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This article was downloaded by: [The Aga Khan University]On: 27 October 2014, At: 11:58Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Quarterly Journal of SpeechPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rqjs20
Review Essay: New Wine in Old Bottles:Quotations and the Rhetoric of FictionRobert HarimanPublished online: 12 Jul 2013.
To cite this article: Robert Hariman (2013) Review Essay: New Wine in Old Bottles:Quotations and the Rhetoric of Fiction, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 99:2, 233-241, DOI:10.1080/00335630.2013.777768
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2013.777768
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BOOK REVIEWCara A. Finnegan, Editor
Review Essay
New Wine in Old Bottles: Quotations and theRhetoric of Fiction
Robert Hariman
Gary Saul Morson, The Words of Others: From Quotations to Culture (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2011), xi�340 pp. $30 (cloth).
_____, The Long and the Short of It: From Aphorism to Novel (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2012), xx�273 pp. $80 (cloth); $24.95 (paper); $24.95 (e-book).
Quotation, citation, sampling, and other uses of the words of others seem to
characterize contemporary media arts, as does the continual shortening of expressive
form. Communication has shifted from the letter to the email to the tweet, while
shards of eloquence are featured far beyond their original contexts in thousands of
anthologies, web sites, email signatures, t-shirts, coffee cups, and not a few speeches.
As Plato warned, it seems that a writer and his words are soon parted.
A conventional response to these aphoristic tendencies is to hold them up as signs
of cultural decline. Whatever happened to originality? What good can come of short
attention spans? And if people must quote and re-quote, why can’t they at least get
the words right? After all, that’s not what the Bible, Shakespeare, Einstein, P.T.
Barnum, or Sherlock Holmes actually said! As Mark Twain said, the difference
between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning
and a lightning rod. How can either literature or civic life thrive when inundated by
knockoff wisdom and 140-character arguments?
Robert Hariman is a professor in the program in Rhetoric and Public Culture, Department of Communication
Studies, Northwestern University. Correspondence to: Robert Hariman, Department of Communication
Studies, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208-1340, USA. Email: [email protected]
ISSN 0033-5630 (print)/ISSN 1479-5779 (online) # 2013 National Communication Association
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2013.777768
Quarterly Journal of Speech
Vol. 99, No. 2, May 2013, pp. 233�241
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Gary Saul Morson has no interest in providing a defense of postmodernism, but he
has written two excellent books that together can bring one to seriously reconsider
how language and culture work. The intertwined habits of literary brevity and
frequent quotation have a long history, as well as distinctive significance during
periods of accelerated cultural change. Morson scants the historical narrative to focus
instead on the work of classification, which then can be applied in a variety of critical
projects. There is considerable overlap in subject matter between these two books*quotations are short, and short forms persist because they are quotable*but each
book works out one half of a larger theory. The Words of Others (hereafter cited as W)
provides an analytical catalog of the functional attributes of a quotation, including
citationality, an implied author, and other techniques, while arguing against literary
fundamentalists who would insist on exact words, single meanings, and other pieties.
The Long and the Short of It (hereafter cited as LS) provides a second-order (but not
secondary) typology in terms of genres such as the apothegm and the dictum, while
arguing for a conception of wisdom set over wit and certitude, and a conception of
literature in which all genres interact dialogically on behalf of an ever larger (because
always incomplete) attempt to understand the complexity of the human world.
An initial achievement of this project is how Morson has assembled his archive.
Quotation books have been part of the history of publishing from the beginning
(including that early modern bestseller, Erasmus’s Adages), and now they spill all over
the Internet. How to select and sort within this landfill of second-hand materials?
