In Search of Better Terms: The Critique of Rhetorical Eloquence in the Transatlantic Hispanic Enlightenment
Goveia, Braden Michael
0000-0002-0904-9666
:
2022-10-25
Abstract
The aim of this study is to explore the ways in which French rationalist thought shaped the poetics of rhetorical argumentation in Hispanic Enlightenment literature. Like imaginative tropes and figures of thought, probabilistic reasoning was cast as if it were a transgression against a natural order. In Chapter 1, the author introduces the tradition of probabilism in the context of historiographic and religious debates in the Iberian Peninsula prior to the Enlightenment, the emergence of French rationalistic reasoning in the seventeenth century, and the theoretical framework that guides this research, New Formalist Criticism. Chapter 2, “Benito Jerónimo Feijóo and The Critique of Figurative Eloquence in Spain in Teatro crítico universal and Cartas eruditas (1726-1753),” explores various works by Benito Jerónimo Feijóo (1676-1764) to argue that the Galician author became highly critical of the power of the imagination in human testimony. Chapter 3, “On Monsters, Mummies, Masks, and Wax: Luís António Verney and Figures of Good Sense in O Verdadeiro Método de Estudar (1746),” follows Luís António Verney’s (1713-1792) critiques of the Jesuit theory of eloquence inherent to a Portuguese education under the Jesuits. While imploring his compatriots to adhere to strict logic of thought, Verney often applied rational figures of diction in his writing that embellished without jeopardizing the transparency of his expression. Chapter 4, “Literary Dialogues in Form: Eugenio Espejo, the Rejection of Jesuit Eloquence, and the Regulation of Rhetoric in Quito,” explores the emergence of a rationalist literary culture in the New World through the works of Francisco Javier Eugenio de Santa Cruz y Espejo (1747-1795). Espejo drew heavily from French theorists in his satirical works to characterize the rhetoric associated with Spanish culture prevalent in the colony as intellectual, political, and cultural forms of bondage.