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Renaissance rhetoric
Rhetoric during the renaissance was characterized for me by Peter Ramus. Ramus was a French humanist and logician. He didn’t care for the classical tradition and had a terrible knack for getting himself into trouble within the scholarly realm. Ramus, however, is not the focus of this post. He stands as a reference to a couple of ideas surrounding my ideas on the renaissance period.
The key idea behind this post is the erosion of the audience through the political structure in this time period. The majority of Europe was controlled by monarchies. Society was tiered in such a way that there were levels of importance among the citizenry. Each tier upward were more important than those below, both in respect and wealth (with few exceptions). The importance of this can be seen in the rhetoric that is produced. For example, Ramus believed that rhetoric was mere ornamentation, the ability to speak in a “pretty” manner. Why would he believe this? This “casting” of society led Ramus to have the impression that swaying the audience didn’t matter, since they had no say in how things were going to be done anyway.
Why did Ramus’ ideas on taking invention out of rhetoric have such an impact in his time?
What lasting impact on rhetoric did Ramus leave us with? What ideas of his are still existent in our society that boil up when talking about rhetoric with those who do not study it?
Are the social/political impacts on rhetoric more obvious during the medieval or renaissance period? The classical? Why?
posted by Tyler Lemmon @ 8:22 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
That's so interesting, Tyler -- that Ramus felt the substance of rhetoric was undermined (or never really there in the first place) because he didn't see much affect of rhetoric on audiences (because, as you say, the audience had become powerless and therefore unimportant). That makes a lot of sense. If rhetoric just seems like this vapor that gets sent out into the air without much effect on society, then it must be something just pretty.
I was thinking the other day how much rich and substantive rhetoric depends on a republican or democratic form of government. B&H have brought out this phenomenon in their introductions. But for some reason, it just recently clicked in my head. If you have a dictator, who cares about oratory? Well, the dictator cares about it (for himself), but that's it.
As for why Ramus' idea to separate invention off from the other canons had such an impact in his time, I'm not sure. Was it just because the time period was already so primed to separate thought from language, logic from rhetoric? Or, was it mainly the rise of science? In the classical through renaissance periods, rhetoric was "the" way to education, to knowledge. Once science comes along, it steals the show. It thinks all it needs is invention, and it thinks it's better equipped to take charge of invention.
And we -- I mean, rhetoricians -- haven't gotten it back yet. We're working on reclaiming it, but we're still over-focused on style over invention. If we could get invention and style back to being integrated, perhaps we could finally get rid of the connotation of rhetoric as empty bombast. Or maybe that's not even possible. Maybe it's too late??
Anyway, thanks a lot, Ramus!
Sorry, Tyler. I think I started rambling there. :-)
Laura
I was inspired by your question about the lasting effects of Ramus' rhetoric on our contemporary society, as I think it's really important to think about where our habits come from. I think that 'pretty' language is entirely overvalued in the classroom (and beyond) today, and that this lies seriously in the hands of renaissance academics, who not only put rhetoric on the back burner, but heaped it in with the likes of disturbingly unrelated methods and ideas.
The sad result is a classroom today that emphasizes grammar over execution. No doubt that we have seen first hand either a paper that we turned in that was graded entirely based on grammar, or one that a peer of ours has encountered. In my years at the writing center, I have seen many essays come in that have been 'reviewed' by that student's TA, who has only gone through and marked mistakes of a stylistic or grammatical point of view.
Don't get me wrong, grammar is incredibly important. If you have something to say, I firmly believe that you should have an educated way of saying it, but it is not the most important by any stretch of the imagination. I know I'm not the only person on this blog who has read an incredibly well-written (stylistically and grammatically, anyway) paper that was flat, uninteresting, and ineffective. In fact, when I came to OSU five (million) years ago, I believed that grammar was pretty much my major.
Maybe I'm placing too much blame on the wrong guy, but it's important still to look at the roots of such problems and explore them, try to understand them. It's no mistake, however, that Microsoft incorporated both the spelling and grammar checking functionality before the content advice software in their Word program.
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