Unit 2
Rhetorical Strategies
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What are Rhetorical
Strategies?
• Rhetorical strategy:
– a loose term for techniques that help to shape or enhance a literary work.
• Rhetorical strategies include:
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Allusion
Analogy
Imagery
Symbolism
Atmosphere
Repetition
Selection and order of details
Epiphany
Diction
• Diction (from the Latin word for “to say”) denotes
the word choice and phrasing in a literary work.
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Formal vs. colloquial
Abstract vs. concrete
Literal vs. figurative
Latin vs. Anglo-Saxon
Formal Diction
The spring, indeed, did often come without any of those
effects, but he was always certain that the next would be more
propitious; nor was ever convinced that the present spring would fail
him before the middle of summer; for he always talked of the spring
as coming till it was past, and when it was once past, everyone
agreed with him that it was coming.
By long converse with this man, I am, perhaps, brought to
feel immoderate pleasure in the contemplation of this delightful
season; but I have the satisfaction of finding many, whom it can be
no shame to resemble, infected with the same enthusiasm; for there
is, I believe, scarce any poet of eminence, who has not left some
testimony of his fondness for flowers, the zephyrs, and the warblers of
the spring. Nor has the most luxuriant imagination been able to
describe the serenity and happiness of the golden age, otherwise
than by gaining a perpetual spring, as the highest reward of
uncorrupted innocence.
---Rambler No. 5 by Samuel Johnson
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Colloquial Diction
The bus climbed steadily up the road. The country was
barren and rocks stuck up through the clay. There was no grass
beside the road. Looking back we could see the country spread out
below. Far back the fields were squares of green and brown on the
hillsides. Making the horizon were the brown mountains. They were
strangely shaped. As we climbed higher the horizon kept changing.
As the bus ground slowly up the road we could see other mountains
coming up in the south. Then the road came over the crest,
flattened out, and went into a forest. It was a forest of cork trees,
and the sun came through the trees in patches, and there were
cattle grazing back in the trees. We went through the forest and the
road came out and turned along a rise of land, and out ahead of us
was a rolling green plain, with dark mountains beyond it. These were
not like the brown, heat-baked mountains we had left behind.
These were wooded and there were clouds coming down from
them. The green plain stretched off.
---from The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway
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Trying to Sound Smart
• In The Adventures of Huck Finn, Mark Twain exposes the
fraudulent credentials of “the king”
– “the king” is a rascal who first claimed to Huck that he is descended from
French royalty.
• He poses as a British clergyman in a scheme to abscond
with the fortune left by a man who, he claims, was his
brother.
• In eulogizing the “diseased” (deceased), he says how
fitting it is for so charitable a person that his “funeral
orgies sh’d be public.”
• His equally corrupt friend “the duke” is considerably
more learned than his partner, and his mistakes anger
him. However, he is posing as a deaf mute, so he
cannot cut off the ignorant oration. Huck describes the
scene:
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Trying to Sound Smart
And so he [the king] went a mooning on and
on, liking to hear himself talk, and every little while he
fetched in his funeral orgies again, till the duke he
couldn’t stand it no more; so he writes on a little scrap
of paper, “obsequies, you old fool,” and folds it up
and goes to goo-gooing and reaching it over
people’s heads to him.
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Trying to Sound Smart
• The king is not deterred. He misuses the term three
more times, and then gives the following
explanation:
“I say orgies, not because it’s a common term, because it ain’t—obsequies
bein’ the common term—but because orgies is the right term. Obsequies
ain’t used in England no more—it’s gone out. We say orgies, now, in
England. Orgies is better, because it means the thing you’re after, more
exact. It’s a word that’s made up out’n the Greek, orgo, outside, open,
abroad; and the Hebrew jeesum, to plant, cover up; hence inter. So, you
see, funeral orgies is an open er public funeral.”
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Abstract or Concrete?
• A writer’s diction may also differ enormously in its
relative levels of abstraction—the extent to which it
deals with general concepts—or of concreteness:
with physical objects, imagery, and emotive and
sensual details.
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Abstract
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Love
Beauty
Patriotism
Time
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Concrete
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Lips
Gun
Silky gown
Shrill cry
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Abstract and Concrete
• Most literary works contain both abstract and
concrete diction, in varying degrees.
• Often a writer will illustrate an abstract concept with
concrete details.
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Example
• In John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” the narrator
describes with increasingly concrete diction a
magical wine that could make him oblivious to life’s
sufferings:
O, for a draught of vintage! That hath been
Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth.
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Abstract Concepts and
Themes
• A writer might also imply an abstract concept or
theme, which must be inferred from a series of
concrete descriptions or images.
One had a cat’s face
One a whisked tail,
One tramped at a rat’s pace
One crawled like a snail.
---Christina Rossetti “Goblin Market”
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Abstract Concepts and
Themes
• The afflicted maiden implies the addictive nature of the
goblins’ wares as she recalls the temperature, texture,
look, and taste of the fruit that she longs to savor again:
What melons icy-cold
Piled on a dish of gold
Too huge for me to hold,
What peaches with a velvet nap,
Pellucid grapes without one seed;
Odorous indeed must be the mead
Whereon they grow, and pure the wave they drink
With lilies at the brink,
And sugar-sweet their sap.
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Hmmm.
• The level of diction depends partly on the context in
which it is being used.
• A philosophical treatise would tend to use words
that are formal, often Latinate and abstract.
• A lyric poem would likely be more colloquial and
concrete.
• Of course there are exceptions!
