《英语修辞学》第二章.ppt

Page * 2. Rhetoric in the Middle Ages 1). Social condition 2). Major achievements The early Middle Ages are often called the “Dark Ages” because the great civilizations of Greece and Rome had fallen. Life in Europe during the Middle Ages was very hard. Few people could read or write and nobody expected conditions to improve. Rhetoric became both a practical art and an academic subject. Rhetoric served the clergy, whose sermons persuaded congregations to accept Christianity, and secular or ecclesiastical courts. In the Middle Ages, undergraduate students who pursued the bachelor of arts degree studied the trivium(中世纪大学的)三学科: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The study of rhetoric was divided into two arts: letter-writing and preahcing. (2) Style began to assume greater importance, together with delivery dominating the other four cannons of classical rhetoric. Page * 3. Rhetoric in the Renaissance Renaissance rhetoricians can be divided into three groups: (1) The Traditionalists: continue to study the five arts of rhetoric. Representatives were Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas Wilson. Thomas Wilson wrote the first English rhetoric book Arte of Rhetorique, which marks the starts of English Rhetoric. (2) The Figurists: subordinate logic to rhetoric, emphasize the importance of style. (3) The Ramists: subordinate rhetoric to logic. Ramist rhetoric intensifies the separation between the five arts and the importance of their sequence. They divorced invention and arrangement from rhetoric and assigned them to logic. Thus, rhetoric under the Ramist scheme is left to deal with style, memory, and delivery. Page * 4. New Classic Rhetoric Several approaches to rhetoric held the field in the war between the plain, unadorned(朴素的，未加修饰的) method of human discourse and the elegant and ornate(优美的，文雅的，经过装饰过的). Three points of view shaped the rhetorical theory: the scientific perspective, the elocutionary演说[辩论]术perspective and the literary perspective. They all support the principle tha