AUDIENCE, WORDS, AND ART

In the six studies which make up this volume, Mr. Davidson has sought to do four things: (1) to recover the crucial steps in the attempt to reconstitute rhetoric as a discipline for France and the French language in the seventeenth century; (2) to analyze the opposition to that attempt, as it appears in the Logique of Port-Royal; (3) to show how Pascal, starting from principles like those of the Port-Royalists, invented an art of persuasion which is reflected in the Lettres provinciales, especially, but also in the Pensées; and (4) to compare and con trast the ways in which one theme or factor in rhetorical theory — the audience — becomes specified in the minds of Corneille, Racine, and Molière as they write and defend their dramatic works. In the adventures of rhetoric in seventeenth-centur