Re: The humility topos

[Vaughan Pratt <pratt@cs.stanford.edu>]

One would suppose that the notions of literary topos and humility topos 
were of ancient origin.  Certainly "topos" appears in Aristotle's 
Rhetoric in the original Greek.  However its entry into the academic 
lexicon as an English word relevant to rhetoric and other literary forms 
would seem, as far as I've been able to tell, to have occurred at some 
point in the 20th century.

1.  Volume Ti-Tz of the OED does not contain the word "topos," nor does 
it appear under the entries for "humility" or "literary."  (Ordinarily 
the OED can relied on to record just about every English word that has 
appeared in print prior to the 20th century.)

2.  Adams Sherman Hill, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory in 
Harvard University from 1876 to 1904, wrote "The Foundations of 
Rhetoric" in 1892 with no mention of the concept of topos as a notion in 
rhetoric.

The Wikipedia article on Ernst Robert Curtius at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Robert_Curtius

says "He is best known for his 1948 work Europäische Literatur und 
Lateinisches Mittelalter. It was a major study of the Medieval Latin 
literature and its effect on subsequent writing in modern European 
languages. The book was largely responsible for introducing the literary 
topos concept as a scholarly and critical discussion of literary 
commonplaces."

So unless someone comes up with an earlier use, it looks like 1948 may 
be the date, and German the language, of the first appearance of "topos" 
outside the original Greek of Aristotle.

Vaughan Pratt


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