New rhetoric — newest rhetoric

Ernst-Robert Curtius, Chaim Perelman, Ernesto Grassi, Michel Meyer and what now?

Walter Veit

pp. 453-467

in: Christine Magerski, Robert Savage, Christiane Weller (eds), Moderne begreifen, Wiesbaden, Deutscher Universitätsverlag, 2007

Abstract

Everything that is called "new" is subjected to an intrinsic dialectic: not only is it distinguished from the "old", but it creates the "old". Thus, since antiquity, every treatise on rhetoric proclaims a new rhetoric superseding an older form. We are reminded of this dialectic by the appearance of the neoteroi, the "new poets", the neologists, like the young Virgil, in Hellenistic antiquity, soon to be called poetae novi disdainfully by the antiqui or maiores (see Cic. Att. 7,2,1; Orat. 161; Alfonsi; Pinborg). We are also reminded of the juxtaposition of moderni and antiqui used already in late antiquity in the description of styles and Christian doctrine alike; similarly of the via antiqua and the via moderna during the later Middle Ages and in the universities of the 14th and 15th centuries when speaking of the development of a new logic on the basis of the doctrine of argumentation in classical rhetoric. Finally, we are reminded of Charles Perrault's replique Paralléle des Anciens et des Modernes (1688) against Nicolas Boileau's critique in the famous "Querelles des Anciens et des Modernes". Since then the debate between the old and the new has been continued into the present in many permutations (see Curtius 256 ff.; Veit 2005; Kortum). We are dealing with dialectic as an instrument which preserves within the new the continuation of the old.

Cited authors

Grassi Ernesto

Curtius Ernst Robert

Perelman Chaïm

Meyer Michel