by Jutta Sandstede and Joachim Dyck

There can be no talk of the "death of rhetoric" in the 18th century: The theory and practice of oratory are more alive than ever: one can even speak of its renaissance. The "Source Bibliography on Rhetoric, Homiletics and Epistolography", which the "Rhetoric Centre" has now presented after six years of work, is proof of this.

The fundamental importance of rhetoric for the theory of literature and its practice in 18th century Germany is undisputed today. However, although we know that it is impossible to imagine literary and social life without rhetoric, from Gottsched to Lessing, Herder and Wieland to Schiller and Friedrich Schlegel, the question remains open as to the intensity and forms in which it was present in intellectual and political life: what was its relationship to aesthetics, philosophy and ethics, what status did it retain in schools and universities, and what references were made to it by Enlightenment anthropology?

In order to clarify these questions, the Rhetoric Unit in Department 11 of Linguistics and Literature, under the direction of Professor Dr Joachim Dyck and Jutta Sandstede, compiled a bibliography of all writings on rhetoric (oratory), homiletics (preaching) and epistolography (letters) over a period of six years with the help of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the support of the University Library: Joachim Dyck and Jutta Sandstede: Quellenbibliographie zur Rhetorik, Homiletik und Epistolographie des 18. Jahrhunderts im deutschsprachigen Raum. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 1996, 1450,- DM.

Rhetoric plays the same role for 18th century literature as it did for European literature from the Middle Ages to the end of the Baroque: it is the only authoritative doctrine of text production that is taught in the social institutions that deal with the writing of literature, namely the secondary schools and universities. However, it is also significant for biblical exegesis as Luther understood it, and pietistic biblical hermeneutics is also related to the rhetorical doctrine of affects in its guiding, irrational categories.

For the 17th and 18th centuries, rhetoric - alongside its modern offshoot, poetics - was the only model for both literary production and literary hermeneutics. After all, rhetoric transported classical literary education and the traditional complex of humanistic philology was delegated to it: as long as beautiful literature and its theoretical concepts had something to do with the intention of conveying thoughts and ideas and wanting to have an effect on other people - and this was the case until the end of the 18th century - rhetoric was there as a quarry for insights that were already well and exemplarily formulated, which literature and its theory could use to build new huts and palaces for new social needs. And they did so, the 17th century in its own way, the 18th century in a different way. In each case, the appropriation of the rhetorical tradition was understood as a productive memory and changed the old system according to the reality that needed to be understood and influenced.

The thesis that the 18th century turned away from rhetoric, which is often asserted in German studies, is false. It is based on a lack of knowledge of the sources. The present bibliography makes it clear that it was not the "death of rhetoric" that was negotiated in the 18th century, but that the reactualisation of its techniques determined the literary discussions of the time.

However, research must beware of a methodological error: the proof of constant patterns of argumentation from rhetoric alone is not enough. Although eloquence in the 18th century was formed on the basis of ancient rhetoric, it was characterised by contradictory aspects. Rhetoric itself suggests that the different ways in which tradition is appropriated must be understood as an expression of social processes. It does not exhaust itself in an empty conceptual apparatus, but forms a practice-orientated instrument of communication that is used on the basis of various interests.

The historically new possibilities of rhetoric can be seen in the Enlightenment reform of the school system as well as in the changed cultural-political constellation of a publication literature with a bourgeois-public character. Rhetoric also provided invaluable services to the flourishing letter-writing culture of the 18th century: Letter writers and instructions on letter writing make up more than a third of the bibliography. Since the 1930s, a good German epistolary style has been regarded as a national educational problem, just like the endeavour to create a German theatre or sophisticated native-language fable poetry.

