Diversitate si Identitate Culturala in Europa (Nov 2017)
Le catalogue rhétorique. Entre epistémologie et esthétique littéraire
Abstract
Rhetorical Catalogue between Epistemology and Literary Aesthetics The catalogue is primarily an instrument of knowledge, as it identifies and organises, according to various criteria (kata – logos), the elements which make up certain entities, starting even with the models of the origin of Universe (cf. Platon, Cratylos). By highlighting the processes of memory and association, the catalogue cumulates the examples which underlie inductive reasoning, i.e. “proceeding from the particular to the general” (Aristotel, Topica, 12,105a13). The transition from pure dialectics to rhetorical argumentation was accompanied by the exploitation of the ethical and esthetical functions of the representative examples (parádeigma) in order to support an idea. Used as arguments of authority, as models of divine or human behaviour, of manifestations of nature etc., the examples thus catalogued acquire the attributes of rhetorico-stylistic devices (enumeratio, amplificatio, gradation etc.). From here to the actual discursive techniques (description, evocation, portrait etc.), and from the latter to the compositional formulas of scientific, didactic, juridical text, on the one hand, and literary text, on the other (genealogy, res gestae, eoiai.), and then to literary genres such as the metamorphoses, the diary, the catalogue-sonnet, the evolution was rapid. Today we shall speak about the use of various catalogue types in scientific meta-research, in juridical or medical casuistry, in the pragmatics of marketing texts and so on. All these are, in fact, variants of the inventories carrying logico-stylistic subtleties from ancient Homeric catalogues.
