{"agent_id":"blair","agent_name":"Hugh Blair","slug":"belles-lettres-or-civic-art","label":"Belles lettres or civic art: does widening rhetoric to taste and criticism enrich it, or hollow out its public purpose?","topic":"Belles lettres or civic art","question":"Does widening rhetoric to taste and criticism enrich it, or hollow out its public purpose?","position":"Criticism and composition are not a retreat from eloquence but its foundation. A man who cannot judge what makes a period clear or an image just will not speak well when the occasion comes, and most educated men will write far more often than they will address an assembly.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Criticism and composition are not a retreat from eloquence but its foundation.","n":[]},{"t":"A man who cannot judge what makes a period clear or an image just will not speak well when the occasion comes, and most educated men will write far more often than they will address an assembly.","n":[1,2,3]}]],"texts":"*Lectures* I (the design of the course), XXV-XXXIV (eloquence of popular assemblies, the bar, the pulpit), and the arrangement of the whole. Reception: Wilbur Samuel Howell's *Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric* (1971) treats the belletristic turn as the era's defining movement; twentieth-century revivals of civic rhetoric (Bitzer, the neo-Aristotelians) read it as a domestication that severed rhetoric from power.","works":["*Lectures* I (the design of the course), XXV-XXXIV (eloquence of popular assemblies, the bar, the pulpit), and the arrangement of the whole"],"reception":"Wilbur Samuel Howell's *Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric* (1971) treats the belletristic turn as the era's defining movement; twentieth-century revivals of civic rhetoric (Bitzer, the neo-Aristotelians) read it as a domestication that severed rhetoric from power.","status":"The organizing decision of the course, made deliberately and defended in the opening lecture.","era":"1718-1800","discipline":"Rhetoric","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"By putting our sentiments into words, we always conceive them more distinctly. Every one who has the slightest acquaintance with composition knows, that when he expresses himself ill on any subject, when his arrangement is loose, and his sentences become feeble, the defects of his style can, al- most on every occasion, be traced back to his indistinct conception of the subject: so close is the connexion between…","label":"Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres"},{"n":2,"work":"Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Even the commoa people are better judges of argu meat and good sense, than we sometimes think them; and upon any question of business, a plain man, who speaks to the point without art, will generally prevail over the most artful speaker, who deals in flowers and ornament, rather than in reasoning.","label":"Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres"},{"n":3,"work":"Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The attention paid to it may, indeed, be assumed as one mark of the progress of society towards its most improved period. For, accord- ing as society improves and flourishes, men acquire more influence over one another by means of reasoning and discourse; and in pro- portion as that influence is felt to enlarge, it must follow, as a natu- ral consequence, that they will bestow more care upon the methods B 9 10…","label":"Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"taste","label":"Taste: is there a real standard, or is criticism finally a report of what a cultivated person happens to like?"},{"slug":"the-sublime","label":"The sublime: does it arise from terror, as Burke argued, or from grandeur and elevation of conception?"},{"slug":"pulpit-eloquence","label":"Pulpit eloquence: should a sermon persuade like an oration, or is preaching a different art with different laws?"}]}