Canons of Rhetoric: Invention - Topics
The warehouse of ideas
The English word topic derives from the Greek topikos, plural topika. The Latin is locus, loci. The closest English words are place or location, and thus a topic is a metaphor for the place where you might find something you want to say and a method for quickly locating such things, like knowing which aisle and on what rack Home Depot keeps the fans when you want to replace a light with a fan. If you didn't already know where the fans were, you would have to wander up and down every aisle, or ask an employee or maybe you could work it out from the signs posted or just your general sense of how such stores are organized. Knowing where to find what you need saves time and mental energy. And if you don't know what you are looking for? The topics can help with that too because they are abstractions, more like "ways to lower the ambient temperature" rather than just "ceiling fans". With the former, you can innovate. With the latter, you can renovate.
It's worth remembering in this context that the Latin word for invention, inventio, is related also to inventory.
The topics are inventories of the thought patterns and forms of expression (sometimes just key words) people tend to employ in specific rhetorical situations. "The rhetorical situation" is a phrase coined by Lloyd Bitzer in the inaugural essay of the journal Philosophy and Rhetoric (1968). He described it as, "A complex of persons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence which can be completely or partially removed if discourse, introduced into the situation, can so constrain human decision or action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigence." I tend to think in terms of people, place, context, need to get something done that can be done by words or ideas alone or needing words or ideas to happen. A list of topics can be derived by reading (or listening to and observing) many examples of what people have written (or said) in response to a given rhetorical situation and identifying the most common patterns of thought and forms of expression. Or they can be purchased from someone who has or claims to have done the analysis already.
Example: Topics of Interpretation
If the argument you are pondering hinges on how a text can be interpreted, what it "means," you can use the following list of topics to locate things you might say.
- Letter, spirit, intention Argue that a text should be read literally or figuratively or contextually depending on what suits your purposes and keep in mind that if you go literal, your opponents will go spirit or intention. In other words, work up arguments for each of the three topics, pick the one that best supports your position prepare to rebut the others since you can be pretty sure your opponent will choose them.
- Ambiguity Identify multiple possible interpretations and then either single one or more out or let the multiplicity stand if imprecision suits your purposes. Eliminating ambiguity can be a powerful strategy, but finding ambiguity where no one noticed it before can be as well. Literary theorists call finding ambiguity defamiliarization.
- Disagreement about interpretative practices Argue that a text's meaning is a function of the method of reading employed and then argue for one method over another -- close reading versus new historicism perhaps or the hermeneutics of intention The author meant ... versus the hermeneutics of suspicion Regardless of what the author thought she was saying, passage betrays the underlying matterial conditions . . . or power relations . . . (or psychic disturbances if you want to go old-school). or reader response versus textual analysis (is meaning in the text or the reader?).
- Definition and range of application of a central word In arguments, everything hinges on the definitions. If a person makes an argument without defining a key term, laser focus on that term. If you are making the argument, inspect your implicit definitions carefully and decide whether or not to make them explicitly.
- Analogy argue that a text's meaning is beyond the literal.
Once you have come up with the inventory of arguments you need to make, (remember that inventio is Latin for the Greek heuresis) then you sort (arrange) what you have in order of what is most relevant, most plausible on the surface and thus can be merely stated as a fact, (be careful here: just because it's obvious to you doesn't mean it will be to others), most readily supported with other evidence and thus a place where you need to elaborate and corroborate, and finally what carries the most weight with the intended audience (precedence) so that you know what to emphasize.
You could argue that learning to write about literature, or anything else, is about learning the relevant topics. Years ago I think I tried to do something like that: "Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Literature, Invention, and Composition." Journal of Advanced Composition 14.2 (1994): 367-87. A couple thousand years ago Aristotle did it for rhetoric.
