Brief Notices

Note: Appearance among these brief mentions of recent publications that arrived to late for inclusion or failed to find an appropriate reviewer in this issue does not preclude more detailed review in a later issue of M L N.

 

Thomas O. Sloane, Editor in Chief, Encyclopedia of Rhetoric. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. xii + 837 pages.

This substantial volume, under the general editorship of Thomas O. Sloane with Shadi Bartsch, Thomas B. Farrell, and Heinrich F. Plett serving as consulting editors, offers a comprehensive survey of major topics, schools, and issues in the history of [Western] rhetoric. Its scope is vast, ranging over more than two and a half millennia, from oral epics and the rhetoricians and philosophers of the 5th century BCE to contemporary theory and practice. By the design, the organization of the book is conceptual rather than biographical, presenting nearly 200 entries arranged alphabetically. These range from very short (c. 100 words) for certain figures of speech to major essays (up to 16,000 words). The editors enlisted 120 scholars, many of them 'high-profile, for the enterprise. The contributors have been drawn from the many fields that have been engaged with rhetoric: classical studies, philosophy, literary theory and criticism, cultural studies, speech and communications. The major articles are supplied with current and judiciously annotated bibliographies. Navigation of all this material--and the tracing of individual rhetoricians and theorists--is facilitated by an exceptionally comprehensive index (33 three-column pages) and extensive internal cross-references.

The organization and underlying editorial assumptions are presented in an appendix, a detailed "Synoptic Outline" of the contents, which deploys the conceptual categories in systematic form. Many of these categories and sub-categories are also individual entries in the alphabetical body of the Encyclopedia. Both the editor's preface and this synopticon assume a common, more or less continuous tradition of rhetoric in the West, with its roots in Greek and Roman culture. The outline proceeds through the traditional three modes of proof, five 'offices' of rhetoric, the ends of eloquence and persuasion, rhetorical genres, the many subjects collaterally related to rhetoric (such as hermeneutics, iconography, law, linguistics, logic, politics, religion, etc.), strategies and principles ("the tactics that have aggregated to rhetoric through the centuries" (including commonplaces, copia, and some 64 figures). It concludes with a historical review of rhetoric covering the familiar periods.

It is not surprising, given the foundational assumptions, that the editor has recruited an exceptionally strong team of classical scholars. George A. Kennedy contributes, inter alia, the longest essay in the book--on "Classical Rhetoric" (23 double-column pages)--, while Elaine Fantham devotes 10 pages to "Eloquence" and David Cohen 9 pages to "Oratory." Gregory Nagy's succinct discussion of "Orality and Literacy" is somewhat shorter but has an especially valuable annotated bibliography. There are very substantial essays in other fields and periods: to cite only a few significant examples, Peter Goodrich's 10 pages on "Law," Manfred Kienpointer's 23 pages on "Linguistics," D. P. Gaonkar's wide-ranging essay of 16 pages on "Contingency and Probability,"and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's 10 pages on "Modern Rhetoric" (supplemented by her 8 pages on "Feminist Rhetoric").

As the editor notes, there is some inevitable overlapping of material, while in certain cases topic entries have been divided into two or more articles; thus "Philosophy" is divided between Brian Vickers and Christopher Lyle Johnstone; "Medieval Rhetoric" between Rita Copeland and, concentrating on grammar, Jan Ziolkowski; and "Audience" yields three separate articles addressing an 'overview,' 'mass audiences,' and 'virtual audiences'.

The Encyclopedia is a user-friendly reference work and one that combines a very solid grounding in antiquity with attention to the most recent inflections of rhetorical theory and practice (e.g., its emphases on performance and communication). While this volume is not designed to supplant either the Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition, edited by Theresa Enos (1996), or Heinrich Lausberg's authoritative Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik (1960), it is based on rather different principles and thereby offers a fresh and reliable approach to the concepts and themes...