Modern Rhetoric {Third Edition}
by Cleanth Brooks (Author & Editor), Robert Penn Warren (Author & Editor)
Brooks & Warren, Modern Rhetoric (3rd Edition)
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Co-authored by Minnesota author, Robert Penn Warren.Tags
Member Reviews
Rhetoric is an interesting thing in the present day. We still need to have a good grasp of it, but it seems that it has fallen out of favor when it comes to things being studied. I mean, what even is rhetoric? Well, Rhetoric is defined as the art of persuasion. It is the use of different methods to argue a case or persuade someone of something. If you communicate with human beings, the time will come where you need to argue a position. It might be something really innocuous, like whether Captain Kirk is better than Captain Picard. Or it could be something essential and important, like the passage of a law.
Modern Rhetoric is a textbook that covers all of these items and more. It is sometimes dry and pedantic but overall it is very show more informative and effective. The dryness comes from the book being a textbook intended for a College Course. The book was published back in 1958 since I have the second edition. This makes for an interesting read since some of the things you read about just don’t occur anymore. For instance, the book discusses the methods used in advertising by talking about what brand of cigarettes to buy. It suggests a situation wherein a heavyweight champion promotes a particular brand of ‘smokes’ which isn’t something that happens. The point is to discern between garbage arguments and good arguments, but it still is a bit off-putting. The book is also somewhat racist, but it is merely a product of the times, so that isn’t really bad either.
As I mentioned, this book is a College Course textbook. It contains all the rules and information you need to communicate effectively. That is the main idea in this book, effective communication. If you need to go and work on your writing skills, this book is really good for that. The presentation is of the sort that makes me think of an informative movie from the 1950s. You know, the man talking has a clear, pleasant voice that resonates and makes you think of a leather chair that you can sink into, the video is in black and white, and he wears a suit.
All in all, the book is slightly outdated, but this is only due to the references it makes. The idea of being able to communicate your ideas and convince other people of things is really important, even though people seem to be losing the ability to concentrate on things. show less
Modern Rhetoric is a textbook that covers all of these items and more. It is sometimes dry and pedantic but overall it is very show more informative and effective. The dryness comes from the book being a textbook intended for a College Course. The book was published back in 1958 since I have the second edition. This makes for an interesting read since some of the things you read about just don’t occur anymore. For instance, the book discusses the methods used in advertising by talking about what brand of cigarettes to buy. It suggests a situation wherein a heavyweight champion promotes a particular brand of ‘smokes’ which isn’t something that happens. The point is to discern between garbage arguments and good arguments, but it still is a bit off-putting. The book is also somewhat racist, but it is merely a product of the times, so that isn’t really bad either.
As I mentioned, this book is a College Course textbook. It contains all the rules and information you need to communicate effectively. That is the main idea in this book, effective communication. If you need to go and work on your writing skills, this book is really good for that. The presentation is of the sort that makes me think of an informative movie from the 1950s. You know, the man talking has a clear, pleasant voice that resonates and makes you think of a leather chair that you can sink into, the video is in black and white, and he wears a suit.
All in all, the book is slightly outdated, but this is only due to the references it makes. The idea of being able to communicate your ideas and convince other people of things is really important, even though people seem to be losing the ability to concentrate on things. show less
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Cleanth Brooks was born in Murray, Kentucky on October 16, 1906. He was educated at Vanderbilt, Tulane, and Oxford universities. From 1932 to 1947, he taught English at Louisiana State University and then moved on to Yale University. At Yale, he helped to articulate the principles of New Criticism, which dominated literary studies in the 1940s and show more 1950s. He coedited the journal Southern Review with Robert Penn Warren. He also wrote several titles in collaboration with Warren, including Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction. A third work Understanding Drama was written in collaboration with Robert Heilman. His other works included The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry and Modern Poetry and the Tradition. He died on May 10, 1994. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Robert Penn Warren, the first Poet Laureate of the United States, was an unusually versatile writer who tried his hand at almost every kind of literature. In all of these forms, he achieved recognition and distinction, but it is as a poet, critic, and novelist that he was most widely known. Writing almost always about his native South, Warren show more produced 10 novels and a collection of short stories, The Circus in the Attic and Other Stories (1948). By far the most successful of his novels is All the King's Men (1946), the story of a southern politician and demagogue named Willie Stark, which Warren based on the rise and fall of Huey Long. Warren was considered one of the most influential of the New Critics, whose influence on the teaching of literature in American schools and universities during the late 1940s and 1950s could scarcely be overestimated. Because All the King's Men seemed to be the very epitome of what a good work of literature should be in New Critical terms---a complicated but highly readable narrative filled with irony and ambiguity---the novel came to be used widely in courses on modern fiction. It won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Southern Authors Award in 1947. Warren's other novels are disappointing by comparison. Following the success of All the King's Men, however, Warren seemed to turn to more loosely told stories about dramatic and romantic subjects, such as the interracial theme of Band of Angels (1955) or the natural catastrophes that serve as the crisis background for The Cave (1959) and Flood: A Romance of Our Time (1964). Wilderness: A Tale of the Civil War (1961) is an allegory of a man's spiritual quest for truth about himself and the world. Meet Me in the Green Glen (1971), the story of a tragic love affair, seemed to mark a return to the tighter structure and more complex artistry of Warren's earlier novels, but A Place to Come To (1977), his last novel, in which an elderly and renowned scholar who seems to owe much to Warren himself looks back on his family's past in an effort to find the meaning of his life, struck some reviewers as a confused and tired work. Sometime midway through his career as a novelist it is as if Warren stopped thinking of himself as a southern writer in the tradition of William Faulkner and turned instead to Thomas Wolfe for inspiration. Although in retrospect that switch must be regretted, no one can deny the immense influence of Robert Penn Warren on modern letters. Warren's poetry is intellectual, rich in powerful images, and has its roots in the pre-Civil War South. He continued to write impressive poetry almost until the time of his death. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Series
Brooks & Warren, Modern Rhetoric (3rd Edition)
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Modern Rhetoric {Third Edition}
- Original publication date
- 1977
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- Members
- 19
- Popularity
- 1,326,795
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (4.00)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 1
