Bon Mot
Dennis
Why, my dear friend, said Socrates, must not I or any one be in a
strait who has to speak after he has heard such a rich and varied
discourse? I am especially struck with the beauty of the
concluding words-who could listen to them without amazement? When I
reflected on the
immeasurable inferiority of my own powers, I was ready to run away for
shame, if there had been a possibility of escape. For I was reminded of
Gorgias, and at the end of his speech I FANCIED that Agathon was
shaking at me the Gorginian or Gorgonian head of the great master of
rhetoric, which was simply to turn me and my speech, into stone, as
Homer says, and strike me dumb. And then I perceived how foolish I had
been in consenting to take my turn with you in praising love, and
saying that I too was a master of the art, when I really had no
conception how anything ought to be praised.
***********************************************
The Class Struggle, Gorgias, and his Art of Rhetoric
Michael S. Kochin
http://mpsa.indiana.edu/conf2003papers/1031882399.pdf
Gorgias rhetoric and his apologies for it are intended to serve the
interest of the traditional Greek aristocracy, whose capacity for
violence does not depend of speech but rather on familial wealth and on
familial relations. The many can only exercise violence to impose their
decrees on the few if they can be joined together by common
deliberation. Gorgias argues that a sharing of things through common
deliberation is in fact impossible: what seems like agreement is in
fact simply the imposition by one alone of his speech as a
<<master-speech>>, a speech that one body among other bodies uses to
master the bodies (including the souls) of his audience. The rule of
one is always and everywhere the case, but that rule can be more
effective insofar as the one who rules has mastered the art of verbal
manipulation that Gorgias professes.
(snip)
Gorgias was notorious in antiquity for his style, which readers of
Plato can sample in pastiche in Polus's answer to Chaerophon. The style
is homophonic, jingly, with balanced sentences and often seems to
<<sacrifice meaning to the effect of sound>>. It is enchanting,
magical, bewitching. Though we contemporaries, "nittering nabobs of
negativism" all, affect to despise the Gorgianic style, his style was
in fact enormously influential, on later Greek prose, and on English in
the Elizabethan age of "EUPHUISM'. One can hear echoes of Gorgias even
in the highest moment of American political rhetoric, in Lincoln's
Second Inaugural: "Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this
mighty scourge of war shall speedily pass away."
********************************************
http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/bl/uc_bakaoukas2c.htm
Gorgias vs Plato : an ancient debate over the non-existent
As has already been said, the origin of the philosophical debate over
the non-being is the first treatise on non-being written by Gorgias the
Sophist in the 5th c. BC. As Guthrie (1975: 708) and Newiger (1973:
177-8, 181-188) point out, Gorgias was the target of Plato's Sophist.
As regards the relation between Plato and Gorgias it has been argued by
Newiger (1973: 177-188) and Hays (1990: 336-7) that there are some
important parallels between Gorgias' On What is not and Plato's
dialogues Parmenides, Meno, Theaetetus and Sophist. These parallels
have not yet been investigated in detail. In Hay's words (1990: 336-7)
"it would seem prudent for scholars of Plato to re-acquaint themselves
with the treatise and to keep in mind that Plato had to respond to
these Gorgianic arguments.
(snip)
The stranger's critique of this debate serves as the introduction to
the Platonic solution to the problem of non-being. Plato does not agree
with the sophist's view that non-being is an image. For Plato the Other
is Non-being by another name, and it turns out to be the case, not only
that the Other is, but that Being and beings participate in it and
hence in some sense are not. (252C-259D). What remains to be shown is
that these conditions obtain in the case of speech, the medium of
sophistry. Plato examines the structure of sentences as well as the
relation of speech to opinion, thought and appearance in order to
determine how Non-being makes its appearance within the realm of human
speech and thinking (259D-264B). Then he reduces sophistry to the class
of apparition-mak-ing, i.e., the making of images that do not preserve
the true proportions of their originals. The sophist is shown, among
other things, to be a knowing-imitator of what he does not know
(264C-268D). He is among those who mime things or paint them, or who
make images in words (Cobb, 1990; Brann, 1995, 2-3).