Aristotle is the origin of much of what later rhetoricians had to say about topics because he both advised keeping lists of topics as a form of rhetorical training (a practice that later became known as the commonplace book tradition) and explained how topics can be derived from first principles inherent in a rhetorical situation, which is what his Rhetoric is about.
Prefabricated discourse
Aristotle said there are two kinds of topics, specific or special eidos form or category and general or common (koinon). Special topics are those most appropriate for specific disciplines. Prices rise for in-demand products as supply declines, is a special topic of Economics. Once you know that topic, you can use it to analyze economic situations and employ it when you want to persuade investors to do something. General topics, on the other hand, might be used anywhere -- more of a good thing is better than less, for example. Aristotle's Rhetoric can be read as a highly elaborated collection of special and common topics, a warehouse filled with the raw materials you need to build arguments. You can find a few Aristotelian topic lists at the bottom of this screen.
Here is Cicero on the topics relevant in rhetorical situations where praising a person (Encomia, eulogy, and the letter of recommendation are some relevant genres) is part of what you need to do:
Thus you are instructed to understand that people praise the fortunate and those who have endured misfortune well or even turned misfortune to advantage The topics are also useful tools for evaluating people and things
. but also to divide fortune into its parts: money, relatives, friends, etc. Dividing and idea into its consituent parts is Aristotle's dialectical method (The method he uses to explain rhetoric). Notice that Cicero also advises that the topics of praise can be inverted and thus turned into topics of blame. This too is Aristotelian, but it is also endemic to the default rhetorical situation of attack and defend. Rhetorical discourse requires an opponent. Thus as you think about what you can say, think also about how it can be said against you and how the opposite of what you are saying can also be used against you. Gorgias once said, "Combast seriousness with laughter and laughter with seriousness." The idea that rhetoric is about proving opposites, as Aristotle said, is also expressed by the idea that on every matter there are several sides (Prortagoras and Antiphon).
If what Cicero is advising looks like just a list of words, it is. But individual words are easier to remember than whole statements and from each word, through defining it and then looking for examples, either from the person's life or the speaker's life or from literature or history, one can invent the whole speech.
Here is Aristotle on the practice of collecting examples to illustrate the topics:
Since at least Aristotle's time, then, people have been keeping collections of topics with illustrations and elaborations of each, what later were called commonplace books.
Commonplace books lent themselves to the rhetorical genre of the chreia, a famous person saying something memorable and inspiring or funny or at least instructive. Like a piece of found poetry, I happened across an example recently. The author of this example of a chreia, Mary Beard, was making a point about Roman history, but her label for the painting and the painting itself are excellent examples of what you might see in a commonplace book, cross-listed under chreia, motherhood, motherly virtue, the origin of greatness, images of children as adornments (?).
Keeping a commonplace book provides you with opportunities to admire and remember well said ideas and leaves you ultimately with an inventory of ideas and expressions to consult whenever you need to say something, so a commonplace book is both an index and a museum or warehouse of thoughts and expressions, maxims, enthymemes, metaphors and similes, definitions, chreia, fables, rhyming couplets, quotations from great works of imagination, written or filmed, and so on.
Some people also collected and practiced creating character sketches (ethopoeia). From Wiki "Ethopoeia (ee-tho-po-EE-ya) is the ancient Greek term for the creation of a character. Ethopoeia was a technique used by early students of rhetoric in order to create a successful speech or oration by impersonating a subject or client. Ethopoeia contains elements of both ethos and pathos and this is noticeable in the three divisions of ethopoeia. These three divisions are pathetical (dealing with emotions), ethical (dealing with character) and mixed ( a combination of both emotion and character). It is essential to impersonation, one of the fourteen progymnasmata exercises created for the early schools of rhetoric."
The earliest example is from Aristotle's direct successor, Theophrastus (who was also a botanist), in a book called On Characters. Here's a clip:
III. The Garrulous Man (xviii)
Garrulity is the discoursing of much and ill-considered talk.
