4.0368 'Topics' in Rhetoric (1/35)
Elaine Brennan & Allen Renear (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Tue, 7 Aug 90 20:51:59 EDT
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 4, No. 0368. Tuesday, 7 Aug 1990.
Date: Tue, 7 Aug 90 11:19:28 +0100
From: Monica Paolini <paolini%icopen.ico.olivetti.com@RELAY.CS.NET>
Subject: Re: topics [4.0363/1]
[Reply to James O'Donnell]
Thanks for your reply. Here's the refererence you asked for:
Roland Barthes, L'ancienne rhetorique, 1970 (there is an interesting
chapter on topics)
By the way, I am surprised not to find anything on topics by Greimas or
someone from his school at L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes, except Ducros.
Have you ever read something about it?
I have read the Murphy's book on medieval rhetoric: interesting, but not
what I am looking for. I have read a good number of books (all the ones
I was able to find at Bologna University) on history of rhetoric, but
the subject of topics seems always to be disregarded -whike much more
emphasis is places on the sistem of figures of speech. Topics is often
treated as one of the most useless products of *formal* (in the negative
sense) rhetoric. I have been reading some Renaissance treatises on
topics and I am convinced that it is a subject more interesting and
relevant from an historical point of view than usually thought. I would
like to find either a good and detailed history on topics or a theoric
discussion on the subject, such as Barthes' or Curtius' (European
literature) ones.
Jonathan Spence's book on Matteo Ricci is a fine book, a very enticing
fresco of the life of Missonaries in Asia, but I did not find his
reconstruction of Matteo Ricci Palace of Memory an essential contribution
to the history of ars memoriae. There are many others mnemonic systems
which I think deserve more attention than Ricci one (you could have a
look to the articles by Lina Bolzoni, Paolo Rossi and Cesare Vasoli).
I have never heard about G. Kennedy's books on history of rhetoric and
Eleonore Stump's translation of Boethius: will you please give me the
exact reference?