But according to Parmenides, images have no place in the world. For
they are curious hybrids. Being and Non-being are intertwined in an
image because in its very being an image is genuinely a likeness. It
certainly is an image, but precisely as an image it is not the
original. But there are images and images. Some preserve the
proportions of the original and are truthful likenesses; others are
distortions - PHANTASMS and apparitions of the original. The sophist is
naturally identified as a producer of such apparitions. He gives
"phantastic" accounts and induces, for profit, deceptions and false
opinions in the soul. To hold a false opinion is to think that what is
not, is and what is, is not; to speak falsely is to say that what is
not the case is the case and the reverse. The Sophist is a maker of
false verbal images. He cunningly appeals to the great Parmenides
himself, who had denied that exactly this was possible: to think and to
say what is not (Brann, 1995, 2-3; White, 1993).
*********************************************
<< The Sophists were united in their belief that language is a tool for
human invention of artistic speeches; that rhetoric is a powerful art
form capable of changing the world; and that the relativistic world
needed to be seen as filled with illusions. He who built the better
illusion would prevail. >>
********************************************
Haughty, aloof from theatre's alarums,
you easily, regretlessly relinquished
the laurels twinning into a dry wreath,
concealing for all time your monstrous genius
beneath a mask; and yet, your PHANTASM'S echoes
still vibrate for us; your Venetian Moor,
his anguish; Falstaff's visage, like an udder
with pasted-on mustache; the raging Lear..
You are among us, you're alive; your name, though,
your image, too - deceiving, thus, the world
you have submerged in your BELOVED Lethe. _Nabokov_
*******************************************
Mary Sidney Herbert's Antonius, English Philhellenism and the
Protestant Cause
Victor Skretkowicz
Abstract:
This study of the literary and political contexts of Mary Sidney
Herbert's Antonius examines its relationship to its companion pieces, A
Discourse of Life and Death. When she translated these works in 1590,
Sidney Herbert's role as a Protestant philhellenist led her to adapt
Garnier's allegory to describe the plight of the Huguenots. She
published them in 1592 to advertise Du Plessis-Mornay's fund-raising
campaign. Sidney Herbert's choice of blank verse to translate Garnier's
alexandrine couplets stem from her reinterpretation of the Calvinist
admiration of Plutarch's Lives as a work in which the models of
Christian virtue are described in clear and unadorned prose.
(snip)
Sidney Herbert's expertise in manipulation translation into a political
or cultural statement places her at the forefront of reformers of
English dramatic rhetoric and style; and indeed, of English literary
style in a much broader sense. One measure of the success of her
translation of Garnier as political propaganda, at least among the
English Protestants, is that it set a precedent for utilising FRENCH
SENECAN drama as an instrument for advocating political reform. R.A.
Rebholz particularly notes the impact of this reformist tool on the
first version of Fulke Greville's Mustapha through the medium of Kyd's
Cornelia, a translation of Garnier's Cornelie.
(snip)
The philhellenic revival of Attic rhetoric, ethics and politics
paralleled and was fostered by Protestant political movements,
including that of the Huguenots. Plutarch provided the Huguenots with
ideal models both of republican idealism and the means of achieving
them through the expousal of monarchomachia, the killing of unjust
kings. Focusing on the Scottish Protestant monarchomachists, Buchanan
in particular, and Shakespeare's interpretation of Scottish
republicanism in Macbeth, David Norbrook notes that "Buchanan was one
of those humanist who looked back nostalgically to the early days of
the Roman republic as a period of linguistic as well as political
purity." Others were Hubert Languet, Mornay and Philip Sidney. There
was ample precedent among Mary Sidney Herbert's family's connecitons
for her holding similar philhellenic views of democracy, republicanism
and linguistic purity similar to Buchanan's.
We can see how Atticism lies behind Sidney's attack in the Defence
of Poetry on the exceptionally pretentious and artificially florid
English-Greek styles preferred by speakers he has heard, and preserved
by writers of the EUPHUIST school such as Lyly, Greene and Pettie.
