Towards a Rhetorical Ethos: Refractions of Classical Rhetoric in Literary, Cultural, and Political Theory

Abstract

In this thesis I attempt to facilitate a fluid conversation between the ‘rhetorical turn’ in literary and critical theory, and the burgeoning historical interest in rhetoric in fields such as Classical and Renaissance intellectual history. I take issue with those empirical histories of rhetoric that tend to rehearse a canon of programmatic treatises from Aristotle to Cicero and Quintilian, identifying the historical significance of rhetorical practice with the explicit statements of its canonical authors. I argue, rather, that the historiography of rhetoric requires a genealogy from the perspective of its influence on the present and the complex sensibility and multiple orientations it has inspired in its adherents. Evoking critics, philosophers, and political theorists such as Jena Romantics, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Hannah Arendt as case studies, I argue that the public orientation of the rhetorical tradition has survived in the ambivalent conceptual persona of the orator or rhetor, inspiring a model of the intellectual as possessing a complex ethos and eclectic cultural competence. I argue that in the discourse of these theorists of modernity, the rhetor as communicator survives as a paradoxical possibility, an ethic of civic engagement and social intervention and a solitary, ‘untimely’ and transcendent figure beholden to no ideological standard or normative cultural code.