Thursday 31 March 2016

Oratory and Rhetoric: Skills Training for the Modern Age


Last week I attended a conference on Oratory and Rhetoric: Ancient to Early Modern at University College London. My own research looks at both classical antiquity and its reception in the early modern period, and it was a pleasure to hear papers focused specifically on the transmission and use of ancient materials. In addition to such scholarly joys, however, there was a question which kept rising during the presentations as well as in the discussions afterwards: the potential application of oratory and rhetoric for modern life. What advice would a classical rhetorician, or an early modern one, give about the practical uses of effective language?
 
This is a topic that interests me, but I would like to approach it a little sideways. Oratory and rhetoric have a long history with many areas of focus, and one which I’ve been researching recently is the idea of rhetoric as praxis, as a practical wisdom which enables us to respond to and manage varied information – factual data, persuasive arguments, the mood of your audience. Rhetoric is, at heart, about manipulating language in order to produce a certain response. This involves figuring out what constitutes effective language, and in the history of rhetoric and oratory we have thousands of years of research into the best way to teach this skill.

Aristotle in the fourth century BCE categorised rhetoric as a practical science, with an aim not just to produce knowledge, but also to induce action. Cicero in the first century BCE positioned rhetoric as the organising principle of all fields of inquiry. Both of these writers had an immense impact on later developments in education, particularly rhetorical skills training – Cicero, for one, was used as the ideal model of good writing for several centuries in the late medieval and early modern periods.

One of the ways in which this training was accomplished was by asking students to produce detailed commentaries on ancient texts, involving an analysis of the different parts of speech: the choice of vocabulary, the structure of the argument, the effect created by emotive or rational appeals. These commentaries survive, with varying levels of originality, from the fourth century CE onwards, which means that we can follow the different ways people have understood what constitutes effective language. They also allow us to unpack the cultural logic which underpins their ideas – if Quintilian in the first century CE warns against speaking ‘effeminately’, does he say this for the same reasons that orators in the twenty-first century would?

The ability to analyse the construction of a given text is a skill we teach in English Literature courses; our students are trained to assess style and content as well as historical and political context, and to create elegantly formed and well-knit arguments (ideally!) based on their readings. And although this is a practice generally applied to literary texts, I have in my lecturing days invited my students to perform a rhetorical analysis of an academic article – because how can you write an argument if you don’t know how to read one?

This kind of critical intelligence is the primary outcome of a humanities education, but knowing how to assess arguments has use beyond academia. Being capable of analysing both the intended point of a text and the strategies employed to create that effect is a key part of media literacy – this is something we all need to know in order to judge things like political speeches, or the validity of a blog post, or even the quality of a newspaper article. Moreover, the ability to apply these critical skills into your own writing – deciding the appropriate language and the relevant content for a job application or a professional email – is crucial for modern life.

The historical study of oratory and rhetoric includes a wealth of strategies for teaching these skills, which can, in turn, be applied to modern needs and modern training practices. And if impact in higher education is about delivering transferable skills, here is a vast source of research that is waiting to be tapped. Who would not want to attend a CPD session inspired by Cicero’s rhetorical practice? Or communications workshop based on Quintilian and gendered language?









Sources: 

Aristotle, Rhetoric.

Cicero, De Oratore.

Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Maud W. Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).

Peter Mack, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric, 1380-1620 (Oxford: OUP, 2011).

Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria.

Monday 21 March 2016

Delacroix, Sardanapalus, and liking things



Last week I went to see an exhibition on Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art at the National Gallery. It’s an intriguingly curated show – there are clear opportunities to see the influence of other painters on Delacroix as well as the influence of Delacroix on others, but there are also organised explorations around research questions, both conceptual (the development of orientalism) and historical (Delacroix’ reputation in the art world). Which made it a very enjoyable event, and enjoyable precisely as a thought-provoking experience.

The thoughts I had were, naturally, about the Death of Sardanapalus. Sardanapalus, the legendary last king of Assyria and the topic of my research for the past six years, was famous for his crossdressing, bisexuality, and being deft with a spindle. Not that you see any of that in Delacroix’s painting, which is more concerned with the interaction between decadence and death. 



Sardanapalus was also known for losing his kingdom to Arbaces the Mede, and choosing to die on a pyre with all his eunuchs, concubines, and treasures rather than be captured by the enemy. There was considerable interest in antiquity in the exact amount of stuff which Sardanapalus added to his pyre – Athenaeus of Naucratis, one of the main sources on the Sardanapalus legend, lists the number of golden couches and tables (150) as well as talents of gold and silver, and of course purple cloths. Diodorus Siculus, on the other hand, spends only one sentence on it, and Lord Byron’s play Sardanapalus, which inspired Delacroix, depicts a somewhat different scenario. Within the later history of the Sardanapalus legend this is not a scene that has received much attention.

Which raises the question of why Delacroix chose it instead of, say, the dramatic moment of Arbaces discovering Sardanapalus in the midst of his concubines, spinning purple wool. There are, I’m sure, good reasons related to contemporary trends in historical painting, or the personal interests of the painter, but looking at it as a Sardanapalus scholar, it occurs to me to wonder why people choose to engage with this character. What is there in his narrative that makes people want to include him in their art? In my work, I look at how Sardanapalus was used as a rhetorical tool with argumentative power, but apart from his value in logical disputation, does anybody like him? Sardanapalus is very rarely portrayed with anything other than vituperation; he was an exemplar of a man deserving invective for both Aristotle and Cicero, and their later influence has ensured that this attitude was repeated until (at least) the nineteenth century. Byron’s play Sardanapalus was reviewed as correctly representing an ‘effeminate’ character; the thought of not counting this against him doesn’t seem to have occurred to anybody.  

I find him interesting because he embodies something that is supposed to be inherently incompatible: a man who wears women’s clothing and enjoys the ‘delights of Aphrodite with men as well as women’, but is also a successful military commander who defeats the rebels in three battles. This apparent contradiction has resulted in a lot of debate, in which various writers attempt to explain, or explain away, the impossibility of these two characteristics being possessed by the same man. Which in turn ends up revealing a lot about the tortuous logic used to prop up normative concepts of gender. This has been the focus of my research for many years, and I’ve enjoyed thinking about it, as you do when you spend a lot of time wrapping your mind around the same question.

But I also find Sardanapalus delightful in his own right. Every narrative which tells his story takes on an editorial stance, usually disapproving, but at the centre of it all is a guy who refuses to be ashamed of his gender practices or his sexual preferences. This for me is the most interesting part about Byron’s play – Sardanapalus’s defence of his philosophy of life, used to counter the accusations of Salemenes, Arbaces, and Myrrha, who all feel that he should not be what he is. It is worth remembering that is the play which Delacroix read, and then ignored; the scene which he painted does not occur in Byron’s play, only in Diodorus.

Which is rather interesting in itself.