Reading Blog 14

November 7, 2011

ARCS Ch. 11; RT 19th Century Rhetoric pp. 981-999 and Whately pp. 1000-1030

Memory: The Treasure-House of Invention
I cannot believe how hard it was to memorize a two minute speech that we had to do earlier in the semester.  It made me wonder how so many ancient rhetors were able to memorize much longer, and much more detailed speeches that were much more effective.  Also, the listeners must have been much more adapt to listening than students are today.  After writing notes for an hour of lecture, most students cannot remember what the class was about.  Kairos is shown to have a connection to memory.  There is even a difference between artificial and natural memory.  Artificial memory being when the student is trained to remember something, natural memory being the extent to which a person naturally remembers some processes.  There is an organized set of information in the mind.  A lot of information.  I think there is no way our culture could remember some of the things that were required to be remembered hundreds of years ago.  Cultural memory or communal memory was used in ancient times.  The idea that our memories are stocked with many things besides narratives of our experiences, things we learned, media, people, church as well as experiences.  One cultural memory- 9/11.  Everyone remembers where they were and how they felt when that event occurred.  Organizational memory is used to use the chaos sometimes seen as an advantage to remember what needs to be remembered at the right time.  Memory is an interesting thing.  I feel like I remember much less from school than ancient students or rhetors did.  Cultural changes is one huge reason, perhaps adaptation?  There is no longer a need to commit so much information to memory when it is so readily available.

19th Century Rhetoric
Science and technology are finally coming into their own.  Mathematics and science are now primary subjects.  The concept of reading, writing and arithmetic are commonly known.  Rhetoric is changing based on the nature of public education changes.  The internal economies of the discipline and related intellectual movements was just part of it.

Richard Whately
Whately uses the trends of his time to publish a new work of rhetoric.  Using Campbell's moral evidence, epistemological focus on persuasion and composition presumably written and an elocution that is clearly oral, Whately contributes a new rhetorical theory to the field.  Whately believed that Aristotle had never been passed in regards to his theories.  He claims that theory has not advanced since Aristotle's time and rhetors need to go back and consider this as a type of logic.  His idea of discovery being based on experience, reasoning on argument is interesting.  I find it so odd that so much of our current idea of effective rhetoric is based on ancient times.  There are very few significant differences, mainly those being of technologies that were not present during that time.  But the majority of ideas are still very relevant to writing today.