Abstract

The "controverted self" is the name I have given to the bad conscience that results from the recognition of one's own facility in argument. It is a by-product of rhetoric's commitment to what was known in the Renaissance as in utramque partem, the principle that the skilled advocate can argue any side of any question. Treating rhetoric as the ancient meeting point between law and literature, I begin by analyzing scholarship in the contemporary Law-and-Literature Movement in terms of the theories of argument of rhetoric's inventors, the Sophists. Sophistic appears to have had no conception of bad conscience in argument, however, and so to find the roots of the controverted self in Anglo-American legal and literary culture, I turn to English Renaissance rhetorical and legal training, and examine the influence of vernacular rhetoric books, particularly those of Thomas Wilson, George Puttenham and Abraham Fraunce, on both common law practice and literary composition in the Inns of Court. ;From this more general survey I next turn to a more particular examination of the work of Francis Bacon, the one man of the period who most powerfully unites literature with logic, law and rhetoric. In placing Bacon's literary works, such as masques and essays, and his writings on rhetoric and argument in the context of his extraordinary legal career, my ultimate theme is the argumentatively powerful and yet disturbing doubleness. ;In the final chapter I summarize my conclusions and bring my notions of the Renaissance into the present by examining the affinities between two very different things. The first, Holy Sonnet 19, a poem of the Lincoln's Inn man, John Donne, finds in utramque partem to be a source of religious terror The second, the late jurisprudential work of Karl Llewellyn, looks upon the problem of two-fold argument in a more contemporary, secular way. Without a punishing God as a powerful presence, the bad conscience of argument remains in the muted way of not terror, but malaise