Rhetoric and tropes

1. Rhetoric and tropes

2. Art of persuasion – classification and study of tropes Medieval pedagogy: grammar – logic - rhetoric The Rhetoric of Fiction (Wayne C. Booth) the rhetoric of science, politics, etc rhetoricised text

3. Does rhetoric matter? „Vajon fűzi-e bármiféle belső kapcsolat a figuratív nyelvet élet és halál kérdéseihez, illetve ahhoz a kérdéshez, hogy valamely adott emberi valóságban ki az, aki az erőszakot adja, és ki az, aki kapja?” “metaphors are much more tenacious than facts” (Paul de Man) “this is my body you eat” “Jews are dirty parasites” “bankárkormány”

4. Rhetoric: boundary of dichotomies Straightforward (literal) – figurative Ordinary language – ‘poetic language’ Philosophy – poetry (Plato) Substance, essence (content) – Appearance (form)

5. THE ANTI-RHETORICAL STANCE

6. “up rose Belial, in act more graceful and humane; A fairer person lost not Heav’n, he seem’d For dignity compos’d and high exploit: But all was false and hollow; though his Tongue Dropt Manna, and could make the worse appear The better reason, to perplex and dash Maturest counsels: for his thoughts were low; …yet he pleas’d the ear And with persuasive accent thus began.” (John Milton: Paradise Lost, II, 108ff)

7. Anti-rhetorical stance Francis Bacon: “men began to hunt more after words than matter” The Sophists Socrates (in Plato’s Gorgias): “There is no need for rhetoric to know the facts at all, for it has hit upon a means of persuasion that enables it to appear in the eyes of the ignorant to know more than those who really know.” Plato (in Phaedo): “the man who plans to be an orator ‘need not’ learn what is really just or true, but only what seems so to the crowd”. Aristotle: rhetoric is predicated on “the defects of the hearers” (Rhetoric)

8. In defence of rhetoric Cato: rem tene, verba sequentur (‘seize the thing, the words will follow’) Quintilian (and Cicero): “No man can speak well who is not good himself” (eloquence follows from good character and grasp of truth)

9. Puritan ideal of the “plain style” Rhetoric – cosmetics „Nobody uses fine language when teaching geometry” (Aristotle) “painted sermons” are “like the Painted Glass in the windows that keep out the Light” (Richard Baxter) “Eloquence, like the fair sex” (John Locke)

10. Bishop Thomas Sprat (1667): praising the members of the Royal Society for rejecting “all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style: to return back to primitive purity, and shortness, when men delivered so many things, almost in an equal number of words. They have exacted from their members a close, naked, natural way of speaking: positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness, as they can.”

11. Rhetoric as appropriate Aristotle: rhetoric and poetry Cicero, Quintilian: civilising the crowd through reason and eloquence

12. RHETORIC AS THE STUDY OF TROPES Figure (e.g. ellipsis, parallelism, congeries) fingere: feign (fiction) vs. trope(‘turn’)

13. METAPHOR Meta+pherein Traslatio Quintilian: metaphor is ‘the supreme ornament of style’ Aristotle: ‘seasoning of the meat’

14. Aristotle : “metaphor consists in giving (or transferring: epiphora) the thing a name that belongs to something else; the transference being from genus to species a, or from species to genus b, or from species to species c, or on grounds of analogy d” (Poetics) a “the ship lying still in the harbour” b “10.000 noble deeds perpetrated by Odysseus” c “I could not digest the information” d “ ‘Tis the yeares midnight, / and it is the dayes” (John Donne)

15. Theories of metaphor substitution  deviation  interaction I. A. Richards: two thought of a thing, active together and supported by the same word or phrase: interaction “we find poetic truth struck out by the collision rather than the collusion of images” (Cecil Day Lewis)

16. I. A. Richards: tenor, vehicle, ground „the fringed curtains of thine eyes” (The Tempest, I, ii) The essence is the copula (A is B) Classical view (decoration) Romantic view (vehicle of truth, essence of language) Shelley: language is vitally metaphorical Surprise effect

17. Cognitive theory Metaphors cannot be retranslated; new meaning love is…; death is…; life is… “What thou art we know not; What is most like thee?” (Shelley, “To a Skylark”) Vico: poetry was our first language

18. Cognitive theory 2 Aristotle: “strange words simply puzzle us; ordinary words convey only what we know already; it is from metaphor that we can get hold of something fresh” …“a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars”

19. The game of the surrealists (André Breton) Everything can be redescribed in terms of everything else (Staircase – bottle of champagne)

