Question 1

What expectations regarding the writing of women did Margaret Cavendish challenge?

Accepted Answer

Margaret Cavendish is seen as one of the first English women to write with the intention of seeking publication. She challenged the period's views on the role of women writers, their style, and chosen genres of writing. While most women were expected to write devotional literature, romances, or recipe books, she chose to write plays, poems, philosophy, and scientific works.

Question 2

By what means did Vico think the mind ordered the world and made civilization possible?

Accepted Answer

Vico believed that the mind ordered the world through the faculty of imagination rather than abstract reason. He believed that human thought began with an ability to make comparisons between objects through metaphor. He traces the progress of human thought through developing metonym, synecdoche, and finally irony.

Question 3

What, according to Vico, was the human capacity of ingenium?

Accepted Answer

Ingenium is the innate human capacity to grasp similarities or relationships. Vico says that this capacity was crucial for humanizing the world.

Question 4

What were Vico's principal objections to the philosophy of Descartes?

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Question 5

What social forces compelled British people to seek education in rhetoric during the eighteenth century?

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Question 6

What particular social developments in Britain alarmed Thomas Sheridan? What was his proposed solution?

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Question 7

What negative effects did Thomas Sheridan associate with the decline in British eloquence?

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Question 8

What were the goals of the Belletristic Movement? What effect did it have on the study of argument as a component of rhetoric?

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Question 9

Why was Hugh Blair concerned to develop the quality of taste in his students?

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Question 10

What theory of psychology influenced George Campbell's theory of rhetoric? How was this influence revealed in Campbell's theory?

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Question 11

How may Campbell's interest in religious questions have influenced his theory of rhetoric?

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Question 12

What did Richard Whately hope to accomplish through teaching his students rhetoric?

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Question 13

How were presumption and burden of proof related for Whately?

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Question 14

What was Maria Edgeworth's response to prominent Enlightenment rhetorical theories?

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Question 15

The elocutionary movement of the eighteenth century offered training in oratorical delivery as a means of personal refinement and success. Even though this particular idea may be foreign to contemporary education, is an ability to speak effectively still a path to personal success or social status?

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Question 16

Vico argued that myth-in its capacity to organize our experience-was a rational form of discourse and the foundation of logos or argument. What stories told today might have the organizational or ordering status of myth?

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Question 17

What, for you, is the significance of style in speaking and writing? Is it important to clear communication? Is it an element in persuasion? If style is important to persuasion, should it be?

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Question 18

George Campbell built his rhetorical theory on a particular view of the human mind. We have seen something like this in the suggestions Plato made in Phaedrus about the nature of the human soul. Vico speculated about the mind's development in terms of rhetorical devices. What view of the human mind and its workings might a contemporary rhetorical theory reflect?

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Question 19

If she were alive today Margaret Cavendish might be a performance artist. What contemporary parallels do you see to her use of a rhetoric of display, and to her challenging of established norms about what can be discussed and by whom?

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Question 20

What is your reaction to Maria Edgeworth using fiction to teach moral lessons?

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Quiz 8: Enlightenment Rhetoric