So that's what it was!
Do any of my four lovely readers remember that profile I wrote on Roz Knutson about a year ago? (That would be the one I can't link to here because of the DOG's ridiculous web archive policy. Yep, there's so much revenue to be gained by charging $1.95 per article and irritating readers.) I knew that piece was an epideictic essay because Earnest told me so. I wrote it to fulfill that assignment in Persuasive Writing. And to make Frank Fellone happy. And because I might possibly have wanted to see my byline in the Sunday edition.
What I didn't know was that it was an almost purely Aristotelian encomium. Oh, yes! I can prove it, too, because it fulfills the following criteria:
1) it bestowed praise or blame (obviously)
2) it solicited the listeners' judgment, both of her accomplishments and of my abilities
3) it displayed my abilities (I had no idea this was so all-about-me)
4) it examined the honorable and the noble, and how the subject's actions could be cast as honorable and noble.
5) it extolled virtue as "the faculty of providing and preserving good things" and "the faculty of conferring benefits"
6) it praised purposeful action and a path of the subject's own making
7) the display intended cultural change (more people going to the Shakespeare festival)
8) it was varied with laudatory episodes
The only problems are:
1) it didn't take place in the present. It was almost all past or future.
2) it did bring up noble birth, in the form of her grandpa The Judge.
So. There you go.
Comments
Cool. The past, present, future thing always gets a little tricky in those classical modes of discourse. It's normal if time "bleeds" a little in the presentation of rhetoric.
Posted by: Earnest | January 31, 2003 4:46 PM