Canons of Rhetoric:
Classical and Digital
Thinking about the classical canons of rhetoric in the digital age
Inventio
Dispositio
Elocutio
Memoria
Actio
“At the risk of oversimplification, we can identify four historically recurring conceptions [of invention]: romantic, systematic, imitative, and social” (p. 327 of James Jasinski’s 2001 Sourcebook on Rhetoric).
“Contemporary rhetorical scholarship on the issue of arrangement usually is suspended between a pedagogical desire to provide instruction that can guide effective performance and a critical-analytic desire to reconstruct and assess the patterns and structures that shape discursive practice” (p. 61 of Jasinski’s 2001 Sourcebook).
“The challenge posed by recent developments in rhetorical, literary, and linguistic theory is to learn how to look at, rather than through, the style or texture of a text so as to discover how it works and what it might be doing” (p. 537 of Jasinski’s 2001 Sourcebook).
“Within an emerging interdisciplinary research tradition, the terms collective, cultural, popular, social, and public memory can take on specific and divergent meanings” (p. 355 of Jasinski’s 2001 Sourcebook).
“Eloquence resides in the process of adjustment and is visible in the discursive elements in which that process is inscribed” (p. 199 of Jasinski’s 2001 Sourcebook).
What This Project Is About
This project relies heavily on Collin Gifford Brooke’s Lingua Fracta: Towards a Rhetoric of New Media (2009), a work that reexamines and reframes the canons of classical rhetoric for our digital, new media age. Appropriately enough, Brooke’s central concern here is the interface. Rather than focus on compositions of today or orations of the past (that is, isolated textual objects or artifacts), he focuses on how we interact with and communicate with what are often synecdochically referred to as “screens.” As part of his reexamination and reframing, Brooke gives each canon a new name (all of which start with the letter “P”): proairesis (invention), pattern (arrangement), perspective (style), persistence (memory), and performance (delivery).
In this project, I discuss Brooke on the canons of rhetoric, explore what other thinkers have written on them, and add my own thoughts about these five subdivisions of classical rhetorical training.
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