Modern Assessments of Quintilian

2021 ◽  
pp. 463-504
Author(s):  
William J. Dominik

The recent history of scholarship on Quintilian makes for intriguing and sometimes contradictory reading. While some modern assessments of Quintilian are ambivalent about his abilities as a rhetorician as revealed in the Institutio Oratoria, there has been a marked shift during the last part of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century towards a more positive appraisal of his achievements. One reflection of this changed perception is the tendency by recent scholars to steer away from some of the disparaging criticism made by previous generations of scholars of Quintilian’s supposed shortcomings as a rhetorical theoretician, especially as a rhetor who is steeped in the faults of his age. Another indication of a more positive approach to Quintilian is the increased scholarly focus on seemingly almost every aspect of his rhetorical treatise. This growing interest in Quintilian is reflected in the over 600 publications that were published in 1980–2016, which is far more in number than for any period of similar length in the past. The discussion is intended to serve primarily as a statement about current worldwide opinions concerning Quintilian, with scholarly assessment of his significant role in Imperial rhetoric being the general focus. This chapter features the following main sections: topics of academic investigation; general praise of Quintilian; originality of Quintilian; modern relevance and utility of Quintilian; Quintilian, education, and law; Quintilian, literary criticism, and stylistic issues; general criticism of Quintilian; antiquated attitudes and speculative criticism; pseudo-academic scholarship: Wikipedia; and journalism and popular writing.

Author(s):  
Daniela Caselli

This chapter traces a history of Dante’s reception in anglophone literature between the 1870s and the 1950s. It acknowledges his importance in Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, but engages more closely with Samuel Beckett, Djuna Barnes, and Virginia Woolf. It shows that the modernist Dante that emerges from these authors’ work is both a formal and political one: recruited as an anti-authoritarian voice from the past and seen anew from feminist and queer perspectives, this is not a twenty-first century Dante forced against his will to virtue-signal, however; on the contrary, this is a Dante anachronistically familiar with key ‘vices’ of twentieth-century authors, readers and commentators. Focusing on sullenness, resistance, and fatigue, the chapter argues for a new understanding of modernist experiments with Dante’s political and formal complexity that refuse to use him as a ‘code or a weapon […] to crush someone’, as Dorothy Richardson put it.


Author(s):  
James Whitehead

The introductory chapter discusses the popular image of the ‘Romantic mad poet’ in television, film, theatre, fiction, the history of literary criticism, and the intellectual history of the twentieth century and its countercultures, including anti-psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Existing literary-historical work on related topics is assessed, before the introduction goes on to suggest why some problems or difficulties in writing about this subject might be productive for further cultural history. The introduction also considers at length the legacy of Michel Foucault’s Folie et Déraison (1961), and the continued viability of Foucauldian methods and concepts for examining literary-cultural representations of madness after the half-century of critiques and controversies following that book’s publication. Methodological discussion both draws on and critiques the models of historical sociology used by George Becker and Sander L. Gilman to discuss genius, madness, deviance, and stereotype in the nineteenth century. A note on terminology concludes the introduction.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-363
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Tilley ◽  
Paul Christian ◽  
Susan Ledger ◽  
Jan Walmsley

Until the very end of the twentieth century the history of learning difficulties was subsumed into other histories, of psychiatry, of special education and, indeed, of disability. Initiatives to enable people with learning difficulties and their families to record their own histories and contribute to the historical record are both recent and powerful. Much of this work has been led or supported by The Open University’s Social History of Learning Disability Research (SHLD) group and its commitment to developing “inclusive history.” The article tells the story of the Madhouse Project in which actors with learning difficulties, stimulated by the story of historian activist Mabel Cooper and supported by the SHLD group, learned about and then offered their own interpretations of that history, including its present-day resonances. Through a museum exhibition they curated, and through an immersive theatre performance, the actors used the history of institutions to alert a wider public to the abuses of the past, and the continuing marginalization and exclusion of people with learning difficulties. This is an outstanding example of history’s potential to stimulate activism.


