What’s more, whether one’s argument is virtuous or wicked, true or false, is beside the point. For Gorgias, being able to speak well is both a lucrative skill and an end in itself. Eloquence isn’t just for those with a knack for it; Gorgias believed it is teachable skill that can be used by anyone – a “rhētorikē` téchnē” or skill of speaking – for any reason, at any time. More troubling yet, Gorgias’s clientele, the young nobility of Athens training for careers in politics and law, would take these skills into positions of power and authority, thus perpetuating what Plato saw as one of the all-time great evils done against the Greek people. For Plato, to mis-educate society’s leaders on a program of rhetorical deception is to poison the very heart of the state. For a lighthearted and comedic example of rhetoric in the hands of the stupid and incompetent, check out Plato’s lesser known dialogue Euthydemus (384 B.C.). This dialogue illustrates Plato’s distrust of democracy in a nutshell – nitwits egging on halfwits, none of whom have the faintest idea of the higher ideals required for civic life to flourish. And, for Plato, if mob rule is the disease of democracy, rhetoric is the contagion through which it spreads.

Plato’s pupil, Aristotle (384 B.C. – 322 B.C.), was foremost in the revival of rhetoric’s academic respectability. He defined rhetoric as “the faculty of observing in an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Unit 1: Rhetoric
• Unit 2: Argument
• Unit 3: Synthesis
• Acknowledgments