The first section of the Rhetorica Ad Herennium really caught my eye, as the anonymous author attempts to discredit previous rhetoricians and their outdated styles. "Indeed, if the ancient orators and poets should take the books of these rhetoricians and each remove therefrom what belongs to himself, the rhetoricians would have nothing left to claim as their own" (244). In the other writing classes I've taken/am taking, the idea of originality always seems to come up. Is all writing simply made up of things previously written? Can we ever write something that hasn't been written before? This author seems to argue that yes, we can, and our writing will actually be weaker if we defer to our predecessors. With this assertion in mind, I question how the author can go on to list the different ways in which to apply rhetoric without wondering where these terms originated.
I love the idea that creativity and originality can be defined as taking old ideas and putting them together in a way that hasn't been done before. I always believed those old ideas could come from a variety of sources, but it seems that the author would care to disagree. "Actually, the fact that the writers on rhetoric... have borrowed from all the orators and poets, is a sign that they themselves have not believed that any one individual can be brilliant in all the branches of style" (246). His belief that our writing is weakened when polluted by multiple ideas is another assertion I'm having a hard time accepting. Maybe we don't necessarily have to perfectly emulate every style we come across and identify with, but can we find a few threads that run through multiple authors and work toward perfecting those in our own way? "...to select from one author alone" (246) seems counterproductive and restraining; how are we to expand our abilities and gain exposure to all of the different rhetorical styles available for us to employ if we are drawing from only one source? I'm wondering if there is an answer to my abundance of questions... We shall see!
Hey Molly,
ReplyDeleteYou definitely picked a great topic to discuss in regards to this reading! I was kind of laughing the entire time I read through this writer’s spiel about “borrowing examples”: I could just picture him as a rebel, modern college student who, after procrastinating and writing a research paper without any references, decides to defend himself to the professor for his lack of “borrowing.” But what’s even more laughable is the irony pointed out in the introduction on page 241: “[A]t the beginning of Book IV, he attacks as ‘Greek’ the practice of borrowing examples to illustrate rhetorical principles. Rather, he argues, the rhetorician should create the examples, because they will ratify his skill and suit the lesson more aptly than anything borrowed. Yet in this very passage the author himself appears to borrow from a Greek source.” After knowing this, I wasn’t much impressed by any ethical appeal the writer set forth, and I certainly wasn’t buying his argument since he wasn’t following his own ideals.
I agree with your idea that creativity and originality isn’t necessarily coming up with “new” content, but rather, with a new presentation or synthesis of old content. I actually wrote a blog post on this idea last year in Digital Rhetorics, and if you’d like to check is out, the URL is this: http://unwritingtheparadigm.blogspot.com/2013/09/my-very-unoriginal-post.html
I think you were also spot-on to disagree with the anonymous writer’s statement that if you must borrow something from someone, it should only come from one source. Emulating just “one” person is hardly even feasible due to the nature of intertextuality and (once again) the nature of “originality.” I highly recommend watching this TED talk by Austin Kleon, author of “Steal Like An Artist”; he really brings to light some of these issues.
http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxKC-Austin-Kleon-Steal-Like