Re: The humility topos

[Colin McLarty <colin.mclarty@case.edu>]

Yes, but Aristotle was not known in Europe in the original Greek.  He
was known in Latin until well after the Renaissance, and in vernacular
languages taking their terms from Latin in recent centuries.   The
Online Etymolgical Dictionary gives for English:

Topics: 1634, "argument suitable for debate," singular form of
"Topics" (1568), the name of a work by Aristotle on logical and
rhetorical generalities, from L. Topica,  from Gk. Ta Topika, lit.
"matters concerning topoi," from topoi "commonplaces," neut. pl. of
topikos "commonplace, of a place," from topos "place." The meaning
"matter treated in speech or writing, subject, theme" is first
recorded 1720. Topical "of or pertaining to topics of the day" is
recorded from 1873.

Colin



2010/7/5 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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