The Confluence of Rhetoric and Emotion: How the History of Rhetoric Illuminates the Theoretical Importance of Emotion

Abstract

This essay argues that the history of rhetoric is a crucial resource for illuminating the theoretical importance of emotion in, for instance, reasoning, reading, knowing, acting, and judging. Taking its cue from two recent histories of rhetoric–Rita Copeland’s Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages (2021), and Benedict Robinson’s Passion’s Fictions from Shakespeare to Richardson (2021), which together trace thirteen centuries of the history of rhetoric, this essay reads these histories with one eye on their theoretical significance. It does so by extracting five theoretical vignettes concerning the role and value of emotion based on Copeland’s and Robinson’s histories of rhetoric: (1) emotional invention; (2) emotional style; (3) emotional knowledge; (4) emotional action; and (5) emotional judgement. In reading history in this way, i.e. for its theoretical significance, the essay seeks to carve out a middle space between theory and history, and thus offer a way of doing theoretically-minded history or historically-responsive theory.