This dissertation draws attention to reciprocal influences linking the arts and sciences, represented respectively here by two seemingly disparate subjects--Rhetoric and Medicine. Both of these disciplines, I argue, share a long and intersecting history with one another still visible in the fifth- and fourth-century BCE Greece, when they began to develop separately and to be thought of as distinct disciplines. Exploring the historical connections between Rhetoric and Medicine in the Classical period offers us food for thought for bridging the gap between the arts and sciences today because it obliges us to recognize the historical intersections between them, the mutual influence each had upon the other, as well as the acknowledgment of these intersections and these influences by the ancient Greeks. The chapters that follow explore links between Rhetoric and Medicine on practical, professional, and theoretical levels. Following the introduction, chapter two investigates the therapeutic functioning of words in ancient Greece and finds that the influence of medicine on rhetoric extends from the usage of healing words in the Homeric epics through the rhetorical practices of healing in Antiphon, to the influence of medicine on the theory of persuasion in Gorgias. Chapter three explores the influence of medicine on rhetoric as it registers in Plato. The chapter shows that the clear-cut division Plato imposed onto Rhetoric and Medicine breaks down in the Phaedrus and that Plato's project to reframe Rhetoric as a true art borrows heavily from Medicine. While chapters two and three deal with the influence of medicine on rhetoric, the next two chapters turn in the opposite direction to explore the influence that rhetoric exerted on medicine. Chapter four demonstrates the prevalence of rhetorical issues about disciplinarity in the Hippocratic Corpus. Chapter five continues to explore this influence, this time arguing that Hippocratic physicians used rhetoric to craft an identity for themselves vis-à-vis other medical healers of the time. Finally, chapter six shows how the mutual and reciprocal influences between rhetoric and medicine, demonstrated through the previous chapters, can be tapped to pave the way for future possibilities in the contemporary study of Rhetoric and Medicine.

This dissertation examines new media by taking as its starting point the definition offered by Lev Manovich, "the shift of all culture to computer culture"--new media are new not so much because they have not existed before but because they must adhere to the conventions of a computer. Media, according to Manovich, become programmable, and in their new programmability, along with a host of other implications and repercussions of that programmability, we human beings experience something new. Articulating that something remains no easy chore, and Manovich continually makes his case that "the language of new media" much resembles the language of that older medium, cinema.However, to nod in agreement with Manovich is not the present task; instead, I take Manovich and place his notion of new media in direct dialogue with rhetorical theorists Aristotle, Plato, Kenneth Burke, Barry Brummett, Jeffery Walker, Michel Foucault, and other writers and thinkers in order to pursue a portion of that "shift of all culture": I ask, "If new media has a language, what is the poetics of that language?" In order to pursue an answer to this question, I take individual new media objects--the film Saving Private Ryan; the video game Medal of Honor: Frontline; the computer worm MyDoom; the media coverage of the 1996 presidential campaign trail, including the "Dean Scream"; the SanDisk's cooperation with the Alzheimer's Association's "Take Action against Alzheimer's" campaign; the film The Manchurian Candidate; and the modern database--and analyze how they make meaning. In order to do this, I frequently reach back into antiquity, specifically into the early and predisciplinary areas of philosophy, rhetoric, and poetics.

Within the past two decades, theorists have begun to look back to the classical rhetorical past for answers to modern dilemmas in composition teaching. Several textbooks have been published that focus their teaching of college composition on the classical tradition. While the movement to revitalize classical rhetoric is gaining strength in universities, however, the benefits of this movement have not yet reached, in any real way, the levels of elementary, middle school, or high school education. This thesis shows how the classical rhetorical curriculum generally, and a specific part of that curriculum, the progymnasmata, accomplish important aims of modern composition approaches, while at the same time providing answers to modern deficiencies in composition instruction, especially at the secondary level. The thesis compares the progymnasmata and their accompanying pedagogy with the most prevalent and up-and-coming approaches in composition teaching, including current-traditional, expressivist, and social epistemic—including genre theory—approaches, and process-based, or cognitive, composition pedagogy. Modern theorists are finding value in the classical rhetorical curriculum because, since the 1800s, advances in composition instruction are now recognized as reinventions of the classical past, recovering vital elements once present in rhetorical instruction and then lost. The classical curriculum also provides solutions to problems in modern composition approaches. Because modern theoretical approaches are partial reiterations of the classical rhetorical tradition, and because the classical tradition can enable students in ways modern approaches cannot, exploring the possibilities of teaching the progymnasmata in secondary schools is worthwhile.

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Recent scholarship has explored the “Machiavellian” actions of Prince Hal in Henry IV, Part 1 ; yet the classical rhetorical pedagogy of Renaissance Britain suggests that the speeches in the play lead to a transformation in Hal that is antithetical to the emergent understanding of Hal as a great manipulator. Falstaff uses the ruse of rhetoric instructor in order to construct a classical rhetorical argument for his own ends, and Henry IV gives a passionate yet formally adept (and classically rhetorical) plea to his son in order to incite change. An analysis of Falstaff and Henry’s arguments as well as Hal’s responses provides the framework of understanding the play not as an example of what has been called “Machiavellianism” but rather as a testament to the power of what Cicero calls the "good man skilled in speaking.”

