Copia (latin)

Encyclopedia : C : CO : COP : Copia (latin)

Copia is a Latin term that means plentiful supply, associated with abundance of words and linked to the Greek figure of excess, macrologia (long-windedness), as well as the general strategy of amplification.

Copia refers to: 1) a rhetorical exercise; 2) a goal for students of rhetoric; and 3) rhetoric as epistemology.

Contents

1 Rhetorical exercise
2 Goal of rhetorical education
3 Copia and Episteme
4 Copia and Morality
5 Copia in Myth

5.1 Roman myth (abstract)
5.2 Greek myth (abstract)

6 Copia, Myth, and exchange of \"The Real\"

Rhetorical exercise

Students can imitate various writing styles (imitatio), or develop copiousness through exercises like those detailed in Desiderius Erasmus' De Duplici Copia Verborum ac Rerum, 1512 (). The goal of such exercise (similar to the Greek progymnasmata) is to develop a novices' facility in expression so he or she attains Copie, an elevated stylistic dexterity and fluency referred to simply as 'abundance of style'. Such abundance is the facility of a rhetor with powerful, flowing speech.

Copia, as espoused by Erasmus, differs from rigid imitation of great masters; it also differs from the stylistic ideal of non-chalance (sprezzatura) promoted by Italian humanist rhetoric (Castiglione, in The Book of the Courtier).

Goal of rhetorical education

Good style is evaluated in contemporary context for eloquence, including audiences and purposes for speech as the notion of a good style assumes a common standard. For the individual, the achievement of copie may provide social capital to the rhetor; however, as imitation of great masters, copia binds a community of practice with tradition.

Copia and Episteme

For Erasmus, following the Greek Sophist tradition, human knowledge is fallible; Every argument has at least two valid yet opposing sides (dissoi logoi) and the purpose of rhetoric was to argue probable truth. With In Praise of Folly, Erasmus examines how we resort to common belief (topoi), tradition, convention, or give way to parameters of folly: understanding inextricably situated in personal and historical context. Copia is thus a means of rhetorical discovery toward greater human understanding when a quest for absolute truth is truly a fool's errand, and prompts some to seek spiritual enlightenment from the confines of our imperfectable knowledge.

Copia and Morality

Copia has moral dimensions: Rhetors decide (tacitly or explicitly) whether or not to conceal education with non-chalance; Copia is a process in rhetorical education that includes abundance of ideas (Erasmus divided On Copia between abundance of expression, and abundance of subject matter), where good style evokes the ideal rhetor, Cicero's Vir Bonum Dicendi Partibus.

Theorists of post-modernism speak of hyperrealism, which, in part, relates to a view of human experience and knowledge that is falible, always mediated by factors such as perception (through sense organs), prior experience, and memory. While post-modern theorists may differ in their adherence to such views of human understanding as camera obscura, panopticon, or simulacra, the classical concept of copia as episteme treats human knowledge with tentativity, but as a method to improve a facility in human understanding and as a tool in the domain of probable truth, copia is a consolation when ideal Truth is unfeasable, but investment in education toward achieving Copia can be a means to improve human affairs, if we retain optimism about the potential to development human understanding and communication.

Copia in Myth

Roman myth (abstract)

In Roman mythology, Copia was the goddess of abundance. She carried a cornucopia and was associated with Fortuna.

Greek myth (abstract)

A mythical icon of copia is the Greek cornucopia. In the myth, Amalthea nurses a newborn Zeus from a goat. Upon maturity, Zeus removes one horn from the beast with an enchantment that creates both the first unicorn and the Cornucopia, the horn of plenty. Zeus then condescends to give Amalthea this gift in exchange for her nursing.

Copia, Myth, and exchange of \"The Real\"

The cornucopia appears on coinage from the reign of Roman Emperor Claudius II; the horn is depicted in the hand of Aequitas, the minor goddess of fair trade and honest merchants. Thus copia has historically been associated with the schism between currency and goods, or monetary value and intrinsic value.

The Greek myth of a cornucopia also portrays a schism between a sphere of pure being, personified in Greek myth by figures of masculinity like Zeus and Apollo, and a material, fragmentary, imperfect realm associated with the feminine and personified by figures like Dionysus.

Such a schism between ideal and real may be characterized as a productive exchange; however, such an exchange may also be critiqued as an unnatural promise, dance of contempt, or materialization of our aggression on the natural world.

For example, in The Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, an image of copia is conveyed as the tale told by Marlow (a narration within a narration within a story):

"The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies in the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical...and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine."

Later in the novel, Marlow depicts the voice of Kurtz and that of his beloved as a relationship very similar to that of Narcissus and Echo:

"The most you can hope from [life] is some kind of knowledge of yourself--that comes too late--a crop of inextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death...I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say. This is the reason I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it. Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe. He had summed up--he had judged. 'The horror!' He was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of some sort of belief...a long time after I heard once more, not his own voice, but the echo of his magnificent eloquence thrown to me from a soul as translucently pure as a cliff of crystal."

In the pair of quotations above, a relationship is perceivable between copia and the dance of contempt between Kurtz and his Beloved, like Narcissus and Echo, or Zeus and Amalthea, that portrays an epic exchange.

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