As the "Telephone" game was brought up in class Tuesday night, allow me to use it to illustrate a concept that I took away from Edward Corbett's Topoi Revisted and Enos' Recovering the Lost Art of Researching the History of Rhetoric.
We know, thanks to our readings, that the Latin rhetoricians took Greek concepts of rhetoric, Aristotle's concepts, and adapted them to suit the Roman ideals and culture. Some of his ideas were given less importance in this new rhetorical scheme, ideas such as the topoi. To Aristotle, "the topoi were devices enabling the speaker to find those arguments that would be most persuasive in a given situation." They were intended to assist the invention process by enabling discovery of the most appropriate and successful direction in which to take an argument based on the matter of the argument itself. But Cicero and Quintilian reduced the topoi to training devices for students, with the intention that the student would soon grow out of reliance on "this rather mechanical system of heuristics." And later, as described by Curtius' book European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, the topoi "became not so much devices for finding persuasive arguments in letter writing...and preaching...as guiding principles for the composition of literary texts." The topoi became formulas for funeral sermons with "stereotyped themes." New topoi were employed for the introductions and conclusions of poetry, with "hackneyed themes and conventions."
Oh how the mighty topoi had fallen. Clearly, this wasn't what Aristotle had in mind, but why did it come to that? It is the historical research version of Telephone.
The new topoi in the Middle Ages appears to be an attempt to reexamine the topoi from different perspectives. But, according to Corbett, "these new topoi served to formularize literature but did little to enliven or innovate it." They seem to have gone to Cicero and Quintilian for their ideas of what topoi should and could do in literature, or research on topoi based on what Cicero and Quintilian perceived them to be. Perhaps that is a disservice, as I don't actually know what sources they used. But Aristotle seemed more interested in the invention aspect of the topoi and what could be discovered, rather than what formulas might be gleaned from them to cut and paste into a document.
We have lost the art of research, according to Enos, specifically in the field of rhetoric. Primary scholarship is no longer the focus. "Rather, what we are presenting as historical studies are critiques on secondary scholarhip, speculative essays on meta-theory and point/counter-point debates over characterizations of ideologies." Enos sees this shift in the focus of research as detrimental to the field of rhetoric for a number of reasons, not the least of which are a lack of respect for the true art of research and the loss of valuable knowledge.
Essentially, we as scholars are in danger of being caught in an unending game of Telephone. We seek out secondary scholarship and treat it like a primary source, which is a shaky place to start. There is information loss between the primary and secondary sources as focuses shift and meanings are skewed based on interpretation. That is inevitable and it would behoove us to keep that in mind as budding scholars. If we hope to make a lasting and worthy contribution to our fields we might want to stop playing Telephone and attempt to go to the source, whatever form that may be.
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Erin, I'm glad you brought up the example of the telephone game discussed in class last week. When I was reminded in your blog, it triggered memories of my own experience with "primary sources". I was priviledged to work for 10 years at the National Archives, in the Denver Regional Office, where I did conservation work on original records and made finding aids for those records. I was often assigned to the Bureau of Indian Affairs records as they were often in poor physical condition. Some records were reports from the indian agent in charge detailing the bureaucracy of how monies were spent on reservations, physicians reports, supt. of schools reports, teacher reports, well you get the picture. I often wondered what filters were used to "cya" as these quarterly, semi-annual, and the big annual reports were generated. Primary sources for researchers? Absolutely. Yet, as David Hume would advise, approach all historical information with skepticism. If you haven't experienced it, be wary. And, that is the point of making new discoveries that might alter our interpretation of the primary sources at hand.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment, Marilyn. That's a good point about the accuracy and veracity of records. However, it is possible to learn just as much from skewed records like those you mention because of those very inaccuracies. That goes back to a larger issue of source authentication and criticism, while I think Corbett and Enos were referring to the lack of research effort and the interpretation of such sources which leads to skewed perceptions.
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