Towards a rhetoric of experience: The role of enargeia in the essays of Montaigne

Rhetorica - Journal of the History of Rhetoric

Volumn 20, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 173-192

  Sharpling, Gerard Paul ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33644530625     PISSN: 07348584     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rh.2002.20.2.173     Document Type: Article

References (28)

1. and Aristotle, Poetics (1411ff).
2. Paul Julian Smith, Writing in the Margin: Spanish Literature of the Golden Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) pp. 45-49.
3. Other useful accounts of enargeia in Renaissance poetics are: Terence Cave, "Enargeia: Erasmus and the rhetoric of presence in the sixteenth century," L'Esprit Créateur 16 (1976) pp. 5-19;
4. Claude-Gilbert Dubois, Mythe et Langage au Seizième Siècle (Paris: Ducros, 1970)
5. Smith, Writing, p. 46.
6. Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979) p. 174.
7. Desiderius Erasmus, Copia, trans. Betty Knott (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991) p. 577.
8. Erasmus, De copia, p. 203: "Namque ipsum offendunt temulento sopore profligatum, totis praecordiis stertentem, ructuosos spiritus geminare."
9. Wayne A. Rebhorn, Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric (New York: Cornell University Press, 2000) pp. 7-8.
10. See James Heffernan, "Ekphrasis and representation," New Literary History 22 (1991) pp. 297-316;
11. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) pp. 151-81.
12. Wayne A. Rebhorn, Renaissance Debates, p. 8.
13. Richard Waswo, Language and Meaning in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987) pp. 213-35.
14. Waswo, Language and Meaning, pp. 218-19.
15. Margaret Mann Philips, "Erasme et Montaigne I & II," in Jean-Claude Margolin ed., Colloquia Erasmiana Turonensia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969) pp. 487-500.
16. See also the introduction to Margaret Mann Phillips, The Adages of Erasmus: A Study with Translations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964).
17. Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani, "L'intertexte rhétorique: Tacite, Quintilien et la poétique des Essais," in John O'Brien, Malcolm Quainton and James J. Supple eds, Montaigne et la Rhétorique, Actes du Colloque de St. Andrews (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1995) pp. 17-26.
18. Francois Rigolot, Les Métamorphoses de Montaigne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988) p. 130: "Ainsi se vérifierait, au seuil même de chaque essai, le parti pris anti-rhétorique de Montaigne rhétoricien, et ses corollaires obligés: la recherche obsédante de la différence, le rejet de la signification préétablie et l'accueil d'une forme changeante, reflétant un sujet en proie à d'infinies métamorphoses."
19. See Walter J. Ong, Ramus: Method, and the Decay of Language (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1958) pp. 302-03.
20. See the introduction to M. A. Screech, Michel de Montaigne: The Complete Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991) p. 18: "Montaigne was a gentleman, not a scholar."
21. See Charles Griswold, Self-knowledge in Plato's Phaedrus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).
22. See Keith Cameron, "Word-play in the Essais," in Philip Ford and Gillian Jondorf eds, Montaigne in Cambridge: Proceedings of the Cambridge Montaigne Colloquium (Cambridge: Cambridge French Colloquia, 1989) p. 100.
23. See Frank Lestringant, Le Cannibale: Grandeur et Décadence (Paris: Librarie Académique Perrin, 1994).
24. Here, Lestringant notes one prime source for Montaigne's account as being Peter Martyr of Anghiera's De Orbe Novo, published as early as 1511.
25. The formal rhetorical aspects of this chapter have been outlined more fully by Ann Moss, "Des Coches: une rhétorique transportable," in Montaigne et la Rhétorique, cit. in n. 21 above, pp. 77-87.
26. She also argues that this piece consists of a mixture of high and low styles. Margaret McGowan, Montaigne's Deceits: The Art of Persuasion in the Essais (London: University of London Press, 1974) pp. 117-18, argues that Montaigne's eloquence encompasses the architectural ingenuity of the Roman spectacle, but that these visions of delight are shattered as soon as the spectator is attracted by their beauty.
27. See Gerard Paul Sharpling, The Role of the Image in French Prose Writing of the Renaissance (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Birmingham 1999) pp. 77-95. This gives a more complete account of the relationship between Erasmus's theory of enargeia and the construction of his Encomium Moriae.
28. This argument is treated more fully by Judy Sproxton, Violence and Religion: Attitudes Towards Militancy in the French Civil Wars and the English Revolution (London: Routledge, 1995) pp. 74-77.