Morson’s system is simple and supple*indeed, systematization is one of the topics
put under the glass by some of the aphorisms and Morson himself. Instead of
bothering with the formats used by anthologies, which typically feature topics or
authors, he focuses on basic properties of language in use: first, those features of an
extract that make it quotable and that prompt appropriation, literary judgment, and
policing by self-appointed custodians of verbal propriety; second, a conception of
genre that presumes ‘‘a particular social setting, a distinct role for the reader or
audience, and a specific attitude to the moment of uttering’’ (LS, 5�6). The first
approach could be traced back to Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction, while the
second is explicitly indebted to Mikhail Bakhtin, not least because of Morson’s
distinguished career as a Bakhtin scholar. Readers of this journal also will note strong
affinities with Kenneth Burke’s ‘‘Literature as Equipment for Living,’’ which not
incidentally featured the proverb as its representative literary form. In any case,
Morson has collected a thousand fragments of a fugitive literature into a classificatory
system that produces many subtle discriminations while remaining flexible, dialogic,
and open to revision.
Although each book stands on its own, The Words of Others sets out key
assumptions and distinctions that support the typology of genres. Morson is not
merely assembling a curiosity cabinet; he believes that quotations are fundamental to
language, culture, and the ethical formation of the self. Thus, after a virtuoso
demonstration of how quotations suffuse discourse, he invites speculation that
‘‘language*words, gestures, tones, all of it*itself [may be] the residue of former
quotations,’’ and that writing may have begun ‘‘so as to preserve the words of others’’
234 R. Hariman
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(W, 8, 34). Instead of a theory of the evolution of language, however, he develops a
careful exegesis along the lines set out by Wittgenstein and Bakhtin: meaning is
defined by use; words can serve multiple functions; mixing and other types of
appropriation have important effects; and scholarly discriminations between types of
discourse remain provisional attempts to identify what are inherently dynamic
processes.
Morson’s anatomy of how quotations work begins by considering how some words
acquire the ‘‘aura’’ of quotability. A wide range of usage is charted, from the explicit
citation complete with quotation marks and references to direct expression in one’s
own words. This continuum proves also to be a measure of relative assimilation,
which is why we don’t put quotes on ‘‘a la carte’’ or ‘‘yogurt’’ or the writing on the
wall. Instead, speech sifts through idioms, cliches, slogans, air quotes, stylistic
allusions, parodies, and other fragments, copies, or retellings. To zero in on how a
quote works, Morson parses this melange of usage by distinguishing among citations,
extracts, and quotations proper. The citation is the broadest term and is defined by
three criteria: (a) a repetition of another’s words, actions, or other defining features;
(b) as a reenactment of the original involving some purpose (W, 80); (c) that often
involves a comment on the situation or other added value (W, 294n.7). Morson then
defines the extract as a verbal citation, and a short extract valued for its literary
qualities as a quotation.
But what are the qualities that define ‘‘aphorisms, witticisms, maxims, proverbs,
wise sayings, and many other short literary forms?’’ (W, 80) The key is that the words
must be able to function as a free-standing text outside of their original context. (For
example, no one would ever use the previous sentence, or this one, as a quotation.)
To do that, the quotation must contain its own frame, which means here that it can
be read as a whole, rather than only as a part of another text. Obviously, some words
can function as both extracts and quotations, and the difference will depend on
context, intention, cultural literacy, and other situational factors*in short, on how
specific conventions of usage are employed. These conventions include the second
speaker, who is an ascription rather than the literal author (though they may share
the same name), and who may be a ‘‘genre speaker,’’ that is, someone whose name
and quotes stand for a particular type of statement: Oscar Wilde for wit, Churchill for
eloquence, or Dan Quayle for stupidity. So it is that some quotes are often attributed
to different authors; the variation reflects not lack of precision but consistent
articulation in different contexts. Quotations also reflect a ‘‘translator’s range’’ in
wording, as the literal words in the original text often are not the same as the
quotation, and sometimes because they could never be quoted unless they were
altered. A lesser example is ‘‘Play it again, Sam,’’ which perhaps could have been
memorialized as it was actually said, although the ‘‘misquote’’ communicates the
contextual meaning better than the original words alone*which were, of course,
surrounded at the time by the rest of the film. More telling is the injunction to ‘‘turn
the other cheek,’’ which is a rewording of the phrase in Matthew 5:39 to ‘‘turn to him
also the other.’’ By rewording the extract, words having almost no meaning out of
context become framed as a quotation.
