Re-Inventing Invention: Alexander Gerard and An Essay on Genius

Autor: Elizabeth Larsen
Rok vydání: 1993
Předmět:
Zdroj: Rhetorica. 11:181-197
ISSN: 1533-8541
0734-8584
DOI: 10.1525/rh.1993.11.2.181
Popis: Historians of rhetoric and composition have agreed that the eighteenth century saw the demise of a pedagogy of invention. Bacon's scientific method and faculty psychology together led to the end of the topoi as generational devices and of rhetorical inventio. Invention, dependent on individual genius, could not be taught. However, An Essay on Genius, by eighteenth-century associationist Alexander Gerard, suggests that inventio was less abandoned than transformed. Accordingly, we need to refine our understanding of eighteenth-century thinking about composing to include the notion that rhetoricians were aware that invention was a necessary part of composing and that associationism itself included invention.
Databáze: OpenAIRE