We have been delighted to host Dr Brian Stone in Maynooth over the past month. Brian Stone is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Foreign Languages at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Dr. Stone's research interests are in the transmission of the arts of rhetoric from late antiquity to the early medieval period, especially in early Ireland. While at Maynooth, he is currently working on a manuscript investigating just this. While there has been philological and literary interest in this phenomenon in Celtic Studies circles, especially among prominent scholars at Maynooth, this research is interested in rhetoric beyond the arts of the classical world, and brings the works of contemporary rhetorical theory and linguistic anthropology to an analysis of the rich, early Irish literary tradition.
Part of this study seeks to understand the use the early Irish learned milieu made of rhetorical and grammatical handbooks from late antiquity, as well as the changing nature of theories of style, invention, and memory. Also, understanding rhetoric in the sense of Burkean symbolic action, this study investigates the rhetorical nature of highly stylized and rhetorical discourse in tales and sagas, including roscad and moments of direct speech attributed to the filid and otherworldly beings, such as 'Immacallam Choluim Chille 7 ind Óclaig', as well as rhetorical theories evident in learned poetry, such as 'The Caldron of Poesy and Learning.'