Unruly examples: on the rhetoric of exemplarity

This collection of twelve essays aims to demonstrate that while example has a rich genealogy in the rhetorical tradition, it also involves issues that are central to current theories of meaning and ethics in literature and philosophy. Whatever is designated as example functions as a nexus of converging articulations: What is it an example of? To whom is the example directed? What makes it "exemplary," that is, what elevates the singular instance to authoritative status? Is the example merely one - a singular, an accident - or the One, a paradigm or paragon?

The use of example in discourse is so pervasive, so routine, and at the same time so various that one might hesitate to dignify it with a theory. In the classical and the Christian traditions the authority of exempla was predicated on their truth status, whether this was understood in a transcendent or a factual-historical sense (and, of course, the two were often interwoven). With the waning of traditional rhetorical practices the functions that example had fulfilled did not disappear, though their label, their place in the taxonomy of cultural practices, shifted. In this volume, the dimensions of these and other questions for literary theory and philosophy are explored in texts ranging across the Western tradition, from the Bible onward.

Introduction / Alexander Gelley -- Take the Bible for Example: Midrash as Literary Theory / Daniel Boyarin -- Example versus Historia: Montaigne, Eriugena, and Dante / Stephen G. Nichols -- Circe's Drink and Sorbonnic Wine: Montaigne's Paradox of Experience / John D. Lyons -- The Discourse of the Example: An "Example," Chapter IV of the First Part of The Logic of Port-Royal / Louis Marin -- Fables of Responsibility / Thomas Keenan -- The Pragmatics of Exemplary Narrative / Alexander Gelley -- Parabolic Exemplarity: The Example of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra / J. Hillis Miller -- "The Beauty of Failure": Kafka and Benjamin on the Task of Transmission and Translation / Ewa Ziarek -- Exemplarity and the Origins of Legislation / Irene E. Harvey -- Kant's Examples / David Lloyd -- The Force of Example: Kant's Symbols / Cathy Caruth -- Of the Eye and the Law / Herman Rapaport.