Recently, feminist scholars have begun to question the traditional telling of the history of rhetoric. Dissatisfied with a history which is told in terms of privileged, white males to the exclusion of all other voices, these scholars have worked to recover "lost" female rhetoricians and have begun critically rereading the traditional narrative of the history of rhetoric in terms of the gender and power structures which helped create it. This project takes as its goal the recovery of women's lament in ancient Greece. Through close readings of classical texts, analyzing ancient legislation, and using anthropological work on modern Greek laments, I demonstrate that lament offered women in ancient Greece a unique opportunity for public performance and a powerful position to speak from. I then show how the city-state of Athens took great pains to contain this genre first by legislating against it and later by creating a rhetorical institution, the epitaphios logos (funeral oration), which worked to contain lamentation and tell a history of Athens without women. Lastly, I attempt to locate lament inside the rhetorical tradition as a form of pre-rhetoric. I show that not only was this form of speech stylistically powerful, but that it also had an underlying epistemology, one which is similar to the poetically-based rhetoric of the sophists. / Graduation date: 2001

Inaug.-diss.--Breslau. / Lebenslauf. Includes bibliographical references.

The author's dissertation, Freiburg, 1928. / Includes bibliographical references.

The author's inaugural dissertation, Erlangen, 1914.

This thesis offers Plato's readers a different approach to reading the Gorgias. Chief consideration is given to Plato's artistic plan as a rhetorician, rather than a strict moral philosopher. The display of his rhetorical genius works to support his arguments in favour of a certain kind of rhetoric. The usual argument that Plato is attacking rhetoric is rejected here. In its place the reader will see a Plato refuting his contemporaries' spurious form of rhetoric, as the rhetoric Plato represents and displays is a true craft, as genuine as the dialectic. Rhetoric is not without its shortcomings, but neither is the dialectic, and though Socrates says otherwise, it is because Plato is not Socrates. The argument for two Socrates is not advanced here, but his rhetorical tendencies are expressed in three debates whose overall message culminates in his prophetic myth of life after death. Plato introduces a new kind of visionary rhetoric that Socrates does not explicitly defend but which he nonetheless displays within the drama of the dialogue. Plato's views on rhetoric, then, are not merely the sum of Socrates' views on the Gorgias' theme, rather it is within the dramatic presentation of different views on rhetoric that Plato seeks to convey his defence of rhetoric.

Thesis (doctoral)--Königl. Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, 1913.

Thesis (Th. M.)--Dallas Theological Seminary, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [93]-111).

Thesis (Th. M.)--Dallas Theological Seminary, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [93]-111).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Baylor University, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 322-351).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1914.