The Garrulous Man is one who will sit down beside a person whom he does not know, and first pronounce a panegyric on his own wife; then relate his dream of last night; then go through in detail what he has had for dinner. Then, warming to the work, he will remark that the men of the present day are greatly inferior to the ancients; and how cheap wheat has become in the market; and what a number of foreigners are in town; and that the sea is navigable after the Dionysia; and that, if Zeus would send more rain, the crops would be better; and that he will work his land next year; and how hard it is to live; and that Damippus set up a very large torch at the Mysteries; and 'How many columns has the Odeum?' and that yesterday he was unwell; and 'What is the day of the month?'; ... Nor, if he is tolerated, will he ever desist.
[He who would not have a fever must shake off such persons, and thrust them aside, and make his escape. It is hard to bear with those who cannot discern between the time to trifle and the time to work.], On Characters
Notice the structure. General description, illustration, moral about how to deal with such people. The structure is a template for further entries in the collection as well as a way of thinking about how to write a new entry, a template, in other words. Also notice the caricature nature of the description and how it tends toward stereotype. A recent book on Theophrastus: Character: The History of a Cultural Obsession, Marjorie Garber. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2020. (link to excerpt)
So how did "commonplace" come to mean hackneyed or trite, evidence of a lack of imagination or stereotypical thinking?If you haven't, you should read Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion becuase that's the origin of the modern use of stereotype. If you don't have time for that, the Wiki article hits some of the highpoints. You might find the section on news and truth especially interesting.
J.F. Dobson (1919) argued that topics were originally derived from real audience expectations, presumably by insightful rhetors who had the skill to see what is inherent in a rhetorical situation, but then, because people were taught what to say rather than how to figure out what to say (research), the topics were reified into lists that led unimaginative speakers to speak in formulaic and boring ways. The five paragraph essay is a good example of what happens when people are taught how to fake rhetorical thinking, although it is primarily about arrangement rather than invention.
I read Dobson's prose here as dripping with disdain. Is that about the reader or the written or both?
So because of the topics, the Greeks didn't need to spend time thinking about what to say and so had more time to think carefully about how (style) and when (arrangement) to say it. Also, because audiences expected certain things to be said in certain situations, resaying the conventional things wasn't perceived as inherently defective. In fact, ticking the boxes, as we might say today, was one way of tallying the success of a performance. If you said all the things you were supposed to say, then you did better than if you had left something out. What separated the competent from the great, then, was how you said what everyone agreed needed saying.
You wanted to sound smart (urbane and energetic to use Aristotle's words) but not "clever" (smart and sophisticated rather than slick or tricky or learned). Your expressions shouldn't "smell of the lamp," as Isocrates said. You wanted to say, "what oft was said but nare so well expressed", as Matthew Arnold said in An Essay on Human Understanding.
Because they tend to express conventional wisdom (say what everyone always says), any given topic can come off sounding dull, formulaic, lazy, predictable, inauthentic, and even irrelevant if the speaker/writer is really just ticking the boxes, something that perhaps bothers us more than our ancestors for reasons I will get to shortly. Also, when we learn how to understand a rhetorical situation solely by consulting a list of topics (as opposed to also reading or listening to many examples of those topics deployed), that list becomes a die which casts our understanding of such situations and so limits how we think about them.
If preferring to focus on style and arrangement rather than content strikes you as obviously simple-minded or "merely rhetorical", consider the lyrics of popular music. The topics are limited, primarily to madness in all of its positive and negative forms (love, drugs, money). The subject matter is conventional. The way the convention gets drummed out is what makes a song worth listening to (or not). Consider the sub-topic of "heartbreak." Can you think of a genre of contemporary music that doesn't have a breakup song? Mick Jagger referred to the genre as "the kiss off song;" I've always liked Cee Lo Green's version: "Fuck You," which is kind of a parody of the genre. Maren Morris' "I Wish I Was" is also an interesting (familiar and yet unexpected, what Aristotle calls "urbane") rendition of the topic: the reluctant heartbreaker. And there's also Tom Petty's "Free Falling," which is a dark mascara-tinted ode to "breakup" as liberation.
