Time for Epideictic

Abstract

When is epideictic rhetoric? In response to a critical review of our past and present, this essay offers a theoretical vision of rhetoric's potentiality. It is time to begin.

Keywords:

• Temporality
• Epideictic
• Potentiality
• Theōros
• Aristotle

Notes

[1] George Kennedy, trans., Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003).

[2] Kennedy, Progymnasmata, 108.

[3] Aristotle, The “Art” of Rhetoric, trans. John Henry Freese (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926).

[4] Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1358b18–20.

[5] Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1358b4–5. Of course, Aristotle also calls rhetoric itself a dunamis … tou theōresai, making the theorization of potentiality simultaneously a part and the whole of rhetoric. See 1355b30.

[6] Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Tredennick (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), 1019a19.

[7] Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1019b14.

[8] Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1358b3–6.

[9] Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1358b6–7.

[10] Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1048b24–25.