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Example
• From “Ulysses” by Alfred Lord Tennyson:
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are—
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
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Poetic Diction
• Poetic Diction: phrasing and vocabulary that are
characteristic of poetry, as distinguished from the
informality of everyday speech.
• Words such as, “lo,” “abide,” and “ere”
• Poetic contractions such as “ne’er” for “never” “tis”
for “it is” and “morn” for “morning”
• Emphasis on figurative rather than literal language.
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Poetic Diction
• Refers to the style favored by neoclassical poets of
the 18th century, such as Alexander Pope and
Thomas Gray.
• They believed that the guiding principle for poetic
diction was “decorum”—highly formal word choice
suitable to a lofty subject and a refined audience.
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Poetic Diction
• Characteristics include:
o Archaic phraseology, modeling Greek and Roman literature and the
poetry of Edmund Spenser and John Milton
o A Latinate, rather than Anglo-Saxon, vocabulary
o Frequent personification of abstract qualities
o Periphrasis
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Example of Neoclassic
Poetic Diction
Can storied urn or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can Honor’s voice provoke the silent dust,
Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of Death?
Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed,
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.
But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page
Rich with the spoils of time did ne’er unroll;
Chill Penury repressed their noble rage
And froze the genial current of the soul.
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Romantics
• When we read the poetry of the Romantic period,
we will look for resistance to the Neoclassical norms.
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Allusion
• Allusion: (from the Latin word for “to play with”) is a
passing reference in a work of literature to another
literary or historical work, figure, or event, or to a
literary passage.
• The reference is not explained, so that it can
convey the flattering presumption that the reader
shares the writer’s erudition or inside knowledge.
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Example
• In Andrea Lee’s novel Sarah Phillips (1984), the
narrator describes her Harvard roommate, a
chemistry major and “avid lacrosse player” who
“adored fresh air and loathed reticence and
ambiguity,” as having the following surprising
predilection:
Margaret, the scientist, had…a positively Bronteesque conception of the
ideal man.”
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Example
• The title of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury
(1929) presents a more complex example.
• It alludes to the soliloquy in Shakespeare’s Macbeth
in which the embittered protagonist dismisses all of
life as merely “a tale/told by an idiot, full of sound
and fury,/signifying nothing.”
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Other Uses
• Allusion can also create ironic deflation.
• In T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,”
the insecure narrator, feeling hopelessly inadequate
in polite society, says of his efforts to court women:
…though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter…
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More Prufrock
• Later in the poem, Prufrock further denigrates his
own worth by alluding to the hero of Shakespeare’s
Hamlet:
“No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.”
• Rather, he claims, he is merely “an attendant
lord,…deferential, glad to be of use,” or even,
occasionally, “the fool,” the court jester among the
dramatis personae.
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Final Allusion Notes
• Other allusion may be more obscure, either
because they refer to highly specialized areas or
because they describe people and events known
only to a small circle of the writer’s intimates.
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Analogy
• An analogy (from the Greek word for
“proportionate”) is the comparison of a subject to
something that is similar to it in order to clarify the
subject’s nature, purpose, or function.
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Analogy
• Science often uses analogies to describe bodily
processes, such as comparing the liver to a filter to
explain its function of removing wastes from the
bloodstream.
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Literary Example
• In Orwell’s autobiographical essay “Shooting an
Elephant,” which is about an incident that occurred
when he was a young military policeman in Burma,
he faces an agonizing decision about whether to kill
an elephant that had gone on a rampage but is
now calm. Before delving into the complex moral,
political, and emotional ramifications of the
situation, the narrator uses an analogy to clarify for
his Western audience its simple economic aspect:
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Example
As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect
certainty that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious
matter to shoot a working elephant—it is comparable
to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery.
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Another Example
• In Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1902)
he makes a lengthy analogy:
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It’s looooong. Sorry.
Imagine the feelings of a commander of a fine—what d’ye call ‘em—trireme in the
Mediterranean, ordered suddenly to the north; run overland across the Gauls in a hurry;
put in charge of one of these craft the legionaries…used to build, apparently by the
hundred, in a month or two, if we may believe what we read. Imagine him here—the
very end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke, a kind of
ship about as rigid as a concertina—and going up this river with stores, or orders, or
what you like. Sandbanks, marshes, forests, savages, precious little fit to eat for a
civilised man, nothing but Thames water to drink. No Falernian wine here, no going
ashore. Here and there a military camp lost in the wilderness like a needle in a bundle
of hay—cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death—death skulking in the air, in the
water, in the bush. They must have been dying like flies here. Oh yes—he did it. Did it
very well too, no doubt, and without thinking much about it either, except afterwards
to brag of what he had gone through in his time, perhaps. They were men enough to
face the darkness….Or think of a decent young citizen in a toga—perhaps too much
dice, you know—coming out here in the train of some prefect, or tax-gatherer, or
trader even—to mend his fortunes. Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and
in some inland post feel the savagery. The utter savagery had closed round him—all
that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of
wild men. There’s no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of
the incomprehensible which is also detestable. And it has a fascination too, that goes
to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination—you know. Imagine the
growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender—the hate.
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Purpose
• The analogy serves two purposes:
– To get the fictional audience for Marlow’s tale, as well as the larger
audience of the readers, into the mindset for understanding the physical
and psychological challenges for so-called “civilized” people of venturing
into an utterly primitive place.
– It also foreshadows the terror, disorientation, and corruption that he will
discover in the jungle, the human “heart of darkness” that emerges in a
primal setting.
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