This study will embrace certain features of postmodern experience so as to underline subjective embodiment as the condition, corollary, and appropriate focus of textual, rhetorical, and sociopolitical criticism. It will theorize somantics as a conceptual toolkit for mapping the structural correspondence of embodiment to the symbolic order, each thus emerging as the other’s non-foundational “efficient reason.” This study will argue that the flesh mediates the theoretic divisions of structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and existentialism, although not in a priori or essentialist ways. It will draw from their vocabularies, combining them into a vocabulary of its own while retexturing their relation to one another. It thus aspires to reduce all rhetorics and metaphysics to the somantic, so as to sabotage conservative fundamentalisms and to establish the terms for an argument with enthusiasts of transhumanism. Moreover, this study will suggest that theoretic systems, cultural messages, and sociopolitical speech-acts inattentive to the condition of embodiment—whether that of their agents, interlocutors, or material mediums of expression— must then seem at once suspicious, maladaptive to the sense contingencies of the moment, and deserving of somantic reduction. In correcting these faults, it will also resist systematizing or universalizing sense-experience; it will function rather as a corpus of maps that rechart the volatile, moment-to-moment interimplication of the somatic and the symbolic. Thus this study takes axiomatically Frederic Jameson’s claim that intertextuality replaces history in the era of transnational capital, seeing in this argument the strategic advantage of taking a theoretic standpoint against diachronic modalities of time. Arguing for the reconstruction of certain narratives as distortions, if not outright falsifications, of the simultaneation of needs, impressions, and changes in a subject’s sense-experience, this study will redirect attention to the relation of certain discourses to the bodies of their interlocutors.

La rhétorique d’un recueil de pièces amoureuses relève de la rhétorique délibérative dans la mesure où l’amoureux tente de convaincre l’aimée d’agir dans le sens qu’il voudrait; de la rhétorique judiciaire lorsque l’amoureux s’adresse au lecteur et lui demande de juger de la situation où il se trouve; et de la rhétorique épidictique lorsqu’il y a louange ou blâme de l’aimée. De plus, étant donné que la poésie agit très directement sur le lecteur, le poète de la Renaissance a trouvé une forte correspondance entre les objectifs esthétiques de la poésie et les trois offices oratoires : plaire, émouvoir et instruire. La redécouverte des textes classiques d’Aristote, de Cicéron, et de Quintilien allait renforcer ces moments de croisement et permettre aux poètes de la Renaissance française de redéfinir leur rôle et celui de leur poésie. En principe, il s’agissait de libérer leurs œuvres poétiques de toutes les contraintes esthétiques et stylistiques valorisées au Moyen Age en composant leurs propres traités théoriques. En réalité, il s’agissait de renouveler l’esthétique poétique en préconisant l’importance de la pratique de l’imitation créatrice, c’est-à-dire, l’invention en lisant les anciens, et l’élocution en les imitant. L’imitation ne se limitait pourtant pas au niveau lexical. Elle s’accomplissait à l’intérieur d’une théorie rhétorique classique où la disposition, la seconde démarche consécutive de la rhétorique offrait à l’orateur des principes organisateurs qui s’appliquaient à la composition en vers. L’objet de cette thèse est donc de cerner une problématique que les poètes de la Renaissance ont dû confronter: comment structurer l’œuvre poétique. Dans un premier temps, en examinant la formulation de la théorie de la disposition classique et sa réapparition dans les arts poétiques de la Renaissance (1540-1560), cette étude établira que les règles de la rhétorique discursive qui régissent la composition et l’organisation du discours oratoire s’attachent facilement, au seizième siècle, à la composition poétique. Dans un deuxième temps, en analysant l’emplacement et l’enchaînement des pièces amoureuses dans les Sonnets pour Hélène (1578), ce travail de recherche examinera la façon dont ces mêmes principes organisateurs rhétoriques se font sentir dans le discours poétique amoureux.

La rhétorique d’un recueil de pièces amoureuses relève de la rhétorique délibérative dans la mesure où l’amoureux tente de convaincre l’aimée d’agir dans le sens qu’il voudrait; de la rhétorique judiciaire lorsque l’amoureux s’adresse au lecteur et lui demande de juger de la situation où il se trouve; et de la rhétorique épidictique lorsqu’il y a louange ou blâme de l’aimée. De plus, étant donné que la poésie agit très directement sur le lecteur, le poète de la Renaissance a trouvé une forte correspondance entre les objectifs esthétiques de la poésie et les trois offices oratoires : plaire, émouvoir et instruire. La redécouverte des textes classiques d’Aristote, de Cicéron, et de Quintilien allait renforcer ces moments de croisement et permettre aux poètes de la Renaissance française de redéfinir leur rôle et celui de leur poésie. En principe, il s’agissait de libérer leurs œuvres poétiques de toutes les contraintes esthétiques et stylistiques valorisées au Moyen Age en composant leurs propres traités théoriques. En réalité, il s’agissait de renouveler l’esthétique poétique en préconisant l’importance de la pratique de l’imitation créatrice, c’est-à-dire, l’invention en lisant les anciens, et l’élocution en les imitant. L’imitation ne se limitait pourtant pas au niveau lexical. Elle s’accomplissait à l’intérieur d’une théorie rhétorique classique où la disposition, la seconde démarche consécutive de la rhétorique offrait à l’orateur des principes organisateurs qui s’appliquaient à la composition en vers. L’objet de cette thèse est donc de cerner une problématique que les poètes de la Renaissance ont dû confronter: comment structurer l’œuvre poétique. Dans un premier temps, en examinant la formulation de la théorie de la disposition classique et sa réapparition dans les arts poétiques de la Renaissance (1540-1560), cette étude établira que les règles de la rhétorique discursive qui régissent la composition et l’organisation du discours oratoire s’attachent facilement, au seizième siècle, à la composition poétique. Dans un deuxième temps, en analysant l’emplacement et l’enchaînement des pièces amoureuses dans les Sonnets pour Hélène (1578), ce travail de recherche examinera la façon dont ces mêmes principes organisateurs rhétoriques se font sentir dans le discours poétique amoureux.

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