Page 32 - Žagar, Igor Ž. 2021. Four Critical Essays on Argumentation. Ljubljana: Pedagoški inštitut.
P. 32
four critical essays on argumentation
give the impression that DHA is not using the Aristotelian or Ciceronian
topoi, but the so-called ‘literary topoi’, conceptualized by Ernst Robert
Curtius in his Europaeische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter (1990:
62–105, English translation). What is a literary topos? In a nutshell, already
oral histories passed down from pre-historic societies contain literary as-
pects, characters, or settings which appear again and again in stories from
ancient civilisations, religious texts, art, and even more modern stories.
These recurrent and repetetive motifs or leitmotifs would be labeled literary
topoi. ‘They are intelectual themes, suitable for development and modifica-
tion at the orator’s pleasure’, argues Curtius (1990: 70). And topoi is one of
the expressions Wodak is using as synonyms for leitmotifs (2009: 119):
In the analysis of text examples which were recorded and tran-
scribed I will first focus on the leitmotifs, which manifest them-
selves in various ways: as topoi, as justification and legitimation
strategies, as rules which structure conversation and talk, or as
recurring lexical items ...
This description and definition may well be dismissed as very gen-
eral or superficial, but in The Discursive Construction of National identi-
ty, where 49 topoi are listed (without any pattern of functioning16), we can
also find (p. 38–39) locus amoenus (topos of idyllic place) and locus terribi-
lis (topos of terrible place) typical of literary topoi as described by Curtius.
For the New Rhetoric (Perelman, Olbrechts-Tyteca 1958/1983: 113) topoi
are not defined as places that hide arguments, but as very general prem-
ises that help us build values and hierarchies, something Perelman, whose
background was jurisprudence, was especially concerned about. But, in
the opinion of some argumentation theorists, The New Rhetoric has three
main deficiencies:
(1) Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca do not develop sufficient criteria
for the distinction between sound and fallacious arguments.
(2) They rarely provide explicit reconstructions of arguments, de-
spite their clearly expressed intention to reconstruct their inter-
nal structure.
16 Instead, we can read (p. 34): ‘In place of a more detailed discussion, we have provided
a condensed overview in the form of tables, which list the macro-strategies and the
argumentative topoi, or formulae, and several related (but not disjunctively related)
forms of realization with which they correlate in data.’
32
give the impression that DHA is not using the Aristotelian or Ciceronian
topoi, but the so-called ‘literary topoi’, conceptualized by Ernst Robert
Curtius in his Europaeische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter (1990:
62–105, English translation). What is a literary topos? In a nutshell, already
oral histories passed down from pre-historic societies contain literary as-
pects, characters, or settings which appear again and again in stories from
ancient civilisations, religious texts, art, and even more modern stories.
These recurrent and repetetive motifs or leitmotifs would be labeled literary
topoi. ‘They are intelectual themes, suitable for development and modifica-
tion at the orator’s pleasure’, argues Curtius (1990: 70). And topoi is one of
the expressions Wodak is using as synonyms for leitmotifs (2009: 119):
In the analysis of text examples which were recorded and tran-
scribed I will first focus on the leitmotifs, which manifest them-
selves in various ways: as topoi, as justification and legitimation
strategies, as rules which structure conversation and talk, or as
recurring lexical items ...
This description and definition may well be dismissed as very gen-
eral or superficial, but in The Discursive Construction of National identi-
ty, where 49 topoi are listed (without any pattern of functioning16), we can
also find (p. 38–39) locus amoenus (topos of idyllic place) and locus terribi-
lis (topos of terrible place) typical of literary topoi as described by Curtius.
For the New Rhetoric (Perelman, Olbrechts-Tyteca 1958/1983: 113) topoi
are not defined as places that hide arguments, but as very general prem-
ises that help us build values and hierarchies, something Perelman, whose
background was jurisprudence, was especially concerned about. But, in
the opinion of some argumentation theorists, The New Rhetoric has three
main deficiencies:
(1) Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca do not develop sufficient criteria
for the distinction between sound and fallacious arguments.
(2) They rarely provide explicit reconstructions of arguments, de-
spite their clearly expressed intention to reconstruct their inter-
nal structure.
16 Instead, we can read (p. 34): ‘In place of a more detailed discussion, we have provided
a condensed overview in the form of tables, which list the macro-strategies and the
argumentative topoi, or formulae, and several related (but not disjunctively related)
forms of realization with which they correlate in data.’
32
