Rhetoric and the Gift: Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Contemporary Communication by Mari Lee Mifsud (review)

The ancient Greek world presents many gifts that keep on giving; its unremitting contributions to the theory-building imaginary of rhetoricians are a case in point. Questions that attend that generosity are ones upon which the Trojans infamously deliberated too quickly: should we, or how much should we, open our gates—and why? Those are very Roman questions. They are practical, bent on measurement, and show a wariness of influence and a reluctance to be receptive without good reason. It was, after all, Virgil—taking on the Homeric epic tradition with his story of the founding of Rome by the Trojan Aeneas—who cautioned: “beware the Greeks, even when they bear gifts.”

In her book, Rhetoric and the Gift, Mari Lee Mifsud dispenses with such suspicion, examining and imagining how the largesse of Homeric gift culture figures within both ancient rhetorical theory and contemporary communication. The ancient rhetorical theory upon which she focuses is that of Aristotle, not the first technician of rhetoric but the first whose techne survives. What intrigues Mifsud is that Aristotle, in his Rhetoric, cites from or refers to Homer more than he does any other writer (Isocrates comes second). Every Homeric line originates from scenes of gift giving and hospitality. Imitating Homer’s own fondness for the form, Mifsud offers a catalog of the references in chapter 3. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 pursue answers to the question, “What does Homer give to Aristotle’s art of rhetoric?” (67).

Mifsud contends Homeric gift culture provides significant parameters for the given (doxa), emphasizing that “rhetoric observes the given, gives judgments, furnishes arguments, and gives advice. Rhetoric as giving positions the rhetor as citizen and, as such, a supplier of persuasive possibilities” (70). For instance, Homer appears throughout Aristotle’s discussion of topoi (places of argument), endowing them with inflections of archaic gift culture. Aristotle cites Homer eight times in his account of the topos of anger, a pathos “brought on by being dishonored undeservedly” (91). Expectations and perceptions govern such evaluations; for example, the anger of Achilles is roused more easily by perceived affronts than the anger of Thersites, simply by virtue of their vast difference in status. By imagining Achilles and Thersites as worthy of equal honor (“respect” is more contemporary to us), we leave Homer’s time and enter our own.

In the early and late chapters, respectively, Mifsud justifies her various incongruous pairings—archaic and classical, epic and rhetoric, tropical and technical, ancient and contemporary—and applies her findings to current challenges. Throughout the book, Mifsud engages an enviable range of interlocutors, from Homer and Vico to Mauss and Cixous. She also recognizes the scholarly beneficence of her coauthors in the discipline, namely, Henry W. Johnstone Jr. and Jane Sutton, the latter with whom she has recently published Alloiostrophic Rhetoric: A Revolution in Tropes, a volume that reads very well alongside Rhetoric and the Gift.

The use of Homer to imagine a generosity- and hospitality-based rhetorical culture will attract rhetoricians who study ancient rhetorics, of course, but it also holds broader appeal. The second half of the subtitle —“contemporary communication”—pertains primarily to discourses blocking belonging and inclusion, especially of those dispossessed by geopolitics or marginalized by entrenched powers at home. Convinced readers of this journal will find the early and late chapters of Rhetoric and the Gift the most generative for their own thinking and communicating, I dedicate the remainder of this review to an appraisal of those chapters.

Mifsud introduces the book as a form of “humanistic problem-solving” actuated by the contemplation of imagined, subjunctive futures that can guide us through complex pasts and presents (15). In particular to her project, Mifsud wonders what a rhetoric of the gift might sound like: what sort of relationships, habits, and structures might it engender, were it the norm? She returns to such imaginings in her conclusion. Chapter 1, “From Technical to Creative Historiography,” calls...