On 17 Oct 2000, at 2:03, shirley sharon-zisser wrote:

> As a rhetorician, I might mention that "imaginary sex" is an oxymoron. As a
> passionate woman, I might say I have little interest in bodies which are
> beyond excavation, and no prurient or other interest in the lives of people
> whose bodies are not touchable and (passionately) alive. As a scholar of
> Renaissance pastoral poetry AND a rhetorician I would say, yet again, as I
> and Stephen Whitworth have been arguing in print too for quite a while now,
> that much of the sexual and the erotic (two distinct categories) is evident
> in the *forms* of Renaissance pastoral poetry and its classical heritage,
> which included, besides Virgil, the rhetorics of Aristotle, Cicero and
> Quintilian, which, when re-articulated by Sherry, Peacham, Puttenham,
> Fraunce, and others, are distinctly eroticized.

Although it's a bit difficult to disentangle the logic of this gargantuan 
paragraph, which could use some rhetorical pruning, I would as a 
Classicist like to see any evidence that much of the sexual and the 
erotic "is evident in the *forms*" of a Classical tradition that includes 
the "rhetorics' [sic] of Aristotle, Cicero and Quintillian.  Anyone who 
claims to discuss the heritage of Classical poetry would first go to 
the actual poetry of that heritage and not prose rhetoric.  That would 
at the minimum include (1) the bits of Sappho known to the mid-
sixteenth century, (2) Callimachus, (3) Theocritus and the Hellenistic 
neoterics, (4) Catullus, (5) Horace, (6) Latin elegy and (7) Ovid.  
Several statements by the author of this post refer to the importance 
of viewing poetry through the Classical education of the time.    
Renaissance poets certainly imbibed a fair amount of rhetoric with 
their texts, but the primary texts came first.  I do not believe they 
filtered everything through rhetorical lenses to such an extent that 
the lenses alone and exclusively will allow a modern audience to 
recreate the view.
        
>                               We might also want to consider the psychic
> and physical specifics of such oral sex as they unfold in the noun-verb
> ambiguity in Shekspeare's sonnets 134 and 135.

It is not only nonsense, but a kind of aesthetic stultitia, to say that 
sonnets 134 and 135 concern the pyschological and physical 
specifics of oral sex.  Neither critics nor rhetoricians are Humpty 
Dumpty: they cannot make a word, or a whole poem, mean just what 
they want it to mean.  The palette of rhetorical terms that could make 
such metamorphoses doesn't exist this side postmodernist fantasy.  

>                                                               But, as I said, such
> unfolding requires mastering a tradition which was an integral
> part of a classical education in the Renaissance but which includes
> many words like "anapodoton" and "tasis" and "tapinosis" which are
> still evident after all those years but not part of "our" cultural
> repertoire and which Renaissance scholars tend to neglect when they
> gesture toward the humanists' "classical education."

I doubt the poster knows what "anapodoton" means, but I'm sure 
she'll enlighten me.  "Anapodotos" is listed in Liddell, Scott & Jones, 
but not as a rhetorical term, and its other possible meaning, "to 
anantapodosis" is strictly grammatical.  The anglicized form given 
above is not in the OED and is not included in any standard lexicon 
of rhetorical terminology.  "Tasis" (<Gk. teinw) is equally absent 
from the OED, though "tapinosis" does reside there.  The latter two 
occur in Latin lexica, but are not cited by any rhetoricians and seem 
to have no association with Classical rhetorics.  None of the three 
terms occurs in Aristotle or the Greek rhetoricians as a check of the 
TLG CDROM shows.  Now I'm not suggesting that the poster 
invented these terms (assuming the OED missed two by accident); 
it's possible that some Renaissance rhetorican invented them, but 
they don't have a lineal descent from Classical sources.  This sort of 
thing reinforces my belief that Plato was right: rhetoric is a kind of 
cookery, nothing more.    

>                                                                     As for the
> parts of this education more palatable to most current critics,
> such as Virgil's second eclogue (or Theocritus's less often
> mentioned but no less relevant eighth idyll), we might want to
> consider the aesthetic/rhetorical/semiotic stakes involved in its
> reworkings by Spenser, Barnfield, and Fraunce, or the many
> appearances of the "name" Corydon in Renaissance pastorals.

All right, I'll bite: what "aesthetic/rhetorical/semiotic stakes" are 
involved?  Vergil was of course influenced by the spurious Id. 8, 
which he probably got in a collection of pastoral poetry made by 
Artemidorus of Tarsus.  Along with poems attributed to Bion and 
Moschus, there were ten poems attributed to Theocritus, including 
Id. 8.  From his frequency of imitation, Vergil seems unaccountably 
to have admired it.  There is a neat symmetry in the idyll between a 
gynaikophilas and an erastes, with the former getting the girl and the 
crown, 

'ws de katesmukh8h kai anetrapeto phrena lupai
'wteros... . (90f)

The poem is, apart from a few touches, not very good; a much more 
interesting course would be to explore the misreadings, from Vergil 
down to the Renaissance, which found an inelegant poem worthy of 
imitation.  Daphnis and Menalcas are children (3, 28, 61, 64, 66, 
93) and Daphnis, as Gow (II.170) remarks, plays the ingenu in 72ff. 
Yet their earlier songs suggest experienced lovers.  The maturity of 
the songs and the elegiacs may be pretended, but is inconsistent 
with Theorcritus' normal dramatic consistency.  This is one of the 
many reasons we now consider Id. 8 spurious.  But a pretty 
postmodern game could be played with these possibilties when 
some rhetoric is whipped in for body.      

>                                                                           If we
> do not care to learn to read with our minds re-tuned to the
> categories of classical education undergone by the humanists, upon
> all their nuanced rhetorical, mythological, and literary
> conceptually and psychologically laden vocabularies, and with teh
> same apssionate investment in our work they had in theirs, what a
> very poor chance have we of ever intellectually excavating anything
> but dead relics, ever accessing the subtle and variegated ways they
> thought about their sexuality, from which we could learn much with
> which to understand our own.  

It's absurd to argue that unless we retune out mind to the 
"categories of classical education undergone by the humanists" we 
have slim chance of extracting anything but dead relics from the 
treasury of Renaissance poetry.  One does not have to assume the 
mental set of Propertius' audience to understand and enjoy his 
elegy.  One does, of course, need to know the language along with 
the relevant historioraphy, influences and sources. If one were to 
apply this sort of nostrum to the study of all older literatures, the 
retunings of the mind would produce cacophony.  The sort of 
arguments advanced in this and other posts do not suggest the 
author has in fact tuned her mind to the Classical education of 
Renaissance poets.  The tenor of the arguments suggests to me, in 
fact, that various postmodern instruments of excavation, as she 
terms it, have been used to manipulate rhetoric in ways that produce 
falacious readings in direct contradiction to the poems.        


==============================================
Steven J. Willett
University of Shizuoka, Hamamatsu Campus
2-3 Nunohashi 3-chome, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan 432-8012
Voice and Fax: (053) 457-4514
Japan email: [log in to unmask]
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