front cover of Cicero's Use of Judicial Theater
Cicero's Use of Judicial Theater
Jon Hall
University of Michigan Press, 2014
In Cicero’s Use of Judicial Theater, Jon Hall examines Cicero's use of showmanship in the Roman courts, looking in particular at the nonverbal devices that he employs during his speeches as he attempts to manipulate opinion. Cicero's speeches in the law-courts often incorporate theatrical devices including the use of family relatives as props during emotional appeals, exploitation of tears and supplication, and the wearing of specially dirtied attire by defendants during a trial, all of which contrast strikingly with the practices of the modem advocate. Hall investigates how Cicero successfully deployed these techniques and why they played such a prominent part in the Roman courts. These "judicial theatrics" are rarely discussed by the ancient rhetorical handbooks, and Cicero’s Use of Judicial Theater argues that their successful use by Roman orators derives largely from the inherent theatricality of aristocratic life in ancient Rome—most of the devices deployed in the courts appear elsewhere in the social and political activities of the elite.

While Cicero’s Use of Judicial Theater will be of interest primarily to professional scholars and students studying the speeches of Cicero, its wider analyses, both of Roman cultural customs and the idiosyncratic practices of the courts, will prove relevant also to social historians, as well as historians of legal procedure.

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front cover of Toward a Transnational University
Toward a Transnational University
WAC/WID Across Borders of Language, Nation, and Discipline
Jonathan Hall
University Press of Colorado, 2023
We live in the age of trans-, an era of pervasive mobility across linguistic, national, disciplinary, and institutional borders of teachers, students, scholars, and institutional programs. The contributors to Toward a Transnational University examine how approaches to postsecondary writing instruction travel and, in the process, transform the transnational and translingual character of universities worldwide. The chapters in this edited collection investigate, in multiple contexts around the world, the challenges, opportunities, and ambiguities that arise when mobility is taken as their foundation. Writing from a wide range of locations—including Bangladesh, Canada, China, Japan, Nepal, Qatar, and the United States—the contributors to Toward a Transnational University examine the friction points by which particular approaches to academic writing and its teaching are translated and interact with local cultures and concerns. Together, they show how institutions of higher education are engaging the mobility and fluidity of academic writing, its teaching, and its learning.
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