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11. Aristotle’s Rhetoric : A Guide to the Scholarship
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A Guide to the Scholarship 185 11 Aristotle’s Rhetoric: A Guide to the Scholarship Arthur E. Walzer, Michael Tiffany, and Alan G. Gross This guide to the scholarship is intended for students beginning a systematic study of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. It divides the eighty-five books and articles reviewed into three broad groups: those dealing with the text of the Rhetoric, those concerned with its political and intellectual contexts, and those that discuss the meaning of important concepts within the treatise. As our title states, this essay is a guide intended to help students beginning their systematic study of the Rhetoric. This guide is also a taxonomy, and taxonomies are never neutral. Our scheme seems to have favored articles over books, probably because articles, with singleness of purpose, fit more easily into the boxes and the boxes within boxes of our system. Certainly, George A. Kennedy’s (1963) discussion of the Rhetoric and the book-length treatments of it by William M. A. Grimaldi (1972), Larry Arnhart (1981),Thomas Farrell (1993), and Eugene Garver (1994b) deserve more than the passing mention that they receive. We have also favored recent over older work. This seems reasonable, but perhaps it has given undue prominence to two recent collections of work by philosophers: Aristotle’s “Rhetoric”: Philosophical Essays, edited by David J. Furley and Alexander Nehamas (1994); and Essays on Aristotle’s “Rhetoric,” edited by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (1996). Our scheme has three basic parts—text, context, and concepts—as well as a note on the uses of the Rhetoric in composition.The first part, “Text,” reviews available editions, translations, and basic references and discusses the problem of the apparent lack of unity in the Rhetoric. The second section considers work on the rhetorical, political, theoretical, canonical, and intellectual contexts of the Rhetoric . The motivation for much of the work reviewed in this section is to address the alleged disunity discussed in the first section.The third part takes up work on key concepts: the proofs (pisteis), the enthymeme, the example (paradeigma), the topics (topoi), and style (lexis), especially metaphor. Text: Editions, Translations, Basic References The best edition of the Greek text is Rudolf Kassel, Aristotelis “Ars Rhetorica” Arthur E. Walzer, Michael Tiffany, and Alan G. Gross 186 (1976). There are two recent English translations: George A. Kennedy, Aristotle on Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse (1991) and H. C. Lawson-Tancred, The Art of Rhetoric (1991).There is general agreement among the contributors to this volume that the Kennedy translation is to be preferred, in part because of its helpful notes, its appendices, and its Greek glossary. The Freese translation (Loeb Library edition, 1926) is satisfactory also and has the advantage of having the Greek on the facing page, though the edition relied on, the Bekker, is outdated. The Rhys Roberts is also reliable, especially as reprinted in Barnes (1984) with corrections. The popular anthology of Bizzell and Herzberg (1990) prints excerpts from Rhys Roberts in its original form. Since the text is so problematic, it is important to know its history. This may be surveyed in the thorough, lavishly illustrated and readable A History of Aristotle’s “Rhetoric” with a Bibliography of Early Printings (1989) by Paul Brandes. A very readable account of the transmission of Greek manuscripts is L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to theTransmission of Greek and Latin Literature (1991). It is not usually realized that the earliest manuscript of the Rhetoric postdates its composition by well over a thousand years. Citations of the Rhetoric and other works by Aristotle are conventionally referenced by “Bekker numbers,” for example, the opening line of the Rhetoric is 1354a. As Brandes explains, Immanuel Bekker (1785–1871) selected from the four hundred or more manuscripts he examined, the one hundred he judged most reliable, and collated these into a two-volume Greek text that was published in 1831. In addition to numbering the pages of this text, Bekker divided each page into columns . Thus, 1354a refers to page 1354, left column, of Bekker’s two-volume edition of Aristotle’s works (Brandes, 162–63). The number that sometimes follows a reference, for example, 1354a10, refers to the line number within the column. Even though Bekker’s text is no longer considered the most authoritative (it has been superseded by Kassel’s), his referencing system remains the standard one. For information on ancient Greek texts, students should refer to the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae: Canon of...