Editorial Bodies

Michele Kennerly

Description

Reveals the emergence and endurance of vocabularies, habits, and preferences that sustained ancient textual cultures

Though typically considered oral cultures, ancient Greece and Rome also boasted textual cultures, enabled by efforts to perfect, publish, and preserve both new and old writing. In Editorial Bodies, Michele Kennerly argues that such efforts were commonly articulated through the extended metaphor of the body. They were also supported by people upon whom writers relied for various kinds of assistance and necessitated by lively debates about what sort of words should be put out and remain in public.

Spanning ancient Athenian, Alexandrian, and Roman textual cultures, Kennerly shows that orators and poets attributed public value to their seemingly inward-turning compositional labors. After establishing certain key terms of writing and editing from classical Athens through late republican Rome, Kennerly focuses on works from specific orators and poets writing in Latin in the first century B.C.E. and the first century C.E.: Cicero, Horace, Ovid, Quintilian, Tacitus, and Pliny the Younger.

The result is a rich and original history of rhetoric that reveals the emergence and endurance of vocabularies, habits, and preferences that sustained ancient textual cultures. This major contribution to rhetorical studies unsettles longstanding assumptions about ancient rhetoric and poetics by means of generative readings of both well-known and understudied texts.

Sujets

• Disciplines
• Language Arts
• Encomium (álbum)
• Ovidio
• Retórica
• Editorial
• De Inventione
• Sententiae
• Commentarii
• Catullus 1
• Elocutio
• Tristia
• Creative writing
• Epigraphy
• Encomium
• Persius
• Ephorus
• Quintilian
• Cato the Elder
• Semantics
• Rhetoric
• Epigram
• Ovid
• Tristia (Berlioz)
• Adage
• Horace
• Agathon

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 28 septembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611179118
• Langue: English

Extrait

EDITORIAL BODIES
STUDIES IN RHETORIC/COMMUNICATION
Thomas W. Benson, Series Editor
EDITORIAL BODIES
Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics
MICHELE KENNERLY

THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA PRESS
2018 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-909-5 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61117-910-1 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-61117-911-8 (ebook)
FRONT COVER IMAGE : The Discourse by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema.
Image courtesy of the Art Renewal Center , (ARC) www.artrenewal.org
To S. M. and N. M., le gr
[Greetings, slender words] Callimachus, Epigrammata 27
Contents
Series Editor s Preface
Acknowledgments
A Note on Translation
Introduction: Corpus Care
CHAPTER ONE
The Polis(h) of Classical Athens
CHAPTER TWO
Hellenistic Gloss
CHAPTER THREE
Tales and Tools of the Oratorical Traditio in Cicero
CHAPTER FOUR
Filing and Defiling Horace
CHAPTER FIVE
Ovid s Exilic Expolitio
CHAPTER SIX
The Cares of Quintilian
CHAPTER SEVEN
Past, Present, and Future Perfect Eloquence
Conclusion: Kissing Tiro; or, Appreciating Editing
Bibliography
Index
Series Editor s Preface
Michele Kennerly s Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetorics and Poetics explores textual evidences of a developing editorial consciousness working to perfect and prepare for publication texts in classical Athens, Alexandria, and Rome during the first century B.C.E . and the first century C.E . Embedded in debates about what sorts of words should be published and preserved was a metaphor of the body. Establishing a framework of key terms and debates in a broad survey of early works, Kennerly then turns to detailed explorations of Latin poets and orators-Cicero, Horace, Ovid, Quintilian, Tacitus, and Pliny the Younger.
Kennerly brings fresh and vivid new understandings of how developing editorial, including self-editorial, vocabularies and frameworks claimed both grammatical correctness and rhetorical effect as their domains. Kennerly is a scrupulously judicious reader of her sources ancient and modern, unfailingly generous and zestfully eloquent. Editorial Bodies is erudite and accessible, offering a model of historical and critical practice and a fresh, compelling rereading of early textual cultures.
Thomas W. Benson
Acknowledgments
I am delighted here to demythologize the figure of the solitary genius: I have not been solitary. Joking aside, sustaining an argument can never be the work of one person, whatever the stamina of her indwelling spirit. I have been exceedingly fortunate in my structures of support.
To my professors at the University of Pittsburgh and Austin College who sparked and stoked my fiery enthusiasm for ancient rhetoric-namely John Poulakos, John Lyne, Mae Smethurst, Mark Possanza, Helen Cullyer, Todd Penner, Bob Cape, and Jim Johnson-thank you for humoring years of fanciful etymologies and Ciceronian sentences (in length, anyway). Each of you made me a better thinker, reader, and critic.
And from former institutions to current ones, Penn State boasts a first-rate library, upon whose human and nonhuman resources I relied daily. I gratefully credit the efforts of many librarians and other library workers. In all manner of ways, my colleagues in the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences have helped me secure time for thinking and writing. I thank especially Denise Solomon, Dave Dzikowski, Ben Henderson, Margaret Michels, Lori Miraldi, Lori Bedell, Rachel Smith, Jon Nu baum, Rosa Eberly, Steve Browne, Cory Geraths, Brad Serber, and Lauren Camacci. Thanks, too, to Dean Susan Welch and the College of Liberal Arts for a substantial subvention of this book.
I am superlatively grateful for the fellowship I have enjoyed through Penn State s Center for Humanities and Information. I invoke fellowship in the senses both of sociality founded on shared interests and of a financial endowment in the form of course releases. When this project was at a crucial and vulnerable stage in its development, I found genuine zeal for it from Eric Hayot, Bonnie Mak, Lea Pao, Sam Frederick, Anatoly Detwyler, and Laura Helton. Another intellectual community of which I am happy to be a part is the International Society for the History of Rhetoric. I acknowledge Mike Edwards and Casper de Jonge for their unstinting encouragement and graciousness.
At the University of South Carolina Press, Jim Denton was a faithful steward of this book, perhaps the only one he has ever acquired that had editorial in the title (tactical thinking on my part), and Linda Fogle saw ably to the details of its production. I would also like to thank Lynne Parker for her editorial assistance and Jerilyn Famighetti for her copyediting efforts. Thanks are due, too, to Richard Leo Enos and Kathleen Lamp for their helpful criticisms of the original manuscript, especially the encouragement to be bolder in some of my claims. I hope I have not exceeded their wildest exhortations.
For various kindnesses and the warmth of shared academic affections through the years of this book s composition, I recognize Topher Kurfess, Janet Atwill, Vessela Valiavitcharska, Richard Graff, Brandon Inabinet, Casey Boyle, Nita Krevans, and Damien Smith Pfister. My dear friend Carly Woods and I found ourselves laboring on our respective books at the same time and set up a system for mutual and loving accountability. During my final weeks writing the original manuscript, several graduate students and I read and wrote side by side in silence (mostly); they included Jeremy Cox, Caroline Koons (who also helped with the index), and Tiara Good. Also during that time, work sessions with Debra Hawhee were immensely productive, since there are few things more inspirational than writing across the table from her, a remarkably generous, generative scholar.
A Note on Translation
All translations are mine unless noted otherwise. Because the diminutive green and red books of the Loeb Classical Library will be easy for readers of this book to find, I have relied upon Loeb editions for the Greek and Latin. Ancient works for which I have departed from that practice are listed in the Works Cited. If I were starting this book now, I would not use the word slave to translate the ancient Greek and Latin terms usually rendered that way. Instead, I would use enslaved person, which requires one to think about the violent imposition of slavery upon someone.
INTRODUCTION
Corpus Care
Delere licebit quod non edideris .
You will be able to blot out what you do not put out.
Horace, Ars Poetica , 389-390
Editing is the defining burden of publication, the arduous process of making written words public and deserving of a public. Though that claim could be supported by thousands of years of examples across several graphic forms, it finds ample substantiation in the earliest centuries of adjustment to the wax tablet and papyrus book-roll alone. That evidence need not include actual, material rough drafts of an orator s speeches, a poet s verses, or a philosopher s dialogues, discovered by chance by someone of a later century. * To seek and potentially find such drafts would tie one to transitional texts that had a small chain of reception, if any at all, and thus limited reach before being reused for other writing, repurposed for wrapping, or left to molder. In pursuit of when and how textual tidying and tidy texts take on a public aspect, this book locates recommendations about and reactions to prepublication processes within works that, without a doubt, have been heard and read by many. Within such works, an editorial language of refining and polishing calls attention to itself, to those writers unwilling or unable to shoulder the editorial onus, and to what may be lost when it is shirked.
Because ancient editorial vocabulary covers a lot of chronological ground and indexes a variety of textual activities, I begin by firmly establishing the terminological perimeters that pen this inquiry. My use of editing requires prompt explanation. The Latinate origins of the word, highly relevant when working with writings in Latin, are a little at odds with its current usage. The Latin verb edo, edere, edidi, editus -from the prefix ex (out, away) + the verb do (give)-enjoys a variety of meanings, from giving birth, to uttering words, to presenting something for inspection, to displaying it publicly, to publishing it. * Ancient Romans did not use edo -words as process words for prepublic textual activities. Instead, they dragged away, cut out, pressed, smoothed, polished, hammered, filed, and shaved. Much manual and metaphorical work was undertaken on written words to move them toward textual publication. As with edo , so with the Greek verbs for publication, ekdid mi (to give up, surrender, empty oneself of) and diadid mi (to hand over or distribute), which tend to appear in the company of active composition narratives.
In Greek and Latin, respectively, the same words refer to the emendation a writer undertakes before publication, and that undertaken by someone else appraising a work before its publication, and that undertaken by someone at a chronological remove attempting to rid a given textual tradition of errors and establish an authoritative edition. This book focuses on the first two types of corrective work, but the third type is not irrelevant to my efforts. As H. L. M. Van der Valk has noted, ancien