Good distinction!
On Jul 14, 2010, at 10:34 AM, David Miller wrote:
> I think it's important to distinguish the inability topos from the inexpressibility topos, even if it's sometimes only a matter of emphasis: whether the failure of expression results from the transcendent qualities of the subject, from the inherent limitations of the medium, or from the professed incapacity of the artist.
>
> It's also important to distinguish the ineffability topos from the effability topos, but that's another story . . .
>
>
>
> On Jul 14, 2010, at 1:30 PM, Harry Berger Jr wrote:
>
>> I know there are more technical names for it but years and years ago Paul Alpers referred to it as the inability trope, and that seemed pretty good to me at the time.
>>
>> On Jul 14, 2010, at 9:45 AM, Scott Lucas wrote:
>>
>>> Dear all,
>>>
>>> I would be grateful if someone out there can help me with a question about naming a familiar practice in Renaissance writing. Is there a specific term for the rhetorical strategy of praising someone or something by asserting that he/she/it is so awesomely splendid that words alone cannot express his/her/its splendor? I am working on the chronicler Edward Hall’s presentation of King Henry VIII in his famous Union of the Two Noble and Illustrate Famelies of Lancastre & Yorke (1548), and several times in his text Hall uses this technique to create a sense of wonder in readers for the sumptuous splendor of Henry and his court. For instance:
>>>
>>> In describing the young King Henry: “The features of his body, his goo[d]ly personage, his amiable vysage, his princely countenaunce…nedeth no rehersall, consideryng, that for lacke of cunning, I cannot expresse the giftes of grace and of nature, that God hath endowed hym with all.”
>>>
>>> In describing a feast attended by Francis I and Henry VIII during their meeting at the Field of Cloth of Gold: “To tel you the apparel of the ladies, their rych attyres, their sumptuous Juelles, their diversities of beauties, and the goodly behavyor from day to day syth the first meting, I assure you ten mennes wyttes can scace declare it.”
>>>
>>> In describing Henry’s visit to Calais in 1532 to meet Francis I (and to show off the new Lady Marquess of Pembroke, Anne Boleyn): “To tell the ryches of the clothes of estates, the basens and other vessels whiche was there occupied, I assure you my wit is insufficient…”
>>>
>>> [The last few lines of Donne’s “The Relic,” it seems to me, also employ a variation on this strategy.]
>>>
>>> In a conference paper I gave a while back, I referred to this strategy as “occupatio,” but in a 1977 article discussing that term, Henry A. Kelly argues that “occupatio” should only be used to describe a speaker’s addressing of an opponent’s argument before the opponent has a chance to bring it up him-/herself.
>>>
>>> Closer to the mark seems to be the term preterition/praeteritio, though the OED’s definition of this word as “a figure in which attention is drawn to something by professing to omit it” doesn’t quite capture the full effect of Hall’s rhetoric, which does not merely draw attention to a subject but specifically creates an aura of awe around it by claiming that the author simply cannot put its greatness into words. Nor does the label “occulatio” seem precisely to fit. Kelly suggests this term as a replacement for the use of “occupatio” when referring to a type of preterition in which a speaker seeks to suggest that “we are passing by, or do not know, or refuse to say that which precisely now we are saying” (the quote is from the definition of occupatio [translated as paralipsis in the Loeb Library translation] in Rhetorica ad Herrenium 4.27.37, which Kelly says classical scholars agree should correctly be the definition of “occulatio”).
>>>
>>> If anyone has an opinion about which term might best describe Hall’s strategy of “conveying praise by claiming that the subject is so praiseworthy it is beyond his ability properly to praise it,” I’d appreciate it!
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Scott
>>>
>>> P.S. The H. A. Kelly article to which I referred above is “Occupatio as Negative Narration: A Mistake for ‘Occultatio/Praeteritio’," Modern Philology 74.3 (1977): 311-315.
>>>
>>>
>>> Scott Lucas
>>> Professor of English
>>> The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina
>>> Charleston, SC 29409
>>>
>>> [log in to unmask]
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