RHETORIC—QUINTILIAN, MPhil—ENGLISH

MPhil—ENGLISH—BHARATHIAR UNIVERISTY

UNIT I—BLAMIERS—SUMMARY

RHETORIC—QUINTILIAN [35-95 A.D]

·        Quintilian was a Spaniard who came to Rome as a teacher of rhetoric.

·        He also worked in the law courts and became the counsel under Emperor Domitian. Later he became the tutor of the emperor’s grandnephews. He retired about the year 90 AD and composed his masterpiece—Institutio Oratoria

Institutio Oratoria

This is a treatise in 12 books. It deals with the education of the orator.

Books I-II——Early and Later Phases of Schooling,

Books III-VII——technicalities of oratory, categorizing the subject matter and the proper organization of material.

Books VIII-IX ——Questions of style and delivery.

Book X——the most important part of the treatise. This is a survey of the literature appropriate for an orator to study. Homer, Pindar, and the Greeks are dealt with. Besides, he deals with Latin writers like Virgil, Lucretius, Horace, Ovid, Sallust, Livy, and Cicero.

Book XI—— deals with delivery, posture and the use of gesture, and

Book XII——deals with the finished orator, ‘the good man skilled in speaking’.

Declamation

This was originally meant for training the orators. A fictional case will be imagined and a mock trail or debate will be conducted. Sometimes a historical personage will be brought into the situation.

Undoubtedly, the whole scenario was unreal. As oratory lost its importance in Rome, declamation also lost its relevance. It became a form of entertainment and was subsequently condemned as decadent.

The poet Petronius also condemned declamation .In his novel, Satyricon he laughs at the declaimer’s practice of creating imaginary situations. He doubts at the efficacy of the exercise to generate good orators. “It encourages extravagant and shallow utterance, turgid and inflated loquacity. Under its decadent influence true eloquence disappears”.

Martianus Capella

Capella worte an influential work—De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (The Marriage of Learning and Eloquence). The work is written in prose and verse.

The work is basically a treatise on the seven liberal arts, and in the central books of the work they appear personified. The work is a hotchpotch, packed with indigestible learning, fantastic narrative, and encyclopedic catalogues.

[With this ‘The Classical Age’ is over and in the next post we will be dealing with ‘The Middle Ages’]

Please refer to the syllabus for M.Phil English.

PAPER II – APPROACHES TO LITERATURE

Unit I

 Classical Age, Middle Age and Renaissance (pp. 1-67)

Dr. S. Sreekumar