********************************************
“Catchy, clever titles are not acceptable’: Style, APA, and
qualitative reporting
Nancy Zeller
Frank Farmer
Qualitative Studies in Education, 1999, Vol 12, No 1, 3-19
Ancient Times
Emerging from a still vital, oral tradition, the Greek sophists of the
fifth century B.C.E. were the first to suggest that all knowledge is
rhetorical and, further, that rhetoric is a practical art capable of
making new knowledge (Bizzell & Herzberg, 1990, p.22). While debate
continues on whether the sophists themselves conceived an epistemology
that might properly be called “rhetorical” (see Poulakos, 1990,
1993; Schiappa, 1990), few would disagree that more than a century
before Aristotles’s Rhetoric, the sophists had already mastered the
rhetorical appeal systematized in that later work. To persuade the
large and frequent audiences they drew, the sophists made effective use
of appeals to speakerly reputation (ethos), to audience emotion
(pathos), and to modes of reasoning common to speaker and audience
alike (logos). And yet, arguable, what the sophists are best remembered
for is their abundant use of tropes, figures of speech, stylistic
embellishment, and performative delivery – the kind of verbal
exuberance that later came to be known as the ASIATIC style.
Among sophists,the figure most often associated with verbal excess is
Gorgias, a teacher of rhetoric known best from Plato’s damning
portrayal of him in the dialogue that bears his name. The Gorgianic
style, as it has come to be known, was marked by antithesis,
repetition, parallelism, and unrelenting word play.
(snip)
(…) Jacqueline de Romilly (1975) has shown that the origins of the
Gorgianic style are found in the great storytelling traditions of Greek
epic and tragic poetry. Impressed by the magical effects that poetic
language could inspire, Gorgias borrowed freely from these traditions,
finding in poetic narrative a model for rhetorical practice. Indeed,
Gorgias’ definition of poetry as rhythmic speech confirms this
blurring of discursive roles, and the growing tendency to look upon
poetry “as a kind of proto-rhetoric” served the purposes of both
Gorgias and, ironically, his most vehement critic, Plato (de Rommilly,
1975, pp.6-8). It is no accident, for example, that Plato exiles poets
and rhetors from his ideal state: both traffic in appearances and use
– or rather misuse – language to make these appearances seem real
or true to the unknowing. For Plato, the chief problem with rhetoric is
that it is able to produce “mere” belief or opinion rather than
Truth. Poetry likewise is flawed because it operates at a double remove
from the ideal forms of Truth (since poetry can achieve a status no
higher than that of being an imitation of an imitation of Truth). The
tendency on the part of the sophists (such as Gorgias) to conflate
these arts of deception must have seemed particularly reprehensible to
Plato. Yet, given his obvious intent to establish philosophy
(dialectic) as the foundation of all knowledge, the same tendency must
have seemed fortuitous as well.
Walter R Fisher (1985) reminds us that long before Plato, the term
logos denoted more than a simple appeal to reason: it encompassed
“all forms of human expression and communication,” including
“story, reason, rationale, conception, discourse, and/or thought”
(p.74) Plato, and his philosophic successor, Aristotle, succeeded in
narrowing logos from a general term rich n potential meanings to a
specific term applicable only to philosophical and, later, technical
discourse. Poetic and rhetorical forms of discourse, with regard to
their capacity to transmit “truth, knowledge, and reality,” were
thus relegated to a “secondary or negative status” (Fisher, 1985,
p.74). To be sure both poetry and rhetoric acquire an important and
philosophic legitimization in Aristotle’s treatment of each, but
there is little doubt as to their relative status vis-a-vis philosophy.
Shortly after the death of Aristotle (322 B.C.E.), the great public
library at Alexandria in Egypt was founded (295 B.C.E.), the great
public library at Alexandria in Egypt was founded (295 B.C.E.), and
event of signal importance if only because the Alexandrian library was
responsible for preserving ancient documents that wer would not have
otherwise. But Alexandrian scholars were also notable for one of the
earliest know attempts at the (now disputatious) practice of
canonization. They established a list of the ten most important Greek
orators – Demosthenes, Lysias, Isocrates, et al. – all of whom
presumable exemplified the highest standards of Greek oratory (Murphy,
1983, p.77).
