Common Places and commonplace

I've just received an interesting looking book 'Eloquence du Roman' by Cristelle Reggiani.

As my French is very new and very poor, I'm reading it veeeerry slowly.

However it is interesting that she focuses on the common places as the central pedagogic vehicle for learning/teaching rhetoric as a method of inventio. And so when the Common Places are reframed as commonplaces, ie as public cliches that do not express the inner subjectivity or uniqueness of an author, rhetoric is positioned as the enemy of discourse. The explicit pedagogy of rhetoric is seen to be mechanical, rigid, and cliched - because it is explicit. By contrast, true expression is natural and untutored, from the soul/esprit, and an expression of pure meaning-making uncontaminated by language or language training.

[For those unfamiliar with traditional rhetoric, Common Places referred to a practice of having Headings for finding ideas. Places were where you went to invent ideas needed for a speech or text. The Places that were common were generic and applied to any situation or discursive setting, compared with Special Places that were domain specific. Common Places were headed as questions: How When Where Why What for In whose interests? etc or under very general headings: person, act, motive, purpose, circumstances etc. Places did not provide an answer; they are not encyclopedia entries. They provide a question or angle for looking at the matter at issue.]

However, it is important to note that during the Renaissance, the practice of Commonplace Books developed, whereby students were encouraged to collect short pithy quotes under a whole range of likely headings. Erasmus is the key figure in this development I think.

So perhaps we really do have here the practice of places/topio as a method of invention being materially transformed into the intertextual practice of collecting quotes for rote learning or copying. In other words a change in the medium of inscription changing the meaning and use of a practice: from Common Places to commonplace books to commonplace ideas.


So, too in English there is a shift from 'Common Place' to 'commonplace', just as there is from sensus communis to commonsense. Both shifts downplay the social reality of mind replacing it with a internal individualised mind.