Search results for "rhetoric"
showing 10 items of 489 documents
Retorica e costruzione del consenso in Tucidide: il caso di Mitilene.
2016
In his account of the Peloponnesian war, Thucydides explicitly insists on some dilemmas linked to the wider matter of deliberative process: in particular, the relationship between nature, profit and justice, truth and lie, speech and action. The story of the uprising of Mytilene is particularly useful, intertwining the antilogy between the two speakers (Cleon and Diodotus) with the so-called metanoia: the Athenian deliberative rethinking puts on focus the complex problems of the building of consensus in the democratic decision-making processes. Here we examine only one point of the two rich and articulate speeches: the opportunity of discussing again what has been already decided in a corre…
Post-veracità. Estetiche della politica, retoriche del quotidiano, stili di vita
2020
A strange obsession for truth seems to define the present time: injunction to truth-telling, call to being authentic, fear of the fake are some of the features characterizing practices and rethorics of our living together. The realm of politics appears to be a privileged ground to this end, being able to grasp the symptoms diffused in the everyday life and configure them into steady models of behaviour through the effectiveness of its (self)representations. This paper aims to address the rhetoric pervasiveness of the concept of truth by inquiring the semantic field deployed by neologism “truthiness” and its Italian translation “veracità”, tentatively defined as a “natural” truth that presen…
La retorica in scena nel Fu Mattia Pascal. Aspetti e figure
2019
The rhetoric on stage in Il fu Mattia Pascal. The essay proposes a reflection on some questions and aspects of thetoric in Il fu Mattia Pascal. Devices and figures of the discourse, in relation to an intense theoretical work, take on a specific stylistic function in Pirandello: they support doublings, inversions, suspensions, able to erode the mimetic paradigms. In the first chapters of the novel one can observe that the figure of the chiasm, with the interweaving of different formal pieces, is functional to an idea of flexible and open narration. The ‘wise form’, the novellistic dimension of the narrative, in antithesis to a linear ordering, the metonymic aspect of the detail, with which t…
La scrittura in italiano LS in apprendenti sinofoni: tra testualità e retorica
2022
Writing skills are a founding pillar of the linguistic-communicative competence of the L2 speakers, which requires a long process of learning and teaching. Based on a corpus analysis of texts written by 24 Chinese learners of Italian, this paper aims to explore whether elements attributable to construction models of the text typical of L1 affect the writing of second language and its embodiment. We analyze this corpus according to both the Contrastive (or Intercultural) Rhetoric and Second Language Acquisition point of views. The conclusion offers the result of the analysis with some reflections on teaching writing in Italian for Chinese students.
L'Oulipo ou la Nouvelle Vague du Classicisme
2010
The Oulipo establishes a new relationship with Antiquity, one which submits to a reevaluation and not to a process of destruction: by means of an analytic tendency, the Oulipo relives forgotten works or rereads the literature so dear to Classical tradition. With regards to its relationship with contemporary avant-garde, the Oulipo, which upholds the idea of a voluntary literature, opposes Surrealism, but shares with Tel Quel the playful notion of literature and the intent of reevaluating text as a practice founded on an handcrafted perception of a writer’s creation. The Oulipo’s answer to Nineteenthcentury Realism’s desire to break from narrative conventions animating Tel Quel and the Nouve…
Building Consensus. An introduction to a rhetorical approach
2016
The contemporary debate on democracy shows two points of view: the “deliberative” one and the “agonistic” one. The first one is related to the classical tradition that considers Habermas as its reference point. It emphasizes the role of rational deliberation as a means to produce a legitimate and binding consensus. In contrast, the second one draws its inspiration from C. Schmitt, and considers conflict and disagreement as unavoidable conditions of democratic life. Despite their obvious differences, these two theoretical models have a conception of rhetoric in common that is subjected to, or at least excluded from, the full exercise of argumentative rationality. We propose an interpretation…
Il sapere congetturale tra medicina e retorica. Un’indagine su semeion e tekmerion
2019
In this essay we focus on the epistemology of Hippocratic medicine starting from the analysis of two terms on which scholars have paid attention, semeion and tekmerion (and related verbs semainein and tekmairesthai ), connecting them to the notion of eikos. Our goal is to examine the conjectural and fallible nature of human knowledge starting from the peculiar case of ancient Greek medicine. In order to do this, we will make a comparison with another techne that played a crucial role in Greek culture: rhetoric. After all, if this comparison medicine-rhetoric may sound surprising for modern scholars, in the Greek world it was instead widespread and it is not by chance that the terms of our i…
Giovanni Meli medico a Palermo tra '700 e '800: il primo dei tre Ricettari
2023
Si discute del primo Ricettario di Giovanni Meli come documento della cultura scientifica sette / ottocentesca a Palermo, esaminando anche questioni filologiche sul latino scientifico del tempo, che avranno importanza per i fini ecdotici.
The Reform and Innovation as Rhetoric and Method
2018
We start from an observation from a well-known Swedish organisational analyst, Nils Brunsson, which reads like irony but feels like reality: the only guaranteed outcome of (organisational) reform is the next reform. What Brunsson calls ‘the reform of reform’ will be – all too – familiar to many readers, particularly those working in the public sector. Given repeated exposure to permanent reorganization – brought in under the mantel of reform and innovation – it is tempting to ascribe this permanent revolution to one or both of two causes: the failure of previous reform attempts and/or the need of senior managers to demonstrate their ‘transformative’ effects upon their organization in order …