Handbooks of rhetoric have come a long way. In their earliest days and form, they were belittled by philosophers for being manuals of ‘how to’ only, without engaging the user in theoretical reflection on the strategic construals of language. This handbook is markedly different from its progenitors. Its expansive scope, its scholarly content and its tacit endorsement by a prestigious publisher are but three of its distinguishing marks.
When looking at this monumental collection, readers will be facing a grandiose entrance, six towering gates, and sixty large doors. The entrance overwhelms by virtue of its magnitude, a fitting reminder of the immense tradition before which it stands. Had Kant stood before it, he surely would have been filled with admiration but might have wondered why anyone would dedicate such an elaborate edifice on the art of confusing seriousness for play and treating the understanding as if it were the imagination; and had Nietzsche, he might have characterised MacDonald's accomplishment as modest, feeling all along self-righteous for his own superabundant praise of the art of persuasion.
The gates afford the reader forays into the familiar corridors of rhetoric's textual landscape – from Hellenic antiquity to the Roman epoch, to the Middle Ages, to the Renaissance, to the Enlightenment, and to modern and contemporary times. Veteran readers will be happy to see these traditional signposts of trans-historical chronology still standing at a time when most such markers are taken down without adequate replacements. Moreover, they will have several chances to enrich their own knowledge of rhetoric's miseries and splendours by going through the gates less visited. As for neophytes, they will discover that each gate opens the way to a broad horizon within which they have unknowingly been operating all along.
The doors are all ajar, each a temptation to open wide and see what is behind. Entry through any one of them leads to an interior space whose intellectual decor may please, puzzle or prompt to further inquiry. Each space proffers a studied interpretation, a plausible argument, informed commentary as well as a set of sources cited, only a partial background against which the author's essay has been created. Needless to say, the arrangement within each space varies from that of the rest; and the same holds for its style. Even so, most arrangements observe the structure of the academic chapter. Within that structure readers can easily detect accounts of where we have been, where we are, even possibilities of where we might be going. Stylistically, most interiors exhibit the two virtues Aristotle mentions regarding rhetorical prose: clarity and appropriateness – the conventions of academic prose still demand that it be so. A few, however, stand out for seemingly heeding Heidegger's insight that prose needs not be prosaic – discussing the delights of eloquence is a good thing; effectuating them in one's own writing is even better.
One of the features that recommends this imposing anthology is its attempt to make the case for rhetoric's relationship to what Ernst Cassirer calls symbolic forms, for example religion, art, language, history, science. More specific relationships include those with the perennial preoccupations of politics and the law, the more recent discourses on feminism, race, the environment and digital media as well as the still more recent scholarly orientations of deconstruction and psychoanalysis. The result is a variety of explorations of rhetoric's affinities with other fields of study, how its general precepts have been employed in specific areas of thought and how such employment has led to renewed versions of rhetoric's character and application.
Not surprisingly, this volume devotes more space to art than any other symbolic form – rhetoric, conceived as a techne or a dynamis, is most closely aligned to the arts. With entries on epic, poetics, the theatre, architecture, the visual arts, fiction and music, the reader can survey the ways in which artistic performance and execution manifested themselves in different epochs as they dealt with two of rhetoric's main anxieties: audience and impact. On balance, however, tradition in this collection takes more space than innovation even as the chapters alluding to the remote past point to what at the time was considered novel. Thus rhetoric in the hands of Plato and Aristotle, two distant figures in the catalogue of rhetoric's dominant personalities, reflects considerable innovations when read as supplementing or correcting the rhetoric of the sophists. But the point obtains as one reads along: modern and contemporary discussions are best appreciated when viewed as the latest links of a long chain of developments.
Without exception, all contributors to this work are seasoned scholars who have been toiling for some time in the province of rhetoric. Their differences in sense and sensibility aside, many of their insights can be traced back to rhetoric's primary sources, which readers will want to consult. The volume includes rhetoric's technical vocabulary in the form of a lengthy glossary of Greek and Latin terms. This glossary and an equally long index are two reading guides for which the reader will be grateful if only because they help to make the reading internally self-sufficient.
It would be a mistake to regard this volume as merely a statement on the state of scholarship in rhetoric. Although it does perform this function, its chief virtues lie in its spaciousness and reliability. Every student of rhetoric can only stand to benefit from it.