People break up, certainly, but is "heartbreak" a thing (something that could be measured on a Likert scale or imaged using an MRI) or is it a rhetorical construct, an idea, a topic promoted and exploited by the music and entertainment industry? I just handed you an either/or construct. Resist. Never accept a dilemma on face value. Both is always an option. So is neither. Btw, "never accept a dilemma" is a maxim you can file under the topic of resistance to the given. Do you need to have experienced a "heartbreak" in order to write such a song? If you've experienced a heartbreak can you better appreciate a given "heartbreak" song? Or do such songs teach you what "heartbreak" is and how to feel it? Is meaning inherent in a situation or a rhetorical construct overlaying a situation or some combination or something else?
From a rhetorical perspective, at least, "heartbreak" is a topic consisting of sub-topics and if you want to write a song in that vein, you would do well to pay close attention to past incarnations, the attitudes the writer strikes, the situations they describe, the resolution if any they offer, and of course the chorus, how it is memorable and emblematic. And then you would "cover" a few of the ones that appeal to you (why do those ones appeal to you?) and then you would start working on your own, not the feeling of being "broken" up but the representation of the emotions that simulate an idea for your audience. If you are writing from the pov of the heartbroken, it's hard not to sound like a whiny bitch (in Cee Lo's version the protagonist actually cries to his mother, an irony that adds a brilliant polish to the song). The "vindictive bitch" is a great variation, but it's been done hundreds of times ("Jagged Pill", "Crazy Ex Girlfriend," "Sorry not Sorry," or the somewhat milder "Single Ladies"). If you aren't yet ready to move on from this topic, here's a list of "The 50 Greatest Breakup Songs".
After Romantic rhetoric's exaggeration of the importance of innovation and ingenuity in invention, and the scientific revolution's rejection of received wisdom, the word commonplace came to mean an over used expression, one that suggests a lack of imagination or careless thinking, a cliché, a stereotype, a shopworn, hackneyed representation that bears only a very little resemblance to reality owing to exaggeration and unexamined prejudices -- the redneck, the welfare queen, the tech bro, the soccer mom, Karen, etc.. While commonplaces are over-used they are effective among unthinking people and the circle of unthinking can be greatly increased if the topic is carefully disguised or re-figured. If you have to defend against an artfully designed topic, point out the artistry: find "the Karen" in the righteously indignant, myopic, tone-deaf, middle-aged, white woman ranting about the service and demanding to speak to the manager. If you have to defend "a Karen," describe her motivation, excuse her demeanor, show how she is misunderstood, actually a victim of good fortune, and so on.
Today we have the internet, the grandest of all commonplace books, an infinite warehouse of ideas and images and video and data out of which to build an opinion about nearly anything, even an informed opinion if you take the time and effort to think outside the confines of a single app. or resource.
Perhaps the deepest source of contemporary commonplaces about characters is tvtropes.org. It's unfortunate they use the word "trope" because a "trope" is a figure of speech not a characterization of a kind of person. Still, the collection is immense and the concept is sound even if the name is misleading. Spend some time here and you will discover patterns you can play with, modify, distort, and avoid.
By the way, contemporary usage tends to bend traditional rhetorical words in sometimes uncomfortable ways. The word "literally," for example, now means "figuratively." And "irony" is now used to mean "peripeteia." Just say'n.
What should you say if you have done something wrong? Well, if you are familiar with the topics of defense against accusation, you have a readymade game plan.
If you are accused of some misdeed, you have several options. You can protest your innocence and if you have compelling evidence on your side, that should be the end of that. Of course you can protest if you are guilty too.If the evidence in your favor is weak, you can try to ignore the accusation. If the accuser persists, you can deny the charge.
