Rhetorical Terms An Introduction

Transcription

1 Running Head http// Philosophy Insights General Editor: Mark Addis Rhetorical Terms An Introduction Christopher Kelen...the means by which we tell and receive the stories that explain the world... For advice on use of this ebook please scroll to page 2

2 Publication Data Christopher Kelen 2007 The Author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act Published in 2007 by Humanities-Ebooks.co.uk Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE Reading and Listening Options * To use the navigation tools, the search facility, and other features of the Adobe toolbar, this Ebook should be read in default view. * To navigate through the contents use the hyperlinked Bookmarks at the left of the screen. * To search, expand the search column at the right of the screen or click on the binocular symbol in the toolbar. * For ease of reading, use <CTRL+L> to enlarge the page to full screen * Use <Esc> to return to the full menu. * Hyperlinks (if any) appear in Blue Underlined Text. Licence and permissions Purchasing this book licenses you to read this work on-screen and to print one copy for your own use. Copy and paste functions are disabled. No part of this publication may be otherwise reproduced or transmitted or distributed without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher. Making or distributing copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and would be liable to prosecution. Thank you for respecting the rights of the author. ISBN

3 An Introduction to Rhetorical Terms Christopher Kelen Bibliographical Entry: Kelen, Christopher. An Introduction to Rhetorical Terms. Philosophy Insights. Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007

4 A Note on the Author Christopher (Kit) Kelen is an Associate Professor at the University of Macau in south China, where he has taught Literature and Creative Writing for the last seven years. The most recent of Kelen's seven volumes of poetry, Eight Days in Lhasa was published by VAC in Chicago in A volume of Macao poems Dredging the Delta is forthcoming from Cinnamon Press in the U.K.

5 Contents A Note on the Author Preface: An Introduction to Rhetorical Terms A Glossary of Rhetorical Terms: old, new and recycled Words and Reality Classical and traditional tropes Simile Metaphor Personification Metonymy Synecdoche Hyperbole Paradox Oxymoron Irony Euphemism Tautology (and other solecisms) Figures of time: Ellipsis Catachresis Non-tropes and near tropes: image, sign, symbol, motif, archetype, stereotype New tropes, Tropology today Inoculation Bricolage Perruque Differend Différance Limen, border Mirror

6 Critical Theory Frame Vector, flow Body tropes Topos and tropography Bibliography Recommended Search Terms

7 Preface: An Introduction to Rhetorical Terms This is a book with a practical purpose. It aims to give students a handy reference to the background knowledge of rhetorical terms demanded of them by critical and theoretical texts in the humanities. A common vocabulary is used today for cultural criticism and theory and for related sub-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary discourses (in philosophy, literary criticism, and indeed all the humanities). The western world s twenty first century renaissance scholar needs to be fluent in the vocabulary which carries her across these disciplines. An important part of this vocabulary is in the rhetorical terms we read and write, reason and refute by. These are the means by which we tell and receive the stories that explain the world. They are the means by which we imagine our own and others ideas. To read and equally to write theory today one needs to be able to negotiate a way among these tropic motions; one needs to master the terms with which motions in meaning are described. Amorphous and difficult as this kind of learning is, it is of vital and personal importance. Through it one learns how one means what one means. It is through that kind of understanding one gets to decide what to mean.

8 1. A Glossary of Rhetorical Terms: old, new and recycled O Lord, praise be to solemn & deliberate movement, to the rigid landscape & hieratic sea. Praise be to the angel: a sail who has need of Brother Wind, to a symmetry not tiresome to behold, to the rectilinear psalm of the robe. from Rafael Alberti s Giotto Rhetorical terms or tropes are quite rightly called figures of speech because they are used in everyone s everyday language. For that reason they can also be considered as modes of thought or ways of meaning. While the figures of speech are not unique to literary language it is in the discussion of literature that the rhetorical terms which describe them have been most commonly used. That is because the study of literature involves looking closely at the language of a text in order to understand how it means what it means. Today the study of tropes or figures is of great importance in all forms of cultural investigation and even more generally in efforts, philosophic and otherwise, to account for how the world works. The western world s terminology and methods for these major tasks of understanding originate in the rhetoric of the classical world, that discipline of thought and language that aimed to help its students to speak and write convincingly. Whereas today the use and study of the tropes tends to be mainly directed at literate discourse, the motions in meaning that the tropes describe apply as much to the understanding of any cultural event or product. The figures of speech dealt with in this book are also traditionally referred to as rhetorical figures because they can be used deliberately to create particular effects with words, for instance to persuade a listener or reader. It is important to distinguish between the figures themselves and their description or the process of naming them.

