Thesis Chapters by Timothy Barr
Without Apparent Occasion: Melancholy and the Problem of Motive in Baroque England, 2019
Melancholy primarily presented itself to the English seventeenth century as a problem concerning ... more Melancholy primarily presented itself to the English seventeenth century as a problem concerning the causes of passions that were, in the words of Robert Burton, “without any apparant occasion.” The configuration of this problem varied as it moved through a range of discourses. In this dissertation, I attend most closely to those configurations in medicine, dialectic, theater, and an emergent civil science. The desire to discover the possible causes of melancholic passions led medical texts to reproduce nearly the whole range of causality. The baroque medical texts, then, produced a “topics,” a collection of potential arguments, of the causes of melancholy. Melancholics also developed their own set of topical practices, adopting the methods of humanist dialectic for articulating their experience. In the theater, the problem of the melancholic's passion served as a form of encounter between a civil logic that sought to determine its causes and the melancholic articulation of the situation through their own passion. Finally, I argue that the modern architecture of the state as envisioned in Hobbes' Leviathan is premised upon the power to eliminate collective melancholy, that is, the arousal of “causeless fears” while instituting a power that keeps the imagination of the people in fear of the sovereign's punishments. I show that this vision of the state required a repression of the image of the melancholy tyrant.
Book Reviews by Timothy Barr
Renaissance Quarterly , 2023
Journal of the History of Ideas, 2019
Review essay of nine recent books on early modern and contemporary melancholia, reflecting on the... more Review essay of nine recent books on early modern and contemporary melancholia, reflecting on the subject's significance for scholars in a variety of disciplines.
Rhetorica, 2018
Rhetoric is an ability. So begins the blithe Englishing of Aristotle's definition of rhetoric. In... more Rhetoric is an ability. So begins the blithe Englishing of Aristotle's definition of rhetoric. In early translations it appears as a faculty, following the European vernaculars and the Latin translation of Aristotle's dunamis with facultas. Yet even if this translation flattens the complex significance of Aristotle's original sense, it happily brings us within the orbit of pressing problems in our own moment. We may now pose new questions: If rhetoric insists it be thought of as an ability, how might we inflect this idée reçue of the field by thinking through the meaning of rhetoric from a position of disability? This is not a matter of simple inversion. Disability is not the opposite of ability but the suspension of the assumptions of ableism. In this sense, it is like disbelief. We say we are in a 'state of disbelief' precisely when we are presented with incontrovertible evidence that commands assent. Disability rhetoric, then, seeks to illuminate the unreflective assumptions and heuristics that we commonly use to make judgments concerning the conditions and abilities of others. In Disability Rhetoric and Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics, Jay Timothy Dolmage and Shannon Walters offer book-length elaborations of what such a rhetoric might be. The authors do not simply challenge rhetoric about disability or examine disability advocacy rhetorically, although both these aims are crucial to their projects. The authors argue that a thoroughgoing criticism of ableism requires a reexamination of rhetorical history and theory. The classical tradition's inability to think through bodily difference made it narrower than it otherwise might have been. Quintilian asserted that the limits of rhetorical education could be found in the body of the orator, "for assuredly no one can exhibit proper delivery if he lacks a memory for retaining what he has written or ready facility in uttering what he has to speak extempore, or if he has any incurable defect of utterance." Any such "extraordinary deformity of body. .. cannot be remedied by any effort of art" (11.3.10). Unable to think of bodily difference as anything but deformity gave ancient rhetorical theory a
Papers by Timothy Barr
Philosophy & Rhetoric, 2021
Aristotle says in the Rhetoric that leading judges into passions is like warping a rule or kanon ... more Aristotle says in the Rhetoric that leading judges into passions is like warping a rule or kanon before using it. Rather than seeing this as an exclusion of emotion from rhetoric, I argue that the ability for the pathe to bend judgment has its appropriate use in achieving equity. The pathe are themselves a kanon, resembling the soft, leaden rule used by Lesbian masons, referred to in his discussion of equity in the Nicomachean Ethics. In problematic cases, the rigidity of law requires the correction of a judge’s pathetic capacity. I then read Lysias’s Against Simon, a speech given under strict relevancy requirements, to show how the pathe are used in the narration of the accused party in seeking an equitable judgment. I conclude with how such a view may inform contemporary rhetorical inquiry on the emotions.
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Thesis Chapters by Timothy Barr
Book Reviews by Timothy Barr
Papers by Timothy Barr