The Ten Attic Orators, as this CANON came to be designated
(Melville – “In the pinioned figure, arrived at the yard-end, to
the wonder of all no motion was apparent, none save that created by the
ship's motion, in moderate weather so majestic in a great ship
ponderously cannoned”).,
proved highly influential among the Romans who, not surprisingly,
discovered in Attic oratory models of stylistic excellence worthy of
emulation in Latin oratory. It is important to keep in mind, though,
that this was a canonization not merely of excellent orators but of
stylistic virtues. Kirby (1996) reminds us that “Greek Atticism…was
primarily a written phenomenon, characterized by strict adherence to a
carefully circumscribed vocabulary and to a collection of syntactical
patterns favored by the canonical authors of the fifth and fourth
centuries B.C.E. “ (p.42) The general virtues of the Attic style were
widely held to be simplicity and purity of expression. As these virtues
became increasingly codified, they also became more rigidly defined and
vehemently defended, especially against what was perceived to be the
corrupting influences of orators schooled in Asia Minor and on the
island of Rhodes. This conflict, known as the Attic-Asiatic debate,
occupied a good deal fo the public discourse of the first century,
B.C.E., a century that saw the appearance of the first Roman treatises
on rhetoric and oratory.
Cicero, the most important author of such treatises, was in fact
criticized for indulging in the Asiatic style, a charge he defended
himself against in the Brutus and the Orator (46 B.C.E.). In these
writings (and elsewhere) Cicero refuses the common partitioning of
Attic and Asiatic styles, a split that nearly always disparaged the
latter. We think Cicero’s eschewal of this dichotomy is related to
another of what Cicero considered unnecessary divisions.
Cicero often laments the sundering of philosophy and rhetoric, noting
that “the schism between the disciplines accounts for the paucity of
truly eloquent orators” among his contemporaries (Cicero, 1962,
Orator, 15). For one who wished rhetoric “to be a system of general
culture,” the divorcing of wisdom from eloquence must have made that
wish seem remote, if not altogether impossible (Ochs, 1983, p.106).
Cicero holds Socrates to be the one philosopher most responsible for
separating philosophy and rhetoric (though, as Cicero observes
ironically, Socrates himself was “a master rhetorician”). A
consequence of this separation, Cicero complains, is that “we now
learn to think with the guidance of the philosophers and to speak with
the rhetoricians” (Cicero, 1954, De Oratore, Bk. III, 55). IN
Cicero’s day, the yoking of thought and word – a relationship that
characterized the older sense of logos – is thoroughly at odds with
the rigid boundaries that mark off philosophy and rhetoric.
Not surprisingly, then, Cicero resists the similarly DIVISIVE (though
popular) inclination to glorify Attic virtues at the expense of Asiatic
ones. He argues that there are variations within both styles and that
appropriateness (decorum) should be the key to choice and usage. In the
Orator, he holds that an intermingling of styles is often useful and
rhetorically effective – a claim that suggests an accomplished orator
with command a range of available styles (even, we may guess, when
those styles embrace qualities typicall labeled Asiatic). Finally, in
the Brutus, Cicero reminds us that “not all who speak in the Attic
style speak well, but all who speak well should be called Attic”
(p.290). This statement should not be read as Cicero’s attempt to
exclude the Asiatic style from descriptions of ‘speaking well;”
rather, it should be read as a move to subsume certain Asiatic
qualities – embellishment and figurative language, for example –
under the salutary rubric of Attic.
All told, Cicero’s attempts to defend the Asiatic style constitute
one facet of a larger project to repair the devastating breach between
philosophy and rhetoric, wisdom and eloquence. Cicero is right to
discover the origins of this separation in Platonic epistemology. And
we think it is hardly coincidental that , as George A Kennedy has
shown, the Attic style, “in it’s most extreme form,” found yet
another model in the writings of Plato (Kennedy, 1980, p.119) or that
the Asiatic Style may be properly regarded as “a descendant of the
artificialities of the sophists” (Kennedy, 1972, p.99). Understood
this way, the Attic-Asiatic debate of the first century B.C.E. had
rather serious implications for a thinker like Cicero, who hoped to see
rhetoric and oratory restored to their earlier glory.