9 Critical Theory There are many ways in which rhetorical figures can be classified. One of the most common is through the division into trope and scheme. Schemes involve re-patterning words that is altering the normal ways in which words would be expected to fall together to make meaning; tropes, by contrast, alter the meanings of words by altering the way in which they mean (in metaphor, for instance, through equivalence, in the case of irony, through meaning the opposite of what one appears to mean). In terms of this particular division, this book is mainly concerned with tropes rather than schemes. Rhetorical uses of language are deliberate and we can think of the figures used to create such deliberate effects in meaning as devices. However the use of tropes or figures may or may not be intentional. The use of figures of speech may have very different effects in a discourse from those intended by the maker. Language and its effects and investments always exceed the given or decided meaning of the author of a text. Likewise the potential meanings of a text always exceed the values assigned it in any particular act of interpretation. This is in part because interpretive acts are acts of reframing. The meaning of the text discussed or interpreted can never be what it was before because it is now being read in a new context. It is only through attempts to contextualise and to historicise, likewise to account for our own reading position and so place ourselves, we as readers can hope to see where our ideas come from. Relationships between rhetorical figures are sometimes complex and difficult to classify. For example personification appears to be a type of metaphor, a metaphor with a particular kind of content. A simile on the other hand is easily thought of as a metaphor made explicit. It might be more apposite to think of a metaphor as a simile made inexplicit, but the dominance of metaphor over simile (not so much in everyday life but in the study of rhetoric) guarantees that we see metaphor as the superordinating trope. There is a question as to whether what are called tropes are in fact abstractions on an equal footing. Synecdoche appears on some readings to be a species of metonymy but these tropes may also appear as mutually exclusive category terms, representing on the one hand a relationship of association, on the other a part for whole (or representative) relation. Now, metaphor is often seen as making acts of representation. So what relationship is there between synecdoche and metaphor? If anything these problems are more vexed in the case of the new figures (mentioned in Part 3), both in terms of their relationships to the traditional ones and in their relationship to each other. For one thing it appears that some of the new tropes are fighting over the same territory (differend and différance are a convenient example).

10 Critical Theory 10 Is there some inherent instability in these tools that are long established in the work of attributing the motions of meaning? Or cynically, is it rather that they are used as floating signifiers (able to be directed at will) by those who claim to be merely observing the processes of meaning, but who in fact are creating cultural values through this process? The best, though perhaps unsatisfactory way, of accounting for these problems is to say that relationships between and among tropes are themselves tropic, that is, wandering. Naming or locating the figures of rhetoric is therefore a necessarily reflexive activity, one in which the terms and tools available for the discussion are also directed at themselves. Words and Reality The figures of speech are often thought to participate in a kind of meaning that can be distinguished from plain uses of language, or from language that straightforwardly refers to things in the world. The contrast here is between the figurative and the literal. The literal is assumed to be the use of language in which words merely mean what they mean; the figurative is thought to be the usage in which words take the mind on some kind of a journey in order to get to what they mean. (Notice the meaning = journey metaphor in the literal seeming words of the previous sentence.) Closely associated with the presumed opposition of the literal and the figurative is another opposition, between denotation and connotation. The denotative use of language is that in which words refer to real objects and specific, limited meanings. A dog is a dog. When I say or write dog my listener or reader sees a dog in her mind s eye. The connotative use of language is, by contrast, suggestive or associative (see the entry for metonymy below). Ranges of things, attributes, images may be associated with a particular word. When I say dog you find yourself imagining a particular dog: a big one, a small one, one from your childhood, Lassie, a guide dog... If you keep trying to dwell on dog in a general sense you imagine as I ve just done many different kinds of dog. You might also start to imagine things associated with dogs: dog food, a dog house, loyalty. Now notice how the attributes of dogs can be generalised into discussions of humans (a dogged attitude, someone barking mad) or human things (a dog-eared book). Dog-house or dog food transferred to the human situation might describe situations or things which are undesirable, presumably because humans deserve better than dogs. Such a range of associations is available because people have a lot of shared experience of dogs (even shaggy dog stories!) and because humans share certain opinions about dogs, opinions that may however vary from cul-

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