This chapter explores the formative role that political oratory played in the literary culture of the early republic, with a particular focus on the statesman's address. American literature bears a strong relationship to oral forms and styles. In the period covered by this volume, the interplay of oral and written language shapes the works of Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin, while oratory figures importantly in such notable novels as Modern Chivalry (1792–1815), Wieland (1798), and Last of the Mohicans (1826). Political speech was far more central to the literary culture of the day than was the novel, with oratorical culture dominating English education until after the Civil War. “The Statesman's Address” considers the influence of Native American oratory and evangelical preaching on a genre that came into its own in the Revolutionary period and gained importance as the contours of the new republic were defined and contested.

Drawing on the classical rhetorical tradition, I argue that we can normatively evaluate political communication by attending to the structure of rhetorical relationships. They are necessarily asymmetrical, but they can become more equitable when they involve both speaker and audience in vulnerability to risk: the audience assumes the risk of having its convictions transformed, while the speaker assumes the risk of public rejection or humiliation. This burden-sharing turns speech from a potential activity of domination into action in a common civic space. Today, this burden-sharing is threatened by routinized and data-driven practices that aim to shield elites from rhetorical risk, and by the demagogic rhetoric of “unfiltered” spontaneity that represents a backlash to these practices. I discuss these rhetorical pathologies in a survey of contemporary US rhetoric. We can recover an alternative in the rhetorical thought of antiquity: eloquence as “spontaneous decorum.” This notion of eloquence welcomes uncertainty as part of public deliberation. But it also has qualities associated with decorum, because it is avowedly artificial; it is conceived as inherently stylized and as set apart from ordinary speech. Eloquence, I argue, is an emergent property of sound rhetorical relationships – the audible sign, as it were, of the relationship’s health.

Chapter 1 engages in a close reading of the most important Roman work on eloquence, Cicero’s De oratore. In the face of the late-stage crisis of the Roman Republic, Cicero reconceives oratorical virtus as a capacity to endure risk in confrontation with an unruly public. From this reconception flows a rejection of systematized rhetoric, in which Cicero valorizes the uncertainties of language: the absence of predictable, manipulable links between speech and audience response. This model of eloquence stresses the unreliability of the orator’s persuasive tools and claims that it is the very possibility of failure that makes oratory worthwhile, virtuous, and even interesting. The pursuit of eloquence pushes Cicero toward a surprising stress on the autonomy of the audience. It is just because Cicero stresses the difficulty of eloquence that he finds himself invested in constructing an unpredictable and unconstrained public. Though he was no democrat, his treatment of eloquence is relevant to democratic theory because of the unexpected pressures it places on his elitism. Cicero’s critique of technical rhetoric also anticipates dissatisfaction with the contemporary routinization of rhetoric. The chapter contrasts this view with the more rationalized model of speech developed in De analogia, Julius Caesar’s work on style.

Cicero’s Brutus and Tacitus’ Dialogus de Oratoribus deal with the silence of eloquence resulting from the change of the political system in the first century BC. This silence leads to a paradoxical effect: it produces all the more eloquent speech, which helps to keep the discourse of the position of eloquence going.

In the Brutus, the narrative is driven by the interlocutors’ desire for eloquent speech while the silence of speech is compensated for by the history of Roman eloquence. The conversation is set in a field of tension between two poles of omnipresent silence: the reason for the political change, Caesar, and the climax of rhetorical history, Cicero himself. The former is explicitly omitted, the latter continually postponed until the climax of eloquence is finally released at the end of the dialogue.

The Dialogus deals in hindsight with the absence of great eloquence. While speech and voices are represented in abundance, small but numerous gaps occur within them, creating a gauze of silence that, unobtrusively, keeps the meaning of the text unstable. The conversation is driven on not by the interlocutors’ desire for eloquent speech but by the speech act of promise, which is renewed throughout the text.

This brief Epilogue maps out the implications of the findings of this book on the various branches of the “science of eloquence” (ʿilm al-balāgha) and their role in poetic beauty. While faṣāḥa comes to refer to the correct, clear, and articulate way of conveying ideas, balāgha comes to refer to the conveying of ideas in a beautiful way after securing its faṣāḥa. Nevertheless, clarity often remains part of the definition of balāgha in Arabic criticism. The Epilogue concludes that this call for clarity is included in classical sources not as a determining feature of eloquence, but as a limit to the obscuring aspects of indirectness, implicitness, and unexpectedness necessary for rendering language beautiful.

The Preface briefly discusses and qualifies basic vocabulary central to the topic of the book, including the terms “medieval,” “classical,” “Arabic,” “literary,” “poetic,” “eloquent,” “literature,” “poetics,” “rhetoric,” “theory,” and “criticism.”

The Introduction presents the argument that aesthetic judgment in classical Arabic literary theory came to depend on the ability of poetry or eloquent speech to produce an experience of wonder in the listener. This experience of wonder is not merely a reaction of amazement and bedazzlement, but it also entails a process of discovery. After presenting an account of the nature of classical Arabic literary theory, its various approaches to literary assessment, its topics and historical development, the Introduction highlights that the main aspects of literary expression Arabic criticism was concerned with lay in rhetorical figures (badīʿ), simile (tashbīh), figurative speech (majāz), metaphor (istiʿāra), metonymy (kināya), and sentence construction (naẓm). It is in these aspects of linguistic expression that an aesthetic theory of wonder can be uncovered in the classical Arabic critical tradition, including in discussions of poetry proper, engagements with Aristotelian Poetics, and works on eloquence and the miraculousness (iʿjāz) of the Quran, culminating by the thirteenth century in the formalized study of eloquence in ʿilm al-balāgha (the science of eloquence).

The style of the various editions of the Institutes is directly related to the audience for which the book was written, for Calvin was convinced that any book had to be accommodated to the capacities of its intended audience. John Calvin originally wrote the Institutes to be a catechism for the pious evangelicals in France, who had come to faith in the Gospel but who needed to have their faith built up and strengthened. “My purpose was solely to transmit certain rudiments by which those who are touched with any zeal for religion might be shaped to true godliness.” Because the audience was ordinary believers who needed to be edified, Calvin adopted a style that was accommodated to their capacities. “The book itself witnesses that this was my intention, adapted as it is to a simple and, you might say, elementary form of teaching.”1 As many scholars have noted, the format of Luther’s Small Catechism is clearly evident in the form of the first edition of the Institutes, as it is structured along the lines of the Ten Commandments, the Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer, followed by an extended discussion of the sacraments.