Killing Abraham Lincoln : Who Turned His Nation's Defeat into Victory in the Battle of Five Forks, and the Story of Cincinnatus with Background Notes

by Ogunbitan, Festus

• ISBN13: 9781469747132
• ISBN10: 1469747138
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-02-17
• Publisher: Textstream

Summary

This epideictic oratory is dedicated to, Thespis of Icaria, the inventor of acting, the first actor, playwright, director, and producer in the world's theater.

Excerpts

My motivation to write Greek style epideictic oratory plays for all United States' presidents is to retell the great history of this country through reciprocity method of story telling. Modern literature regards telling stories through epic heroes as backward and anachronistic; but there is something that the society can learn through the locus of these heroes. Playwrights and poets through the centuries seemed not to have narrated the great history of this country for permanence in our memory as Sophocles, Aristophanes, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlow and others narrated the great history of Greece and England on the theaters of all schools and colleges through epideictic oratory. I have decided to start this project with the great contribution, which President Abraham Lincoln achieved for the Union of America. According to Prof. Athanassakis Apostolos in his lecture to Hellenistic Society at Sacramento State University in 2008, he mentioned that modern literature, and contemporary historians have failed to retell the story of our great heritage for permanence; he warned that if care is not taken to find the right language and literature (epideictic rhetoric) to retell history, 'our children will forget.' David Starkey, a British Historian, also commented on how contemporary culture has caused disappearance of articulate language and literature in the British society; but he mistakenly accredited the phenomenon to the impact of African American Hip Hop lyrics when said "'It is a Jamaican patois that has intruded in England, which is why so many of us have this sense that we are literally living in a foreign country. Charlene Spretnak, in Resurgence of the Real, also referred to the disappearance of educative rhetoric in our schools and colleges, and said, "Learning, especially at the university level, is strictly divided into departments, which have little interaction. One of the 'compartments," spiritual and religious life, is devalued in modernity because modern history celebrates the escape from religion and other 'superstitions' In the modern era, institutionalized religions have downplayed spiritual connectedness with creation, instead, they focus on rationalist application of morals and ethics." Fred D'Aguiar, a literary critic also pointed out from Prof. Everest Percival's Erasure that un-educative rhetoric is proliferated in our schools to erase critical thinking in students through the help of publishing industries that promote only certain kinds of literature—those with vague speeches and ghetto settings, at the expense of intelligent writers like the Monk personality in Erasure. Monk happens to be black but he cannot get published because he writes the wrong kind of books which contain classical rhetoric that could project critical thinking for articulate college composition in students. Modern literature has misled us to believe that Liberal Arts--epideictic oratory, which is the beginning of all departments in colleges and universities is no longer needed in modern civilization. As a result, the foundation of creativity and industrial growth, which the great scholars of deposed College of Liberal Arts built for thousands of years for earth's growth has been wrongly accredited to the success of plain and dry modern literature that contains no philosophy. In less than one hundred years, the rich inheritance from the College of Liberal Arts will soon dry up in our children, and the earth may fall into unfathomable recession as students are void of the energy of reasoning through the proliferation of vague language and literature in our schools and the media. From my high school days in Nigeria, I have been opened to British history in Christ Apostolic Grammar School Ibadan through Shakespeare's plays. When I reached the University in America, I started to further appreciate Greek and British history through the great works, which these playwrights did for Greece and Europe by rewriting European history with philosophical poetry that consciously controls the minds of its readers. Examples of other literatures that consciously control the minds of its readers are: Iliad, Livy's Pentads, Bible, Qu'ran, Taoist Books, I Have a Dream, Bhagavad Gita, and Vedic Books; these writers have used epideictic oratory style of writing to make the history and struggle of their various nations very permanent in our memory, and even to control the souls of most readers to go to the shrine, church, and mosque. Hoping to permanently retell the history of America, I have decided to use Aristotle's theory of catharsis to rewrite America's history through the locus of all presidents, or the first family—reciprocity—to have a permanent knowledge of America's history. All the plays shall incorporate the principles of American politics, focusing on the values and virtues of the Conservatives and the Liberals.