20. Cognitive theory 3 Paul Ricoeur: 3 levels of thinking about metaphor: word, sentence – impertinent predication discourse (text) – identity and difference (level of reference) metaphor is the process by which discourse unleashes the power that fictions have to redescribe reality metaphor ~ fiction; poetic reference, discovery

21. metaphor ~ model Model: hypothesis that tris to break down an inadequate interpretation by means of fiction Suzanne Langer: “every new idea assumes the form of a metaphor” Poetry imitates action, but the mimesis passes through a plot, a tale (describing the unknown through the known)

22. “Every man is an island” ‘The poet is a penguin’ (e e cummings) „If music be the food of love, play on Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die.” • (Twelfth Night, I.i)

23. „My head is a city, and various pains have now taken up residence in various parts of my face. A gum-and-bone ache has launched a cooperative on my upper west side. Across the park, neuralgia has rented a duplex in my fashinable east seventies. Downtown, my chin throbs with lofts of jaw-loss. As for my brain, my hundreds, it’s Harlem up there, expanding in the summer fires. It boils and swells. One day soon it is going to burst.” (Martin Amis: Money)

24. I have „these perverse thoughts, these crashers, dossing in my head. With their milk cartons on the windowsill and their damp double-mattresses on the floor, they grow in confidence every day. They were nervous at first, it’s true, but no one has tried very hard to evict them and they’re used to the uncertainty, they are used to living rough.” (Money)

25. Nietzsche Lang: not about truth but our relationship to the world Nerve stimulus – image – sounds – concept All we have are metaphors, tropes Concepts are not the origin but the residue of metaphors ‘no real knowing apart from metaphor’

26. Literal and figurative language Fr. Nietzsche: „What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms  in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically enhanced, transposed, and embellished, and which after long use seem fixed, canonical and binding to a people: truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power, coins which have lost their picture and now matter only as metal, no longer as coin.” („On Truth and Lies in an Extramoral Sense”)

27. rejecting “all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style: to return back to primitive purity, and shortness, when men delivered so many things, almost in an equal number of words. They have exacted from their members a close, naked, natural way of speaking: positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness, as they can.”

28. Man: the „metaphorical animal” Is all language figurative? “Imagine, then, a flat landscape, dark for the moment, but even so conveying to a girl running in the still deeper shadow cast by the wall … an idea of immensity, of distance” (Paul Scott: The Jewel in the Crown) ‘I am rich’

29. I. A. Richards No proper meanings Constancy of meaning: constancy of context (meaning carried by text) Words: general categories Language is propsopoeia Language is catachresis

30. Metaphor and other tropes “Here lay Duncan, His silver skin laced with his golden blood, And his gashed stabs looked like a breach in nature For ruin’s wasteful entrance” (Macbeth II, iii)

31. „The heart, poor fellow, pounding on his little tin drum with a faint death beat The heart, that eyeless beetle, enormous that Kafka beetle running panicked through his maze, never stopping one foot after the other one hour after the other until he gags on an apple and it’s all over.” (Anne Sexton)

32. Simile LLRH’s red cape: „was red, red as the Swiss flag, yes it was red, red as chicken blood” (Anne Sexton) the wolf „was as heavy as a cemetery” „Richard turned forty. Turned is right. Like a half-cooked steak, like a wired cop, like an old leaf, like milk, Richard turned.” (Martin Amis: The Information) „the earth is blue like an orange” (Paul Éluard)

33. Other tropes Synecdoche, prosopopoeia, allegory, symbol, synaesthesia, oxymoron, paradox, zeugma, euphemism “War is peace” (Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four)

34. Allegory Grief fills the room up of my absent child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, Remembers me of all his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form: Then I have reason to be fond of grief. (Shakespeare, King John, 3.4)

35. Metonymy ships sail the sea – keels plough the deep „an aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick” (W. B. Yeats: „Byzantium”) „Grandmother looked strange, a dark and hairy disease it seemed” (Anne Sexton: „LRRH”) “we have been created of dust and into dust shall we return”

36. A candle in a churchyard: which trope?

37. catachresis “the ships ploughed the sea”; to grasp; mother tongue „I am a string strung over wide, roaring resonances. Things are hollow violins / full of groaning dark” (Rainer Maria Rilke)

38. reliteralisation “Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark-spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror. It’s passing, yet I’m the one who is doing all the moving. I’m not the station, I’m not the stop: I’m the train. I’m the train.” (Martin Amis: Money)