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Violence and Rhetoric in Euripides's Hecuba

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

James L. Kastely
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Abstract

Euripides's Hecuba contributes to a theory of rhetoric by exploring the problems created for persuasion in a world where those in power are isolated from the pain of others. For Euripides, the threat to rhetoric resides not in active suppression of speech but in an audience's indifference to a speaker. He dramatizes this threat and the personal cost to a rhetor who would challenge the security of the powerful. The result is a tenuous recovery of a rhetoric that can contend with a world governed by force and chance.

Type
Cluster on the Poetic: From Euripides to Rich
Information
PMLA , Volume 108 , Issue 5 , October 1993 , pp. 1036 - 1049
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1993

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