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
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ORGSU/oai:ir.library.oregonstate.edu:1957/33097 |
| Date | 13 September 2000 |
| Creators | Robertson, Wayne |
| Contributors | Burton, Vicki Tolar |
| Source Sets | Oregon State University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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