Language and Learning

INTRODUCTION

In recent years, there has been an upsurge of interest in ancient Cynicism, which has benefited in particular from renewed attention to the notion of rhetorical practice. It was recognised that even though the Cynics never formulated an explicit body of philosophical theories, their life-style could be analysed as the exercise of a philosophical rhetoric, intended to convey a particular set of ethical messages.

In this contribution, I will focus on Cynic strategies of communication, and on problems of the interpretation of Cynicism resulting from their communicative choices. First, I will look at the Cynics' use of transgressive non-verbal communication with the help of modern socio-linguistic theories of non-verbal communication and impression management. The Cynics scandalise their audience by their conscious use of the body and its processes for philosophical purposes; anthropological ideas about transgression will be helpful here (section 2).

In section 3, I will turn to verbal communication, and investigate the Cynics' characteristic use of language and literature, regarded as an aspect of their self-fashioning. Here, I argue that Cynic ideas on language correspond to a specific type of folk-linguistics, represented for us by a well-delineated literary tradition of iambos and comedy. I claim that the literary representations of Cynicism that have come down to us cannot be fully understood, unless their intertextual relations with other ancient transgressive genres are explored.