The De Compositione of Dionysius of Halicarnassus Considered With Reference to the Rhetoric of Aristotle: A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the ... of Michigan for the Degree of Doctor of Ph

Excerpt from The De Compositione of Dionysius of Halicarnassus Considered With Reference to the Rhetoric of Aristotle: A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Department of Literature, Science, and the Arts of the University of Michigan for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Moreover, Aristotle explains that exordia which do not set forth the end or Object Of a speech are not true exordia, but merely means Of remedying defects in the audience, serving to get their attention, remove prejudice, and the like. They are used in this way because the audience is corrupt. If this is not the character of the audience' there is no need Of an exordium, except for the mere purpose Of stating the facts summarily, that it may not be, as it were, a body without a head (iii. Besides the exordium a speech contains necessarily two parts, exposition and proof; the peroration is some times found as a third part, but it is not necessary to a speech. Probably, then, in Aristotle's opinion, the exordium is the begin ning, the exposition the middle, and the proof the end. In short, the Platonic conception Of discourse as an organism, which is a dominating idea in the Poetics, probably underlay, though less consciously, Aristotle's whole theory Of discourse. Certam it is an idea altogether likely to have accorded with his scientific type Of mind and early-awakened interest in biology. The underlying concept Of Dionysius, from the point Of view of the discourse as a combination of words, is not at all biological in its nature, but rather what may be called architectonic, or perhaps, in a restricted sense of the word, architectural. He has first analyzed words into their component syllables and these into their component letters: We designate them letters because they are written with certain lines, and we term them elements because all speech takes its origin from them and into them resolves itself in its final analysis. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.