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But don’t tell this to the language guardians. Morson elaborates his analysis by
debunking those who insist on correcting the pervasive misquoting that occurs
throughout the archive of quotations. Writers such as Paul Boller head a cottage
industry of small time censors who, I should add, often are interesting to read and
may be expanding the audience for short forms. Morson demonstrates why their
literalism is mistaken, and in doing so illustrates more of the nuance and flexibility
characterizing popular usage. ‘‘The border between accuracy and inaccuracy shifts
with context, convention, and purpose’’ (W, 152), and so too the semantic inflection
of the words can vary with the occasion of their use. Morson develops this
orientation with an initial foray into genre classification by studying last words,
epitaphs, anthologies, the commonplace book, and the functions of wisdom
literature. Death is an occasion of some significance, anthologies can be very big
books, and all these forms have been vital resources for self-reflection and ethical
living. Obviously, Morson is raising the stakes as the book progresses. The anatomy
continues as well, as ‘‘stringing,’’ decomposition, and other techniques are aligned
with aesthetic principles of separation, spontaneity, and incompleteness to explicate
how discourse works in an intermediate zone between truth and falsehood (W, 190)
and between direct statement and citation (W, 231, see also LS, 127). This is a zone of
possibility, or what classical rhetoric would have recognized as the space of
invention*that is, the manner in which language itself is inherently generative.
Morson further elaborates this realm of possibility by suggesting that the short forms
encourage distinctive ways of reading, which he describes by turns as collecting,
browsing, roaming, harvesting, and so forth. In other words, the short attention span,
digressiveness, self-selection, eclecticism, and other supposed vices of digital media
are valorized as long-standing, worthwhile, intelligent, productive ways to be literate.
Morson understates this argument for the relevance of his project, and no caveat need
be dislodged, but it does suggest a broad basis for reconsideration of how both new
and ancient communication arts can be obscured by narrowly drawn norms of print
culture.
The full significance of the short form is set out in The Long and the Short of It,
which examines several genres of the aphorism. These are the quotations that fall
‘‘somewhere between literature and philosophy’’ (LS, 1) and comprise a significant
portion of wisdom literature and the ‘‘informal philosophy’’ (LS, 3) that shapes
individual and collective character. Morson’s system of genres is built directly on
Bakhtin’s conception of ‘‘worldviews seeking expression’’: ‘‘formal features do not
define a genre but follow from the sense of experience that does’’ (LS, 5). The
conventions that develop over time do matter, especially as they articulate a social
setting, role for the reader, and attitude. Morson also emphasizes how the genres are
interactive and generative: they address and play off of one another as they are paired
or otherwise aligned in ordinary usage and as they become incorporated into larger
literary works. Most important, short forms generate long forms, with the central
example being the arc from prosaic apothegm to the realist novel.
To capture how the aphoristic genres interact to form a complex web of utterances,
Morson follows the classical custom of paired definitions. Thus, we get eight
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categories of the apothegm and the dictum, wit and witlessness, wise sayings and
sardonic maxims, the summons and the thought. Because each of these can include
variant developments, internal paradoxes, and extension into more than one long
form, quotations come to exemplify many of the qualities of literature while serving
as an informal philosophy; in short, they prove to be a serviceable rhetoric for doing
ethical work across a wide range of situations.
The apothegm is the hero of the book, while the dictum has to be the bad guy. Our
hero is no action figure, however, but rather moody and enigmatic. ‘‘Nature loves to
hide.’’ ‘‘There is hope, but not for us.’’ Apothegms tell us that something is not
known, not present, not capable of being directly communicated. Dicta, by contrast,
express certainty and totality. ‘‘Nothing happens without a reason,’’ and ‘‘where there
is matter, there is geometry.’’ (One could ask whether Gorgias’s three propositions
about ‘‘nothing’’ are apothegms or dicta; the answer provides two very different
interpretations of what he said.) Dicta speak without self-reference and in the
unmarked present tense of timeless truths to set out self-evident conclusions that
stand on their own. Apothegms are fragmentary beginnings of quests already
postponed that point toward mystery, paradox, or the unexpected. One can’t step in
the same river twice, and what can’t be said must be passed over in silence. ‘‘The
dictum must be complete or it is nothing. But we sense the emptiness around an
apothegm as part of it. The dictum says Something. The apothegm shows Something
Else’’ (LS, 50).
