A Noble Warrior with Pen in Hand
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A Noble Warrior with Pen in Hand A Noble Warrior with Pen in Hand The Conversational Enlightenment: the Reconception of Rhetoric in 18th Century Thought, David Randall, Edinburgh University Press, 2019, 297 pp., $29.95 paperback. Donald M. Hassler # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Bonaparte’s idea of public education was that it should [keep]… social order…. it must, he said, “embrace the nation.” Georges Lefebvre, Napoleon: From 18 Brumaire to Tilsit (154) Writers of our history as well as more pulpish storytellers who entertain with popular genres such as Donald M. Hassler received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1967, taught in Montreal prior to that, and then taught English at Kent State University until retiring in 2014; [email protected]. Hassler last contributed to AQ in the spring of 2020 with “An Avenue to Truth in the Teleology of Rhetoric.”
heroic fantasy must work, as Napoleon says, “to embrace,” to touch us as concretely as they can. We need the solid realities of our humanness, so our writers need to avoid being remote, abstract, “virtual.” Clearly, I think, we need a solid and conservative cast to writing. I do hesitate somewhat with this opening on a versatile young writer, whom I want to promote, since one of my favorite old writers took as a ruling dictum for his work, “First, get general principles.” Samuel Johnson had received this dictum when he was a young man from older, distinguished friends. But the great Johnson, also, wove substantial detail and concreteness into his Lives of the Poets (1820), each solidly unique in his portraits; provided immense hard-won detail in his Dictionary (1755); and, actually, violated the dictum for generality enough in his work in order to be seen as his own greatest adversary with regard to the principle. In fact, such internal agons are part of fine writing often enough to make such tension its own dictum. I see this tension in the legendary Napoleon, whom most historians say might have been a writer, a poet, if he had not been a key general. But more of
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that legend later. This short take is mainly about a young non-military, though fiercely aggressive writer, early in his career. I have written here on David Randall, the Director of Research at the National Association of Scholars, before (“An Avenue to Truth in the Teleology of Rhetoric” AQ spring, 2020). Now I have read Randall’s second volume about the history of the Ciceronian notion of a mode of rhetoric he called sermo and will add my impressions of that book at the end of these comments about his role as an all-purpose writer agonistes—with, in fact, a nearly Miltonic combativeness in the intense world of NAS argument. I said in the review that I thought he was a good hire back in 2015, and here I want to elaborate on that opinion. Also, like several of my own graduate students who were training to work officially with “literature,” Randall has tried with some success, along with his doctoral work in British history. to market fantasy fiction. I fin
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