Rhetoric is thus unreservedly bound to the real requirements of everyday communication: The rediscovery of practice - which had been lost in the Baroque - determines the entire register of rhetoric. If in the 17th century, instructional poetics and standard rhetoric still embodied the belief that an orator's tools could be summarised in norms and conveyed in a lecturing manner, then the 18th century bid farewell to this and took the ancient understanding of rhetoric at its word: pragmatism, purposefulness in the use of language, knows no idealised norms that could be saved over the centuries.

The power and impact of rhetoric become clear from the thousands of writings dealing with the production of texts in the 18th century: The sheer quantity of the 4,000 works collected in this bibliography for the first time provides a new insight into the productivity with which the 18th century embraced all forms of writing, speaking and reading. For not only did the great Latin rhetorical works of the 16th and 17th centuries by Vossius and Pontanus, Soarez, Radau and Lauxmin dominate the field with five to ten editions: the planet of homiletic, rhetorical and epistolographic instructional literature was also orbited by hundreds of secondary stars that dealt with special problems of speaking and writing or with topics that were important for bourgeois commercial society or the forms of interaction at the absolutist court. In addition to the writers of letters for private, public and business life, there are instructions on business essays and office transactions, titular books, style guides and collections of formulae, model letters for secretaries, young lovers, young people from the bourgeoisie, young merchants and businessmen, as well as language lessons, collections of compliments, instructions on German writing and thesis defences, not to mention treatises on the difference between court and curial style, not to mention Latin and German style lessons.

This list could go on and on. No profession, including country and town preachers, could do without these writings: The path of the rising bourgeoisie and nobility in absolutism is paved with hundreds of instructions dealing with social behaviour, gestures and ceremonial as well as the associated affectations and conversational rituals. Added to this are the lexical aids, encyclopaedias, guides and compendia that the rhetorical culture of the 18th century produced. We can draw several conclusions from these findings:

1) In appropriating the mother tongue as a medium of mediation, rhetoric in the modern state steps into its ancient rights. It succeeds in recommending itself as a strategically applied art of persuasion, even in private conversation.

2) The proof of true eloquence is no longer seen in the eloquent verbosity of festive speeches, but in the concrete intention of persuasion. The fact that current textbooks are only devoted to the major genres is now subject to criticism: the focus is increasingly on speech situations in which persuasion is possible and necessary.

3) The field of rhetoric thus expands beyond the old genre boundaries (eulogies and ceremonial speeches). The compendia of Hallbauer and Fabricius, following in the footsteps of Thomasius, explicitly set themselves the task of providing useful instructions for speeches and conversations in everyday, private life.

The Enlightenment demand for socialising also led to the formation of new institutions, private academies, secret societies, agricultural and economic societies, as well as journalism in the broadest sense. The two new publication media, the journal and the review organ, show the extent to which this was aimed at communication, discussion and the joint release of reason.

For all its effectiveness, however, rhetoric must also give way to new sciences, such as psychology and aesthetics. Here, philosophy and epistemology seem to prevail against the old opponent, and yet it is only a change of form: in connection with the new subjectivity, eloquence, once again made subservient to concrete needs, recalls human affectivity as a medium of rhetorical persuasion. The emotional treatment of the addressee is rediscovered as a prerequisite for exerting influence and is made the foundation of all further considerations. As is well known, the speaker's aim is not only to direct the thoughts, but above all the will of the addressee according to his intention.

This intention alone cannot achieve what is true and useful. The task of the orator can therefore be reduced to a single denominator in the requirement to provide sensual representations, which Nicolaus Hieronymus Gundling described in 1715 as follows: "All sensual instruments arouse our plaisir. The essential must therefore become sensual."

The fact that the sensualisation of their arguments was once again declared to be the supreme duty of rhetorical practice had serious consequences for the aesthetic discussion of the 18th century. The sensualisation of ideas, as practised by rhetoric, is emphasised as the specific method of proof that distinguishes it fundamentally from philosophy, as Hieronymus Andreas Mertens makes clear in his "Hodegetic Outline of a Complete History of Scholarship" in 1780: "Rhetoric differs from its cousin philosophy in that it makes sensual again that which philosophy has clearly developed."