Author(s):  
Aneta Drożdż

This paper presents a short history of Polish formations protecting the governing bodies of the state, starting from the moment Poland regained independence at the end of the twentieth century. The considerations are presented against the rules and principles of the functioning of the state security system, with particular emphasis on the control subsystem. This paper demonstrates the need to research attitudes to safety in the past, in order to develop and apply effective contemporary solutions. The considerations contained in it also concern the existing threats to the management of state organs. They may contribute to further discussions on the purpose and rules of operation of the formation which is supposed to protect the most important people in the state.


2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 134-142
Author(s):  
Esther B. Schupak

Abstract Because of its potential for fostering antisemitic stereotypes, in the twentieth century The Merchant of Venice has a history of being subject to censorship in secondary schools in the United States. While in the past it has often been argued that the play can be used to teach tolerance and to fight societal evils such as xenophobia, racism and antisemitism, I argue that this is no longer the case due to the proliferation of performance methods in the classroom, and the resultant emphasis on watching film and stage productions. Because images – particularly film images – carry such strong emotional valence, they have the capacity to subsume other pedagogical aspects of this drama in their emotional power and memorability. I therefore question whether the debate over teaching this play is truly a question of ‘censorship’, or simply educational choice.


1967 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 600-621 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. B. Smith

‘Les livres historiques sont rares en pays annamite: le climat et les guerres ont concouru a les de truire.’ When he wrote those words in 1904 Pelliot no doubt hoped that they would be true only of the past; but the troubled history of Việt-Nam in the middle decades of the twentieth century has made them also prophetic. Before modern methods for combating the climate could be brought to bear on the problem of archive preservation further wars occurred to destroy even more of the country's historical remains, as well as to disperse many of those which survived.


2021 ◽  
Vol 201 (3) ◽  
pp. 534-545
Author(s):  
Janusz Zuziak

Lviv occupies a special place in the history of Poland. With its heroic history, it has earned the exceptionally honorable name of a city that has always been faithful to the homeland. SEMPER FIDELIS – always faithful. Marshal Józef Piłsudski sealed that title while decorating the city with the Order of Virtuti Militari in 1920. The past of Lviv, the always smoldering and uncompromising Polish revolutionist spirit, the climate, and the atmosphere that prevailed in it created the right conditions for making it the center of thought and independence movement in the early 20th century. In the early twentieth century, Polish independence organizations of various political orientations were established, from the ranks of which came legions of prominent Polish politicians and military and social activists.


Text Matters ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 229-243
Author(s):  
Alicja Piechucka

The article focuses on an analysis of Hart Crane’s essay “Note on the Paintings of David Siqueiros.” One of Crane’s few art-historical texts, the critical piece in question is first of all a tribute to the American poet’s friend, the Mexican painter David Siqueiros. The author of a portrait of Crane, Siqueiros is a major artist, one of the leading figures that marked the history of Mexican painting in the first half of the twentieth century. While it is interesting to delve into the way Crane approaches painting in general and Siqueiros’ oeuvre in particular, an analysis of the essay with which the present article is concerned is also worthwhile for another reason. Like many examples of art criticism—and literary criticism, for that matter—“Note on the Paintings of David Siqueiros” reveals a lot not only about the artist it revolves around, but also about its author, an artist in his own right. In a text written in the last year of his life, Hart Crane therefore voices concerns which have preoccupied him as a poet and which, more importantly, are central to modernist art and literature.


Love, Inc. ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 83-112
Author(s):  
Laurie Essig

Getting engaged now requires more emotional and financial resources than ever before. Here Essig traces the history of engagements from the birth of companionate marriages in the nineteenth century to the invention of rituals like the bended knee and fetish items like the diamond ring in the early twentieth century. But the real change happened at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as engagements became “spectacular,” requiring not just highly staged events but also highly produced videos and images that could then be disseminated to the larger world.


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