Echoes of the Attic-Asiatic debate, we believe, can be heard in any
number of different contexts since the days of Cicero. An Asiatic
tendency, for example, may be heard in the Second Sophistic of the
Roman Empire, in the writings of thinkers as diverse as Erasmus and
Nietzsche, in the Scholastics of the High Middle Ages and the
Neo-Ciceronians of the Renaissance, and, most recently perhaps, in the
verbal experiments of much postmodern writing and literate. By
contrast, the Attic tendency can be heard in the writings of Anicius
Boethius and Francis Bacon, in the SENECANS (who opposed the
Neo-Ciceronians) of the seventeenth century, and, we believe, in the
modern composition handbook of the twentieth.
*******************************************
The Attic School.
The fragments of Cæcilius' writings which are still extant attest
above all his versatility. Together with his friend Dionysius, he was
the representative in his time of the Attic style of oratory in
contradistinction to the verbose Asiatic style. While the earlier
devotees of the Attic school contented themselves with the study and
the classification ofliterary forms, Cæcilius and Dionysius extended
their labors to the fields of philology and esthetic criticism; and the
hatred felt by the former for the Asiatic school resulted in his two
works directed against it: Τίνι ΔιαΦέρει ὁ Αττικος
Ζῆλος τοῦ Ασιανοῦ ("On the Differences between the
Attic and the Asiatic Styles"), and Κατὰ Φρυγῶν ("Against
the Phrygians"; that is, the ASIATIC BARBARIANS). In his earliest works
on rhetoric (Tέχνη Pητορική and Περὶ
Σχημάτωμ), Cæcilius showed himself a disciple of the older
Attic teachers, who confined their attention to matters of form; but
soon afterward he seems to have come under the influence of Dionysius,
to whom may be attributed his interest in philologic and esthetic
criticism.
Other Works.
In the latter field, the most significant work of Cæcilius is
Περὶ χαρακτῆρος τῶμ Δέκα έητόρωμ ("The
Characteristics of the Ten Orators"). Though Dionysius also wrote on
several of the chief orators of Greece, it is either in Cæcilius or
his contemporary Didymus that the first account of the caron of the ten
Attic orators is found. In the above-mentioned work Cæcilius
endeavors, by means of information gathered from traditional documents
and all other available sources, to present truthful portraits of the
orators, in order to determine the time and to illumine the
circumstances in which each oration was delivered. These researches
possessed unusual critical value in that they not only offered classic
examples of the adaptation of style to substance, but helped to unmask
a large number of orations circulating under false names. They remained
the permanent source of information on the diverse qualities of the
classic orators, even the erroneous hypotheses of the author being
accepted by later writers as authentic facts. To promote the study of
the classics, Cæcilius compiled a lexicon that was much used by later
scholars. The fine rhetorical feeling and critical acumen which enabled
him to expose literary pretenders were again exhibited in a work
devoted to an examination of the genuine and the spurious orations of
Demosthenes. However, he used his discriminative gifts also in
comparative studies, this being a unique literary phenomenon in that
time. He produced three essays of this character: a comparison of
Demosthenes and Æschines, of Demosthenes and Cicero, and of Lysias and
Plato. As an evidence of his intellectual curiosity, the study of
Cicero is particularly note-worthy, in view of the fact that Cæcilius
and Dionysius were the only students of Latin literature at a time when
it was the literary fashion to dismiss it with contempt. In all his
writings on esthetic subjects Cæcilius appears as an uncompromising
antagonist of the artificial style, always insisting that thought and
the proper choice of words, with the least possible use of rhetorical
ornamentation, indicate excellent oratory. These ideas are reiterated
in his work on "The Sublime" (Περὶ 'Ιψους), known from a
polemical work against it composed in the first century under the same
title and falsely ascribed to Longinus. Cæcilius did not attempt to
formulate a theory of the sublime, but simply gave illustrations of
what was and what was not sublime. It is interesting to note that among
the examples of the sublime there is a quotation, somewhat inaccurate,
from the first chapter of Genesis.