Aesthetics, which sees itself as a "new science", utilises the irrationality and emotionality of rhetorical intentions as philosophical principles. The advantages that rhetoric and poetry emphasised for their own legitimacy are incorporated into the "science of beauty" without much modification: "The benefit that aesthetics promises us is that it enables us to present the truths that we have learned from the higher sciences in an appealing and pleasant way, and to make them comprehensible to every mind. The vast majority of people cannot comprehend anything without sensual images, at least they find no pleasure in the naked truth," wrote Georg Friedrich Meier in 1748 in his "Anfangsgründe aller schönen Wissenschaften".

It is therefore clear why rhetoric was able to remain so powerful in the 18th century. The Enlightenment philosophy of the social was almost unquestionably linked to the social practice of the Enlightenment, i.e. social culture. Through this, rhetoric became the motor of a literature of demand with a broad impact. However, what made a career at that time was not so much the universal educational claim that antiquity had formulated for rhetoric, but rather the teaching of linguistically effective communication. For rhetoric has always seen itself as the art of communication, and in this respect we must speak of a renaissance in the 18th century. As in antiquity, rhetoric now means aesthetic experience as socially mediated experience; communication, i.e. equalisation versus privilege.

Even poetry, which was always clichéd by older German studies as a breakthrough of emotion against the resistance of sterile rationalism, lives from rhetorical axioms. Klopstock as the German poet of a subjective emotional world par excellence: German studies must finally bid farewell to this idea. Klopstock was a humanist scholar who was familiar with rhetoric from the Roman tradition. He found his theory of representation, with its claim to bring images vividly before the reader's eye, in Quintilian, which is why Klopstock's poetic theory is always a theory of both imagination and emotion.

And what applies to Klopstock applies to the same extent to Wieland and Schiller. His linguistic art also comes from Roman rhetoric and poetry. He had been familiar with Latin stylistics through his contact with the Latin language itself, through Cicero and Quintilian since his school days, whereas he only became acquainted with Aristotle's Poetics in 1797. In the meantime, the influence of ancient and German rhetoric on the philosophy of German idealism has come more clearly into view, and we note that, in addition to the ambivalent reception of rhetoric in Kant, there was the orator-philosopher Fichte, not to mention Hegel, who developed a philosophical theory of rhetoric.

The present bibliography is intended to serve as a basis for future work on literary theory, rhetoric and aesthetics of the 18th century in Germany thanks to its wealth of sources. It lists the independent publications on rhetoric (theory), homiletics and epistolography that appeared in German-speaking countries between 1700 and 1800 - including all new editions and reprints.

The bibliography is organised chronologically and thus also documents a history of the development of literary-theoretical, poetological and aesthetic awareness in the 18th century.

In short, it aims to present rhetoric to the interested researcher as what it once was and what characterised its status in Western education: a dynamic principle, a psychagogical and anthropological art. As a persuasive technique, school subject and social practice, rhetoric has determined the literary and linguistic-social life of Europe since the 5th century BC up to Lessing and Herder, Klopstock and Schiller, Kant and Friedrich Schlegel.

The authors

Jutta Sandstede studied German Studies in Oldenburg and from 1986 to 1991 was a research assistant at the Rhetoric Centre, a project funded by the German Research Foundation. She is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Linguistics and Literature with a thesis on the rhetorical practice of the German Enlightenment.

Prof. Dr Joachim Dyck completed his doctorate with a thesis on Baroque literary theory and habilitated in Freiburg/Breisgau with a study on the connection between the Bible and literary theory in the 18th century. Associate Professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, since 1972 Professor of Modern German Literary History in Freiburg. Appointments at the universities of Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Toronto and Giessen, among others. From 1982 chair of literary theory and literary reception at the University of Oldenburg. Visiting professorships in the USA, appointments at Washington University, St. Louis (1985) and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1989).