Classical Rhetoric in the Digital Age

                 I remember being very disappointed when we started the semester. Although we opened with the classical tradition, few of my colleagues seemed to enjoy the theoretical tag team of Plato and Aristotle. This wounded me because I love Aristotle’s Rhetoric so much that when I returned from my home state of Indiana at the beginning of the semester, I spent the entire drive listening to an audiobook of it read by a sleepy-voiced British man. Considering that fact/confession, it should come as no surprise that I really appreciated the work Lunsford and Ede, along with Zappen, did to argue for the relevance of the classical theorists in our digital age.

                Lunsford and Ede highlighted four major distinctions which typify the way scholars tend to distinguish the “classical” from the “modern” period of rhetoric. These distinctions speak to competing definitions of man, different kinds of appeals, the process of communication, and the goal of rhetoric. The distinctions they make present these two periods as two poles on a spectrum, a dualism, which they spend the majority of the argue complicating.

                The most significant point they made is that Aristotle’s Rhetoric is often viewed in isolation from the rest of his philosophical system, which theorized rhetoric within the scheme of an entire system of personal ethics, political organization, and metaphysics. Extracting rhetoric from its relationship to these other fields of inquiry, they argue, distracts us from the fact that Aristotle considered many of the issues of meaning and power that scholars often consider a particularly modern concern. To answer first question of this week’s prompt, then, I do not think the distinctions they mention hold, and I think that viewing Aristotle’s Rhetoric light of the rest of his system makes that case.

                Although Zappen’s work on digital rhetoric and online spaces might seem to challenge the relevance of the classical theorists, I don’t believe it does. True, he points out the relationship between text, audience, rhetor, and other important concepts has changed, it’s worth remembering that for theorists like Aristotle, rhetoric was a discipline of oral communication. That the classical theorists could not address the kind of texts that he does is a limitation, to be sure, but one that invites us to re-theorize their concepts, not dismiss them.

                Finally, these articles suggest questions about the way we make distinctions between periods, narrate the history of the discipline, and explain how what we are doing is alike, different than, advancing, or otherwise distinguished from what our scholarly antecedents have achieved. Beyond the four categories of distinction that Lunsford and Ede address, what other categories do we use to make distinctions between “periods” of study? What use, anyway, is grouping different authors/ideas together under a single name? What do we gain and what do we lose? These are the questions these readings leave me with, and I hope they are questions that we can discuss in class.