Pynchon's epideictic

[Terrance]

doug mentioned how P brings back his bag of tricks--the pavlovian
conditioning, rilke, and so on. paul M. noted that p's use of the poetic
as prose  is compounded by the pyncher's propensity for assholery. paul
N. notes that the cover of the book reads like a movie trailer. it's
slick marketing on pynchon's part (or whoever it is that markets him)
and I can't help but think that there is something ironic in all this.
THEY insisted he write some conventional Foreword and he insisted on
being a poet. 

The Greek epideictic means "fit for display." Thus, this branch of
oratory
is sometimes called "ceremonial" or "demonstrative" oratory. Epideictic
oratory was oriented to public occasions calling for speech or writing
in
**the here and now**. Funeral orations are a typical example of
epideictic
oratory. The ends of epideictic included praise or blame, and thus the
long
history of encomia and invectives, in their various manifestations, can
be
understood in the tradition of epideictic oratory. Aristotle assigned
"virtue
(the noble)" and "vice (the base)" as those special topics of invention
that
pertained to epideictic oratory. 

	

Today, we recognize this in advertising and publicity, purple passage
prose, and attempts to communicate some wordless mood or emotion. Like
those of us, in the here and now (c2003, post 9-11)  of some sort of
disposition.