The other genres fall between these strong polarities. Wit, for example, can be
smugly certain and yet valued because it surprises, while witlessness can be full of
unmerited confidence and yet also include the inside out wisdom of Yogi Berra or
Sam Goldwyn. Morson’s catalog of witticisms begins with Aristotle’s valorization of
practical judgments, which are true only on the whole and for the most part, and
emphasizes the wit’s mastery of verbal agility, style, and timing. Wit also is highly
oriented toward an audience, suggesting the virtual setting of a salon. Thus, because
they are so situational, quoted witticisms typically have to be accompanied by a story
of who was speaking to whom. This contextualization, along with an equally
important interest in competitive play, provides endless opportunities for creating,
retelling, and relishing witticisms. And that is part of the problem: the short form
most noted for its quick intelligence can lead to shallowness. Morson identifies two
forms of wit, one in which agility is enjoyed for its own sake and the other in which it
serves a higher value. If his own writing is any guide, Morson’s commitment to
seriousness can’t go as far as Tolstoy’s ‘‘war on wit,’’ but he does give Wilde a
C���. This internal squabble about wit is doubled by the pairing with witlessness,
which comprises a fair share of the larger archive of quotations. Morson helpfully
catalogs various forms of idiocy and apparent idiocy, including bumbling (politicians
loom large here), self-betrayal, wise folly, and assumed innocence. Not surprisingly,
perhaps, witlessness also follows the division between superficial and serious
intentions: we have an endless store of nonsense and long forms of the literature
of defamiliarization (including the Menippean satire and Alice in Wonderland) and
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the literature of wise folly (including the first Letter to the Corinthians, Don Quixote,
and The Idiot).
But for every aphorism there is a season, and so we turn to wise sayings, which
include proverbs and other maxims from the wisdom literature. These might seem to
be intellectually uninteresting*wisdom often is*for ‘‘from the perspective of this
genre, nature and human nature derive from an underlying, fundamentally moral
order. Therefore the two broad counsels wise sayings offer*be righteous and be
prudent*are ultimately the same’’ (LS, 114). Yet Morson teases out varied
techniques for adapting wisdom to its recalcitrant audience, and then extends the
genre through the dialogue and the fable to reach Tolstoy’s claim that the real
challenge to art is not complexity but rather making ‘‘the truly simple effective’’ (LS,
133), which could be a statement of principle for the art of rhetoric. Nonetheless, just
as he opposed dicta and apothegms, wise sayings are countered by anti-sayings,
which counsel against received wisdom with a confidence equal or greater to its
exponents, and by the sardonic maxim, which discredits any faith in the human
capacity to comprehend reality. ‘‘Treason is a matter of dates’’ is an anti-saying, as
Talleyrand doesn’t doubt the variability of moral ascription. But when Chekhov
observes that ‘‘The university brings out all abilities, including stupidity,’’ now
stupidity is not merely a deficit but a force in the world and at home even within the
citadel of learning. Perhaps because it has so much to work with, the sardonic maxim
exhibits a number of forms and extends far into long-form prose composition.
Gibbon and Dostoevsky are masters of the genre, and Morson hints that the sardonic
attitude and a corollary misanthropy have spread widely throughout learned culture,
perhaps because the mode is closely tied to prose composition. Despite his own
mastery of the form (e.g., see the ‘‘Devil’s Dictionary’’ appended to his parody of
Russian literature, And Quiet Flows the Vodka), at this point Morson reveals where his
heart is: the answer to the ‘‘maximist’’ is the Good Samaritan. ‘‘The Samaritan
response acknowledges all the sardonic maxim asserts, but encourages us to rise
above it and value compassion’’ (LS, 172).
