Theatre Symposium, Vol. 5

This volume explores the fascinating aesthetic and social connection

between drama and rhetoric.



Inasmuch as drama seeks to keep an audience engaged, it takes on rhetorical

qualities; likewise, rhetorical endeavor may employ dramatic appeal. Centuries

ago, Aristotle's companion pieces The Rhetoric and The Poetic

generated crosscurrents of critical thought about rhetorical and dramatic

theory. Recently, such critic-theorists as Kenneth Burke, Ernest Bormann,

Elder Olson, Paul de Man, and others have stirred up these currents afresh.

The contributors to this volume take provocative new approaches to enduring

issues.

****Contents ****

PART I: Rhetorical Dimensions to the Drama: The Classical

Context

Enthymeme and the Invention of Troping in Greek Drama, August W.

Staub

Theorizing the Spectacle: A Rhetorical Analysis of Tragic Recognition,

Tom Heeney

Exile and the Kingdom: Reason as Nightmare in the Aeschylean

Vision, John Arthos



PART II: The Rhetorical in Renaissance and Neoclassical Drama

Epideictic Pastoral: Rhetorical Tensions in the Staging of Torquato Tasso's

Aminta, Maria Galli Stampino

Shakespeare's Rhetoric versus the Ideology

of Ian McKellen's Richard III, George L. Geckle

And Now for Application:

Venice Preserv'd and the Rhetoric of Textual Application, Odai Johnson



PART III: War, Politics, and the Drama

Federalist and Republican

Theatre in the 1790s, Steve Wilmer

Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Rhetoric of

Gradualism, Charles Wilbanks

Dario Fo's Angry Farce, Stanley Vincent Longman



PART IV: Contemporary Culture

Stain upon the Silence: Samuel

Beckett's Deconstructive Inventions, Leigh Anne Howard

Still Angry after

All These Years: Performing the Language of HIV and the Marked Body in

The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me, Peter Michael Pober