Psyche, Suasion, Style: Comparative rhetoric and the mind (ACLA Seminar for the July 2017 meeting)

Psyche, Suasion, Style: Comparative rhetoric and the mind (ACLA Seminar for the July 2017 meeting)

Despite Socrates’ (wary) definition of rhetoric as an “art of leading the mind by words” (τέχνη ψυχαγωγία τις διὰ λόγων), scholarship on the interplay between persuasion and psychology in pre-Modern rhetoric remains in its infancy. Cognitive linguistics, psychoanalysis, and neo-rhetorical theory shed alluring but scattershot light on how models of the mind shape the efforts of literature to seduce and “induce cooperation” (Burke). Indeed, for the scholar of classical, medieval, and/or non-“Western” literature, these contemporary accounts of how language grips and coaxes Quintilian’s “vice of the mind” (vitium animi) raise more questions than they answer.

What are comparatists to do with Modern notions of mind and (literary) persuasion that remain cloistered from the problems of anachronism and cultural contingency? Can such notions speak to what al-Āmidī, the 10th-century Arabic critic, called the (manipulative) elevation of khayāl (imagination) at the expense of qalb (heart)? Can they unlock the influence of Epicurean and Stoic psychology on Hellenistic rhetoric? Can they explain the composition and force, say, of the epinikion or qaṣīda?

Addressing these questions, “Psyche, Suasion, Style” proposes a transhistorical inquiry into how the conception of cognition, soul, and mind—modern and ancient, “Western” and “non-Western”—shapes persuasion in theory and practice. On the one hand, what light do recent developments in cognitive linguistics, philosophy of mind, and psychoanalysis—especially where they seemingly explain the working of figurative language—cast upon pre-Modern literature and literary criticism? Can and should they be retroactively applied? On the other, how are we to understand the dialectic between contemporaneous (i.e., pre-Modern) notions of the psyche (philosophical, theological) and pre-Modern rhetoric?

Further questions to be addressed in this seminar include:

• How should the “problem” of anachronism—or the backward-dating of contemporary insights on language and mind to illuminate pre-Modern rhetoric—be navigated?
  
• What theories of cognition (implicit or otherwise) animate pre-Modern literary theory?
  
• How might differing accounts of cognition across literary traditions produce different theories of persuasion?
  
• How are the formal “tricks” of persuasion—tropological, schematic, syllogistic—differently employed according to different notions of the mind?
  
• Do models of psyche and mind inform the ends (ethical, political) towards which persuasion is directed?
  
• How does authorial identification—with the ethical or poetic “I,” with the character in prose, with the audience itself—depend upon understandings of the psyche?

Interested participants in this seminar—which is for the 2017 meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association (7-9 July in Utrecht)—are invited to submit abstracts of 250 words by 23 September 2016 to Henry Bowles (bowles.henry@gmail.com).