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Rhetoric, Beauty, and the Sublime. Opening questions . Opening questions . What is beauty?. Opening questions . What is beauty? Where is it?. Opening questions . What is beauty? Where is it? What connects beauty and rhetoric?. Rhetoric and aesthetics.
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Opening questions • What is beauty?
Opening questions • What is beauty? • Where is it?
Opening questions • What is beauty? • Where is it? • What connects beauty and rhetoric?
“…one of rhetoric’s functions is to celebrate the what there is an imagine what has yet to be” (Poulakos, 94)
Rhetoric and aesthetics • Aesthetics is concerned with how perception affects feeling, mood, attitude (and from there, sometimes, action).
Rhetoric and aesthetics • Aesthetics is concerned with how perception affects feeling, mood, attitude (and from there, sometimes, action). • Rhetoricians can use aesthetic principles to shape experience
Rhetoric and aesthetics • Aesthetics is concerned with how perception affects feeling, mood, attitude (and from there, sometimes, action). • Rhetoricians can use aesthetic principles to shape experience • And public discourse can, itself, be a kind of art
A tension between rhetoric and aesthetics • According to some, art is concerned with producing aesthetic arrest: a moment of meditative stillness where you are simply in awe of the radiance of the thing
A tension between rhetoric and aesthetics • According to some, art is concerned with producing aesthetic arrest: a moment of meditative stillness where you are simply in awe of the radiance of the thing • Rhetoric, by contrast, is concerned not with stillness but with action.
Two aesthetic modes Beauty:
Two aesthetic modes Beauty: pleasure by one’s perception of the wholeness, harmony, and radiance of an encountered thing; beauty comes from fitness, proportion, grace
Two aesthetic modes Beauty: pleasure by one’s perception of the wholeness, harmony, and radiance of an encountered thing; beauty comes from fitness, proportion, grace Sublime: pleasure taken in the face of the overwhelming and threatening; that which cannot be contained.
Rhetoric and aesthetics • The authority of rhetoric “issues from the principle of topical preference” (Poulakos, p. 90)
Rhetoric and aesthetics • The authority of rhetoric “issues from the principle of topical preference” (Poulakos, p. 90) • “This is rhetoric at its most elemental: highlighting some things and placing other in the shade” (Ibid).
Rhetoric and aesthetics • The authority of rhetoric “issues from the principle of topical preference” (Poulakos, p. 90) • “This is rhetoric at its most elemental: highlighting some things and placing other in the shade” (Ibid). • Rhetoric always says: “This is worthy of attention… it must be put ahead… it has priority” (92)
Rhetoric and aesthetics • Note how beauty “calls” and then compels the witness to speak
Rhetoric and aesthetics • Note how beauty “calls” and then compels the witness to speak • Rhetoric that acknowledges beauty “in the midst of it all” affirms the capacity to “articulate visions of perfection” and “to communicate subjective feeling as if they were objective truths”