This moral seriousness becomes increasingly evident through the rest of the book,
although without ever lapsing into didacticism. Instead, Morson explicates additional
genres known for their seriousness: the summons, the thought, and the prosaic
apothegm. The first two are paired, and the binary will be familiar to scholars of
rhetoric. The summons contains all those ringing words by great political leaders in a
time of crisis. The time is now, the challenge cannot be avoided, we must be true to
our values or perish, and so we pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
Curiously, one of the features of this genre is the speaker’s modesty, while words
matter and power lies ultimately with the common people rather than the heroic
individual. One could identify paradoxes that result from this genre’s close affiliation
with political excess, although Morson traces the theme through longer forms and
dissident voices, culminating in War and Peace. That trajectory then leads to the
paired genre of the thought, which is private rather than public, diffuse rather than
directive, etc. Indeed, thoughts push against the defining edge of the short form:
‘‘they belong to the family of short genres while more closely resembling an
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unfinished longer one. The masters of the form have made the most of this paradox’’
(LS, 195). The exemplar is Pascal’s Pensees, and so we enter a world of inner struggle,
incompleteness, probabilities, and a renewed sense of how ‘‘possible’’ options are
available means even if not actually present. Curiously, the thought ends up being a
genre not only of reflection but also of new beginnings, and so its long forms include
Christmas stories.
There will not be a merely sentimental ending to Morson’s book, as he ends by
returning to his modal form, the prosaic apothegm. We can’t know the world in full,
but there need be nothing mystical at stake: for this genre, ‘‘language is not worldly
enough. Our ways of speaking do not match the real complexities of experience’’ (LS,
214). Montaigne, the later Wittgenstein, and other writers extending through the
major figures of the realist novel all have developed this renewed commitment to
describing the world while reflecting on the futility of doing so completely. No
wonder this genre leads to such big books, and so once again the short form seems to
be exploding, and now to release all that had been contained within. Thus, the short
form ‘‘undefines’’ words to make room for new language games, while the novel
incorporates all other genres into dialogic interaction. Truth is found only between
people, collectively and provisionally, as they are able to compare different
worldviews in an ongoing conversation, and not to settle on any one but to see
ever more widely and finely. This is a worldly vision firmly grounded in a conception
of human fallibility, yet without the cynic’s resignation. After all, Rome wasn’t built in
a day.
The rhetoric of fiction was an important initiative in the twentieth century revival
of rhetoric: it was the primary context for Kenneth Burke, received explicit and
influential exposition by Wayne Booth and others, and may have underwritten the
idea that there was a literature of public address. That shouldn’t surprise, however,
because literary study also figured prominently in the classical emergence of the art
that began in part with Gorgias deconstructing Homeric myth while crafting
techniques of prose composition. Each moment was quickly eclipsed, however,
whether by the civic art in antiquity or the spread of cultural studies more recently.
Rhetoric still includes literary study, but scholars are far more interested in just about
everything else, and not least in avoiding cultural hierarchies while promoting
vernacular life. Morson’s project stands out in part because of how well it can be
applied to both literature and popular culture, and to both traditional media and
digital media. Short forms suffuse both art and ordinary speech, while they exemplify
reading practices that are both ancient and flourishing in new media environments.
So it is that these two books offer a rhetoric of fiction that is directly relevant to
contemporary scholarship.
Note that I said ‘‘a’’ rhetoric of fiction; much is not covered. That said, the project
expands the conception of literature to include the short forms, both on their own
terms and as keys to critical understanding of much larger texts, discourses, and
cultures. As the short form unlocks a larger work, interpretive recalibration can
include everything from the canon to reconfiguring stock debates. For example, the
realist novel gets a classical pedigree, while literature is centered on moral fiction but
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with the proviso that morality is not limited to dicta. In that spirit, Morson advances
specific attitudes toward literature, life, and scholarship: these include being
grounded in uncertainty, plurality, and fallibility; comparing discourses to obtain
multiple perspectives on complexity; being committed to the intermediate zone
between certainty and skepticism, philosophy and literature, and high and low
cultures; and admitting to a worldly humanism that values compassion more than
being smart. In addition, Morson offers a thoroughly rhetorical worldview and set of
conceptual tools for explicating how language necessarily is tangled up in social
relations and crucial for forming collective judgments, while shifting the study of
both rhetoric and literature from the modern valorization of knowledge to the much
more fraught task of discerning and sharing wisdom. Indeed, the commitment to
wisdom might be one of the few real scandals in a modern university.
