The Department of Philology, University of Ploieşti
and
Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities and the
Social Sciences, Bern University , Switzerland
invite you to the international conference
ETHOS/ PATHOS/ LOGOS
The Sense and Place of
Persuasiveness in Linguistic, Literary and Philosophical Discourse
18-20 October 2012
In his Rhetoric,
Aristotle defined the act of persuasion as the interaction between three
elements: ethos (Greek for
‘character’, which designated the image of the self built by the orator to
inspire trustworthiness and credibility), pathos
(the arousing of emotions in one’s audience), and logos (referring both to discourse and reason). While these notions
have remained conceptual cornerstones in major intellectual endeavours of
western thought, ethos in particular
developed in a distinctly different direction (from the individual to the
collective or national) in the nineteenth century, from Hegel’s understanding
of the German word for ‘ethics’, Sittlichkeit,
as what binds the members of a community to a place. Similarly, with the advent
of Heideggerian ontology and its rediscovery of pre-Socratic heritage, logos, hitherto restricted to ‘logic’
and reason, and classically opposed to muthos
(fable, fiction, therefore untruth) by philosophy against poetry, was given a
more existential dimension as what the Being-in-the-world inhabits (‘Language
is the house of Being’ in Heidegger’s ‘Letter on Humanism’) by the German
philosopher, for whom ‘Poetically Man Dwells’.
While linguists (Austin and, later,
various pragmatist schools), sociologists (Bourdieu: his notion of 'habitus'
and his critique of a purely linguistic performative in Austinian theories) and
rhetoric- or discourse-focused critics (Amossy) mediating between them, have
endeavoured to analyze discursive exchanges in oral as well as written
situations within this broadly post-Aristotelian framework, no conference has
yet explicitly tried to re-address this conceptual triad in the light of these
more ‘modern’ philosophical re-orientations.
The aim of this symposium is
therefore to investigate how a post-Hegelian (as well as Derridean)
construction of ethos as indissociable from a sense of place, coupled
with a more extended and generous notion of logos
no longer opposed to 'fiction' or synonymous with persuasive truth, can be
brought to bear on how both rational ideas and emotions (pathoi) are
expressed, both in public forms of address (e.g. political discourses) and
literary texts pertaining to different generic conventions. If, as Derrida
famously claims in ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’ - including in
defence of persecuted writers - 'literature is the right to say everything/anything'
(‘le droit de tout dire’), how can
this right be exercised with an 'ethical' sense of place and with an awareness
of the 'cultural pathologies' of a given audience? More generally, how can one
construct a different concept (and pragmatic operation) of 'persuasion' across
linguistic and literary genres?
Possible session topics:
- Ethics and rhetoric of discussion and argumentation
- Techniques of (per)suasion from consensus to coercion
- Alternative constructions of implication, implicature (Grice), ‘implicitness’ (implied narrator, implied author) in linguistic and literary discourses
- Citation as a ‘parasitic’ act or as an act of hospitality
- Comparative approaches between ‘face-to-face’ encounters in oral discursive situations and narrative or dramatic polylogues
- The status of confessional and testimonial narratives: fiction and/ or truth
- The affective role and discursive construction of loci memoriae (Nora’s lieux de mémoire)
