ABSTRACT
Chapter Two: “‘And My Life Blood Out They Suck’: Aristophanes’ Rhetoric,” situates Aristophanes in the Western rhetorical canon, which traditionally neglects the theatre as a rhetorical site. Beginning with sketches of student performances, the chapter discusses Aristophanes’ rhetorical theorizing in Clouds, the play that most directly addresses the development of rhetoric in 4th century Athens. Clouds enacts a performance of bodily proto-performativity whereby commonplace expressions are negotiated, embodied, and subverted on the playwright’s terms. Specifically, Aristophanes takes on two heavyweights in Classical Western rhetoric, Socrates and Protagoras. In Clouds, their ideas are debated, embodied, and disrupted to suit the transgressive vision of Aristophanic rhetoric. Moreover, with his attention to sentence level utterances, the chapter argues that Aristophanes practices proto-critical discourse perspectives (CDP). Firmly situating the stage in the rhetorical tradition, Clouds anticipates twentieth century performances of staged performativity and CDP as it crudely and hilariously assaults our attention back to the transgressive body in Western rhetoric.