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=8&letter=C
********************************************
<<Asiatic Barbarians>> Cæcilius
Barbarous, brass-faced Shakespeare
Jonson: Every Man Out of His Humour:
Macilente:
'Tis strange! of all the creatures I have seen,
I envy not this Buffone, for indeed
Neither his fortunes nor his parts deserve it:
But I do hate him, as I hate the devil,
Or that BRASS-VISAGED monster Barbarism.
Jonson on Shakespeare:
O, could he but haue drawne his wit
7: As well in BRASSE, as he hath hit
8: His FACE; the Print would then surpasse
9: All, that was euer writ in brasse.
10: But, since he cannot, Reader, looke
11: Not on his Picture, but his Booke
(And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
>From thence to honour thee, I would not seek
For names :)
<<As Gorgias himself said, logos dunastes megas estin, "speech is a
powerful master". (Encomium of Helen 10). >>
********************************************
Did you kill Socrates the SOPHIST, men of Athens, because he was shown
to have taught Critias, one of the Thirty who overthrew the democracy,
and will Demosthenes take his comrades from you, Demosthenes, who
exacts such vengeance from private citizens and from men loyal to the
demos because they exercised their equal right to speak? (Aeschines,
1.173)
<<GENIO SOCRATEM>>
********************************************
Stoicism and Roman Example: Seneca and Tacitus in Jacobean England
J.H.M Salmon
Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol.50, No.2. (Apr.-Jun., 1989), pp.
199-225.
Before the rise of Neostoicism on the continent a number of Stoic works
, or works later enrolled in the Neostoic movement, were known in
English translation. These included two of Seneca’s essays (De
Remediis Fortuitorum and De Beneficiis), the tragedies attributed to
Seneca, the Manual of Epictetus, some of the relevant work of Cicero
(Paradoxa Stoicorum; De Officiis; Tusculanae Disputationes) and
Plutarch’s Lives together with a few sections of his Moralia. If
translation is a measure of popularity, Tacitus was virtually unknown.
Contact with European Neostoicism began with Sir Philip Sidney and his
circle. Sidney met and corresponded with Lipsius, who dedicated to him
a work on Latin pronunciation. An earlier and closer friend was
Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, counsellor of Henri de Navarre and director
of Huguenot and Politique propaganda. Mornay anticipated Lipsius in his
attempts to Christianize Stoicism, although he was even more insistent
than Lipsius was to be a few years later in his emphasis on those Stoic
doctrines which a Christian must reject. Sidney himself began a
translation of Mornay’s De la religion Chretienne (1581) which was
completed by Arthur Golding and published after Sidney’s death in the
Netherlands in 1586.(snip)
Mornay’s Stoic-inspired Excellent Discours de la vie et de la mort
(1576) included a French version of Seneca’s De Providentia and was
put into English as the Defence of Death by Edward Aggas in the year of
its publication. Sixteen years later Sidney’s sister, Mary Herbert,
Countess of Pembroke, retranslated it and had her client, Samuel
Daniel, prepare a new English version of De Providentia, known as “A
Letter to a Countess.” The Countess of Pembroke’s rendering of
Mornay was accompanied by her translation of a tragedy in the Senecan
mode by the French poet, Robert Garnier.
