Declamation, Paternity, and Roman Identity: Authority and the Rhetorical Self.

Aus der Bibliothek von Prof. Wolfgang Haase, langj�igem Herausgeber der ANRW und des International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT) / From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - sehr guter Zustand / very good condition - Not even the most febrile fits of authorial vanity would incline me to believe that the world eagerly awaits the present volume. Relatively few know what declamation is, and of those who know something about it, most are satisfied with their knowledge, and do not care to know more. Perhaps the author of a full-length study on such a topic possesses an admirable dedication to the production of knowledge in its own right, to the documenting of every scrap about the past no matter how tattered and uninteresting. Or perhaps such an author is merely dedicated to the production of verbiage and to wallowing in the mire. General readers can be excused from perusing the first sort of text; sensible ones will avoid the second. -- Producing knowledge and producing verbiage, though, are themselves -or at least they should be � issues within declamatory criticism. They are not mere metacritical issues. Can seemingly empty speech from antiquity really have been all that empty? Just try to say something and have it mean nothing. Have you come up with a clever bit of non-meaning? Remember, its meaninglessness is still governed by the condition that it be meaningless. It means, then, precisely nothing. And even if you can produce that one meaningless thought, you must also accept that others did the same over the course of centuries. It would be easier just to admit that something might be in such a corpus than to insist doggedly that scores of hands had so successfully managed to speak empty volumes. ISBN 9780521820059