Modern Rhetorics of Style
Tonight’s Themes
• Metaphor and Language
• Rhetoric and Reality
• Style and Substance
Richard Weaver (1910-1963)
• Ideas have Consequences
(1948)
• The Ethics of Rhetoric
(1953)
• Language is Sermonic
To Write the Truth
1. What is Weaver’s problem with the way
composition is being taught?
2. What are vere loqui, recte loqui, and utiliter
loqui?
3. What does Weaver argue is the proper role
of the teacher?
Types of Compositionists
• Vere loqui (metaphysicians)
– Speaking truthfully
• Recte loqui (empiricists)
– Speaking correctly (etiquette)
• Utiliter Loqui (sophists)
– Speaking usefully
Kenneth Burke (1897-1993)
• Marx, Freud, Nietzsche
• Rhetoric: “Symbolic means
of inducing cooperation in
beings that by nature
respond to symbols.”
Burkean Concepts
• Dramatism
– Identification
– Pentad
•
•
•
•
•
Act
Scene
Agent
Agency
Purpose
• Terministic Screen
Four Master Tropes
1. According to Burke, what are these and how
are they related?
1.
2.
3.
4.
Metaphor/perspective
Metonymy/reduction
Synecdoche/representation
Irony/dialectic
Four Master Tropes
• Metaphor (Perspective)
– Seeing something in terms of something else
• Metonymy (Reduction)
– Conveying something incorporeal or intangible in terms of
something corporeal or tangible (science)
• Synecdoche (Representation)
– Part for the whole; relationships of convertibility between
terms
• Irony (Dialectic)
– Universalizing or abstracting the perspectives of all the
characters from the perspective of a single character.
Wayne C. Booth (1921-2005)
• The Rhetoric of Fiction
(1961)
• A Rhetoric of Irony
(1974)
• The Company We Keep:
An Ethics of Fiction
(1988)
The Rhetorical Stance
1. What is the rhetorical stance and how does it
differ from the pedant’s, advertiser’s, and
entertainer’s stance?
2. What does a “good author” do that lesser
authors do not?
3. What is the rhetorical balance Booth
discusses in the last sections?
Metaphor as Rhetoric
1. What are Booth’s criteria for judging good
and bad metaphors?
2. Why does Booth like the catfish metaphor so
much?
3. How does (and should) metaphor choices
affect or determine ethos? (57)
Metaphor as Rhetoric II
• Read (aloud) Metaphor Delivered (58)
1. What kind of passage is this? What is the
context?
2. What sort of ethos comes through?
Metaphor III
1. What does Booth mean on p. 64: “The quality of
any culture will in part be measured both by the
quality of the metaphors it induces or allows
and the quality of the judges of metaphor that it
educates and rewards.
2. P. 66: “Criticism of metaphoric worlds, or
visions, becomes one clear and
important…instance of a general human project
of improving life by criticizing it.”
3. How are these issues related to advertising? (69)
Metaphor IV
• 71: “Even the most secular literary work is
engaged in the religious exchange.”
• 71: “There can be no ‘innocent’ art, no art
that can be considered free of ethical
responsibility.”
Stylistic Performances
• Thomas Pynchon
– The Crying of Lot 49
• Jonathan Franzen
– The Corrections
• William S. Burroughs
– The Naked Lunch