Unruly Examples

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.