6. In the 18th century, Scottish rhetoricians Hugh Blair,
Adam Smith, and George Campbell were intrigued
more by the ways in which discourse appealed to an
audience’s taste and sense of propriety than by its
reasoning. To explore the rhetorical dimensions of
aesthetic influence, Blair, Smith, and Campbell looked to
17th century views of beauty, novelty, and “the
Sublime.” ... Warnick explains how the influence of
French belletrists effected a shift in emphasis from
neoclassical invention to aesthetics, thereby altering the
traditional five-canon model of rhetoric and initiating a
revised conception of rhetoric in the modern period.
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8. What happens when we assume that
successful composition depends upon
genius, and that genius is natural and
therefore cannot be taught?
(Crowley, 51)
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9. 3-stage model of 19c
inventional processes
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10. 1. Storing the mind with
knowledge
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13. Genung: grades of invention (53)
• originative invention
• reproductive invention
• methodizing invention
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14. These mental habits keep the mind “in the attitude of
constant interrogation” and insure that writers become
habituated to “sternly thinking the vagueness and
obscurity out of a subject”; moreover, the habits will
develop “a real strength of mind and true moral
courage” in those who practice them. In short, better
thinkers are better people. (54)
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16. The opposite of play is not what is serious
but what is real. ... The creative writer does
the same as a child at play. He creates a
fantasy which he takes very seriously --
that is, which he invests with large amounts
of emotion -- while separating it sharply
from reality. (25)
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20. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It
cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain
it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the
historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable
to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his
twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a
perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of
its presence. (37)
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21. Seth:
1. Is the “historical sense”—and, by extension, the
collaborative sense—of writing in fact its own authorial
construction? Is the first writerly invention the
invention of our place as a writer amongst other
writers, past and present? “No poet, no artist of any
art, has his complete meaning alone.”
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