Richard Lanham's book, "The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance," is one of the most important books in my library.
What's It About?
In the book, Lanham discusses two opposing frameworks: the "Serious" and the "Rhetorical." The Serious, exemplified by Plato, emphasizes absolutes, fixed identities, and objective reality. The Rhetorical, represented by Roman writers such as Ovid and Cicero, values fluidity, the power of words, and the creation of identities through performance and play. Lanham argues that literature naturally leans towards the Rhetorical due to its dramatic nature, while literary criticism typically adheres to Serious assumptions, which causes misunderstandings when attempting to critique rhetorically conceived works.
I Lost It!
Last Tuesday I took it with me to college so that I could read through Lanham's treatment of Shakespeare's "Rape of Lucrece."
When I got home last Tuesday I was struck dumb when I realized that I had mislaid the book. I really felt the loss. Without this book, my researches into the paper I am writing (on the Rape of Lucrece) shuddered to a halt.
Even so, I was also fairly confident that I would find the book again when I returned to college on Wednesday morning. I assumed that I had left it on my desk.
However, when I searched for it on my desk and in my desk drawers the next morning, it was nowhere to be found and I returned home without it and spent the next few days thinking about where I could have mislaid it. The problem was, I'd moved around quite a lot on Tuesday. That day I went to:
- a college
- a cafe
- a chemist (drug store)
- a language school
- a restaurant
- a convenience store
and could have mislaid my book at any of those places...
A week later, I asked at the convenience store and the cafe, but neither had my book. I searched my desk again, and all the classrooms I'd been in, but there was no sign of my book.
I Found It!
And then, when I'd finished teaching, I went back into the staffroom to hang up my ID card, and suddenly saw... MY BOOK with a post-it note on it saying in Japanese that it was "lost property" left in classroom 551!
I didn't quite jump for joy, but I was elated at the return of my precious book. There are a lot of books in my library that I could get rid of and not miss, but this one is part of my "core collection" - and mislaying it helped me to appreciated how much I valued it.
Cheers!
David Hurley
#InspiredFocus
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