Date of Award

Fall 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Germanic Languages and Literatures

First Advisor

Campe, Rüdiger

Abstract

In this dissertation, I address the following question: how does the tradition of rhetoric answer the question of how a subject constitutes itself that can only act by constituting another subject that will act in its stead? For this purpose, I focus on the subject of oratorical self-representation in four theories of rhetoric to each of which one more or less self-contained chapter is dedicated. The first two are prominent examples from antiquity: Aristotle's Rhetoric and Quintilian's Institution Oratories. The other two come from German-speaking traditions: Christian Weise's Politischer Redner and Adam Müller's Zwölf Reden über die Beredsamkeit und deren Verfall in Deutschland. The four chapters are structured in the following way: each chapter begins with a brief outline of the historical and cultural context of the given program. In each case, I also point to the place that has been traditionally assigned to the respective program within the history of rhetoric. References to the external world of the text, however, only serve the purpose of pointing to something that also has a place within the text. The investigation that takes place in each chapter is guided by a central concept. In the first chapter, this concept is êthos (character, self-representation). Aristotle uses it to designate the representation of the speakers in their speeches. The entire first chapter pursues the conceptual strands which converge in êthos. The center of the second chapter is taken up by two concepts. On the one hand, there is the word imago (image, picture, ancestor mask) that recurs in Quintilian's Institution at significant points. It carries a whole semantic plethora that I attempt to untangle in my reading. On the other hand, there is the verb concepisse (to conceive, to receive, to wield) which often appears in conjunction with imago, but which also covers an entire array of significant ambivalence on its own. The guiding concept of the third chapter is exemplum (example, role model). This term lies at the heart of almost all the rhetorical operations that we can find in Christian Weise's writing on rhetoric. There is again a pivotal as well as covert ambiguity in the term itself that opens up a wealth of implications with which my reading is concerned. The central notion that guides my reading in the fourth and final chapter is the one of submission. for which Adam Müller uses several expressions. This time, the ambiguity will not so much lie in the term itself as in the processes that it launches and determines. Each chapter also includes digressions and glances at other sites of interest. Eventually, however, each chapter can essentially be regarded as the attempt to sound an entire, overt and covert, scope of each central concept. In general, I will apply a method of close reading through which I hope to achieve several objectives at the same time: first, to do justice to the given texts in their singularity; second, to make a contribution to fields that focus on the history and problems of subject formation; and finally, as my focus rests exclusively on theories of rhetoric, to provide useful insights for those who are interested in the history and philosophy of rhetoric.

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