PhD Seminar: Rhetoric in Literature and Philosophy

Post-Graduate mandatory

Teacher Martin Procházka

Semester winter

The course discusses theoretical aspects of rhetoric in relation to literature and philosophy (relations between rhetorical figures and literary meaning or philosophical truth). It focuses on the roots of the Renaissance rhetoric in the Antiquity (Gorgias, Aristotle, Quintilian, Longinus, Horace), on the philosophical criticism of rhetoric (Plato, Aristotle, Kant), on the function of rhetoric in the representative works of Renaissance poetics (Puttenham), on the relation of rhetoric to early modern poetry (Shakespeare), science and philosophy of history (Bacon, Locke, Vico) and finally on the discussion of the problems of rhetoric in art, science and history in recent theoretical and historical approaches (Derrida, de Man, Hayden White, Carlo Ginzburg).

LITERATURE
Herman Diels, ed., Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (any edition). Rosamond Kent Sprague (ed.) The Older Sophists: A Complete Translation by Several Hands of the Fragments in Die Fragmente Der Vorsokraticker Edited by Diels-Kranz with a New Edition of Antiphon and of Euthydemus. (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1972)

Protagoras (fragments from Sextus and Diogenes Laertius):
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~goodwin/eng350/protagoras

Gorgias
(fragment from Sextus): http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/sextus_empiricus.htm,
(fragment from Helen) http://www.phil.vt.edu/MGifford/phil2115/Helen.htm 

Plato, Phaedrus,trans. Benjamin Jowett http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html ;
Ion, trans. Benjamin Jowett http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/ion.html

Aristotle, Poetics, trans. S.H. Butler http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.html;
Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/rhetoric.html

Horace, Ars poetica, trans. Leon Golden http://www.english.emory.edu/DRAMA/ArsPoetica.html )

Quintilian, The Institutes of Oratory, trans. Rev. John Selby Watson
http://www2.iastate.edu/~honeyl/quintilian/index.html

Longinus, On the Sublime, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1899) http://classicpersuasion.org/pw/longinus/

George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poetrie / Poesie
http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/display/displayprose.cfm?prosenum=17

William Shakespeare, Sonnets

Francis Bacon, “On Rhetoric, or the Art of Eloquence,” in The Advancement of Learning, especially Book II.XVIII http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/adv2.htm

John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book 3 “On Language”
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/locke/locke1/Book3.html

Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fish (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1948) http://www.archive.org/details/newscienceofgiam030174mbp

Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, Part 1, §§ 42 - 54, especially §§ 51 – 53, trans. J.C. Meredith http://philosophy.eserver.org/kant/critique-of-judgment.txt )

M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: Norton, 1953)

Hayden White, Metahistory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978)

Jacques Derrida, “Plato´s Pharmacy,” in Disseminations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) 61-119;“White Mythology,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985) 207-72, “Economimesis” (Diacritics, June 1981)

Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), Blindness and Insight,2d ed. (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), “The Epistemology of Metaphor” (Critical Inquiry, Autumn 1978).

Carlo Ginzburg, History, Rhetoric and Proof (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999)

ASSESSMENT
Credits will be given for active participation in discussions and for two short presentations (15-20 minutes).