If they can prove it happened, then you deny responsibility.
As the old saying goes, deny, deny, deny. But if the evidence is overwhelming and it all points to you, then you need the topics of last resort.
I've got $20 says you recognized the topics for the accused.$100 says you've heard "deny, deny, deny" before You've heard them since you were a kid, perhaps not unfolding in their entirety because most such arguments stop somewhere along the way, but some subset of them. I'm also guessing you never saw these topics listed like this before, never come across them in a rhetorical handbook, until now. So, does the fact you could intuit them mean the topics are inherent in the rhetorical situation of accuse and defend? Or that you absorbed them like all other cultural phenomenon -- by hearing and noting without consciously remembering? Or both? Or something else?
One last point. Some topic lists can be turned from statements into questions and when you do that, you may notice the order is hierarchical. If you say I lied and I don't deny it, then we aren't climbing the accusation/defense tree. We are going somewhere else. The order inherent in some topics lists suggest a deep connection between invention and arrangement. At the end of this section you will encounter stasis theory and you will see what I mean.
Below are links to more detailed discussion of Aristotle's thoughts on topics. Each is branch off this main trunk, so you will need to hit back to move on to the next element of invention, dialectic.
Anyone who intends to praise someone will realize that he must set out the advantages of fortune. These are descent, money, relatives, friends, power, health, beauty, strength, intelligence, and everything else that is either a matter of the body or external. If the person he is praising possesses these things, the speaker must say that he has used them well; if he lost them, that he bore their loss with moderation. Secondly he must relate what this person has undertaken or endured in a wise manner, or generously, or courageously, or justly, or magnificently or dutifully, or humanely, in short, in any way that showed some virtue or other. These strategies and others of this sort will easily be understood by someone wishing to praise, as will their opposites by someone wanting to blame" (De Orator, 2.46). For more on the topics from Cicero, have a look at Daniel E. Mortensen, "The Loci of Cicero" (PDF) (Rhetorica 2008.26.1, 31-56.)
We ought also to select from written disquisitions [or rhetorical handbooks like his] and make up descriptions of each class of subject, putting them in separate lists, for example, about 'the good' (or about animal life'), dealing with every kind of good, beginning with the essence. We ought also to note in passing the opinion of individuals, for example, that Empedocles said that the elements of bodies are four in number ; for one may accept the statement of some thinker of repute. (Aristotle, Topika I 14. 105b, the E.S. Foster translation. See also, Joan Marie Lechner, Renaissance concepts of the commonplaces: an historical investigation of the general and universal 164)
"Angelica Kauffmann's painting of 'Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi', with her young sons (1785). Cornelia is one of the few but famous Roman mothers credited with a powerful influence on her children's public career. She was reputed to dress less flashily than many women at the time. 'My children are my jewels' she used to say. Here Kauffmann imagines her presenting Tiberius and Gaius (on the left) to a female friend." SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, Mary Beard.
The dicasts [jurors/judges], with a curious inconsistency, seem to have demanded a finished style of speaking, and yet to have been suspicious of any speaker who displayed too much cleverness. ... A pleader, therefore, who felt himself in danger of incurring such suspicion, must apologize to his audience in advance, stating that any strength which his case might seem to possess was due to its own inherent justice, not to his own powers of presenting it. He must compliment the jury on their well-known impartiality, and express a deep respect for the sanctity of the laws. The early rhetoricians made collections of such 'topics' or 'commonplaces', and instructed their pupils how to use them. The process became merely mechanical; any speaker could obtain from the rhetorical handbooks specimens of sentences dealing with all such requirements, but only a man of rare genius could, by originality of treatment, make them sound at all convincing. Aristotle at a later date made a particularly exhaustive collection of such topics. J.F. Dobson. The Greek Orators. Ares Publisher, Chicago: 1974, 21
Another Example: Topics for the Accused
Then deflect:
What to Say if You're Caught Red-Handed