(snip)
<<The advent of James I, who not only forgave the surviving partisans
of Essex but showered honors upon them, did not result in any lasting
appeasement of court faction. Many of those associated with Essex
gravitated to the court of Prince Henry, who, before his premature
death in 1612, seemed to have inherited from Sidney and Essex the
mantle of the Protestant cause in Europe>> (Salmon, p.208)
<<One of (William Cornwallis’s) boldest literary ventures was an
attempt to rehabilitate Richard III, published anonymously. As already
noted, he had served Essex, was connected to the Harington family, to
whose ladies he dedicated some of his essays, and hoped for favor from
Prince Henry. No one typified the attitudes of the group better than
he, and the more his expectations were disappointed, the more strongly
his Stoicism was affirmed. In his younger days he had been attracted to
the CHIVALRIC ROMANCES that were popular in the Sidney circle and
enjoyed a revival at the court of the prince. His tastes changed, as he
confessed in the essay “on the Observation and Use of Things”;
“If in Arthur of Britain, Huon of Bordeaux, and such supposed
chivalry, a man may better himself, shall he not become excellent with
conversing with Tacitus, Plutarch, Sallust, and fellows of that
rank.”
*******************************************
Stoicism, Politics, and Literature in the Age of Milton: War and Peace
Reconciled. Andrew Shifflett.
Review by Achsah Guibbory
University of Illinois
(…) Revising common notions of what early modern Stoicism meant,
Andrew Shifflett insists that Stoicism was not about submitting to the
existing order of things, or about passive retirement or conformity,
but rather about resistance. A friend of republicanism not monarchy,
Stoicism entailed an oppositional stance that had political, ethical
and literary dimensions and , thus, carried a dangerous valence.
Familiar binaries collapse as Shifflett explains the paradoxes at the
heart of early modern Stoicism: Stoicism emphasized constancy but was
fascinated with violence; its indifference had a lot in common with
anger; retirement was actually active, a quest for authority and power,
a withdrawal from the state but not from political action. Shifflett
further suggests that Stoicism in the seventeenth century became a
predominantly “literary” activity, constituting a republic of
letters, potentially cosmopolitan, a kind of community that could
include people from different countries or from different sides of a
political conflict such as civil war.
Shifflett shows how thoroughly early modern Stoicism – with its
moral ideal of CONSTANCY – was bound up with WAR. “Combat…is the
primary Stoic experience” (p.30) War “constituted the political and
cultural contexts of early modern Stoicism both in England and on the
Continent.” (p.15). Though the prevalence of war in the early modern
period accounts for the appeal of Stoicism, Stoicism was also an active
force in the “waging of wars”. (p.16) For the stoic, war and peace
were “two sides of the same coin” ((p.16), since Stoic values were
always defined in terms of war. Showing Stoicism’s dissident,
oppositional, and republican (rather than conservative) stances,
Shifflett discusses Lipsius, as well as Seneca and Cicero, all of whom
were important sources of Stoic ideas in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. IN a welcome updating of Wesley Trimpi’s Ben Jonson’s
Poems: A Study of the Plain Style, he also nots the subversive
political significance of the new Senecan style. But Shifflett’s
argument is ultimately focused on the civil war period and its
aftermath in England.
*******************************************
Hamlet/Amleth/Brutus
How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.
Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on the event,
A thought which, quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward, I do not know
Why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do;'
Sith I have cause and will and strength and means
To do't. Examples gross as earth exhort me:
Witness this army of such mass and charge
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puff'd
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death and danger dare,
Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour's at the stake. How stand I then,
That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep? while, to my shame, I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men,
That, for a FANTASY and trick of fame,
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be NOTHING worth!
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Frankenstein's Dream, Matthew VanWinkle
<< If Wordsworth and Percy Shelley may be taken as representative of
the Romantic ideology criticized in Frankenstein, then Coleridge
provides the most prominent model for an alternative, parodic
tradition. In an archly riddling, anonymous contribution to Southey's
Omniana (1808), Coleridge expresses his own equivocal concern with
parody: "PARODIES on new poems are read as satires; on old ones, (the
soliloquy of HAMLET for instance) as compliments. A man of genius may
securely laugh at a mode of attack, by which his reviler in half a
century or less, becomes his ENCOMIAST" (SW & F I, 305). The bluff of
confidence Coleridge ascribes to the man of genius belies misgivings
that the mocking tribute may turn out to be utterly derisive. At the
same time, Coleridge obliquely concedes that the relationship between
genius and parody is symbiotic, if asymmetrically so. A parody that too
absolutely demolishes its target destroys the grounds for its own
appreciation.>>
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Dennis