Morson’s books are not flawless, although he fends off a lot of criticism with his
erudition and perhaps even more with his wit. His style contains a fair amount of
indirection, in two senses. First, there is the paradox of speaking on behalf of
uncertainty, but always with an authorial voice suffused with confident command of
his subject. To draw on two writers he contrasts, the books read as if Darwin were
being restated by Freud. Frankly, the inconsistency didn’t bother me, perhaps
because, as Thoreau said, a foolish consistency is the behemoth of little minds, but
the tendency would bear watching in other hands. The more misleading incon-
sistency is the author’s misrepresentation of himself. By larding technical exposition
of rhetorical conventions with hundreds of puns, misquotes, and other witticisms,
many of them shameless (and obviously contagious), one might think this is frivolous
work, a divertissement, something that might deserve a C���. Instead, each book
is at bottom a work of ethical criticism: one that addresses the fundamental question
of how scholarship can contribute to the daunting but inescapable task of trying to
live well with others. Together, the books can be judged by the company they keep,
including the Biblical writers, Confucius, Lao Tzu, Erasmus, Montaigne, Bacon,
Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein,
Kafka, and many other very serious thinkers. If nothing else, the rhetoric of fiction
has the opposite problem of so much rhetorical study: instead of laboring to uncover
the intelligence behind texts that are themselves all too limited, world literature offers
a dense archive of endlessly rich and rewarding texts. Morson’s detailed study of the
genius in small form composition is particularly useful because it can be taken in
either direction.
Which brings one to consider the work that remains. Despite Morson’s analytical
commitment to reading texts as if they were situated speech, he gets to an explicit
sense of pragmatics only late and weakly; for example, at some moments we want
confidence, and at others skepticism (LS, 235). Here the focus on literature and the
status of literary genres may have slowed the pace of theoretical development.
Another shortfall comes in the implications for non-realist genres and modes of
representation. Morson acknowledges Walter Benjamin’s sense of the parable as a
‘‘ruin which stands on the site of an old story’’ (LS, 131), but the allegorical sensibility
that is part and parcel of that observation could be given more development, not least
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with respect to how quotations are used in various media arts. Realism was not and is
not the only line of development for larger use of the short forms. Indeed, Benjamin’s
metaphor highlights one of the very few weak spots in Morson’s critical sensibility.
For all his erudition and previous work on temporality, in these two books the
quotations, parables, and other short forms seem to be excessively shiny, durable
objects that can rattle around the pinball machine of history without ever losing their
sheen. Benjamin suggests that criticism should include the more troublesome
consideration of how time erodes all, and he demonstrates how melancholia*an
attitude scanted by Morson despite its presence in his archive*can be turned into a
critical attitude for renegotiating temporal discontinuities.
Morson’s seriousness also can be redirected slightly to prompt additional
reconsideration of how culture works. He has done both literature and rhetoric a
service by providing a rigorous, positive, and compelling answer to the question of
whether short forms are a mode of serious thought, and he has provided an original
and insightful demonstration of how short forms can provide the hermeneutical keys
for deeper understanding of the great works of prose fiction and non-fiction. In short
(!), he makes the case set out in his subtitles, as his argument moves from quotations
to culture and from aphorism to the novel. Precisely because he makes the case so
well, one can also consider how things might work in reverse. Could serious thought
converge on short forms, rather than merely starting or being tested or circulating
there? And could long forms function as winnowing sheds or laboratories for
extracting the ideas and attitudes that will become realized fully only through further
condensation and circulation across audiences over time?
The easy answer is ‘‘both-and.’’ While genius is found at both extremes, think of
how many of the most influential figures have worked directly in the short forms, and
consider how difficult it is to imagine the culture makers known as ordinary people
doing anything else. If there is any merit in these speculations, then one would do
well to double down on Morson’s example, from his dialogical imagination to his
critical acuity to his clear and engaging style. Stated otherwise, the rhetoric of fiction
has been revived, not as it was but as a program for understanding both high and low
culture and especially that intermediate zone of social interaction that is the province
of rhetoric. Of course, I don’t know how this effort would end, but these two books
are a very good place to begin.
Review Essay 241
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