Abstract
This chapter, the second of three concerned with the content or invention of the text, considers eight questions related to argument. The questions relate to the issues raised in the text, the questions the text addresses, the forms and sources of the arguments, the ways in which arguments are made convincing, the connections between arguments and the overall structure of the text’s arguments, and their impact on the audience. The chapter brings out the implications of, and possible answers to, the questions by discussing the topics of invention, the Aristotelian and stoic forms of argumentation, and doctrines from Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Agricola, Melanchthon, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, and Bakhtin. The chapter ends with a sample reading of passages from Shakespeare’s Hamlet related to argument and narrative.
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References
Aristotle, The Complete Works, ed. J. Barnes, 2 vols (Princeton, 1984).
Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin TX, 1981).
Cicero, Topica, ed. T. Reinhardt (Oxford, 2003).
Mack, Peter, Elizabethan Rhetoric (Cambridge, 2002).
Mack, Peter, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric (Oxford, 2011).
Mack, Peter, Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of Rhetoric and Dialectic (Leiden, 1993).
Melanchthon, Philipp Erotemata Dialectices, Opera omnia, 28 volumes (Brunswick 1834–1860), vol xiii, cols 507–752.
Moss, Ann, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford, 1996).
Perelman, Chaïm and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Theory of Argumentation (Notre Dame, 1969).
Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, ed and trans D. A. Russell, Loeb Classical Library, 5 vols (Cambridge MA, 2001).
Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. H. Jenkins (London, 1982).
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Mack, P. (2017). Content 2: Argument. In: Rhetoric's Questions, Reading and Interpretation. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60158-8_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60158-8_5
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