Showing papers by "Jonathan Culler published in 1978"

On Trope and Persuasion

Abstract: HETORIC," claimed I. A. Richards in his Philosophy of Rhetoric, "should be a study of misunderstanding and its remedies. We struggle all our days with misunderstandings, and no apology is required for any study which can prevent or remove them." The contributors to this issue of New Literary History could doubtless claim that their essays prevent future misunderstandings of the subjects they treat and remove misunderstandings perpetrated by previous discussions, but none, I think, would argue that this makes his essay rhetorical analysis. Students of rhetoric today are not primarily concerned, as Richards proposed, with failures of communication, nor with "weasel words" and the deceits of political discourse. Has rhetoric, then, regained the scope it enjoyed in the Middle Ages, when logic, grammar, and rhetoric were the three subjects of the trivium? For Stanley Meltzoff, who alone among our contributors offers an explicit definition, rhetoric is "the study of languages and sign systems in use," and it thus can cover a host of sins in Strolling Actresses. Later, in a gloss which helps to explain his own usage, Meltzoff adds, "our understanding [of Hogarth's picture] is neither precise nor conventional, that is, neither linguistic nor semiotic, but rhetorical." Theorists of rhetoric who have labored hard at precise codification of conventions might be dismayed at this disjunction, which seems to set aside their elaborate taxonomies and assign them the realm of theje ne sais quoi: everything that lies beyond convention and precise understanding. Indeed, since rhetoric has during the past two centuries often been sneered at as an excessively precise inventory of figures and conventions, this reversal may seem alarming-as if linguistics and semiotics had suddenly usurped the place of rhetoric and rhetoric had displaced the interpretive criticism which previously dealt with the use or combination of linguistic and rhetorical devices. In fact, this movement of substitution and displacement is wholly characteristic of rhetoric, which can be defined by a series of such paradoxes. Rhetoric is the art of using language effectively, yet it is also that which any speech or composition must avoid if it is to be truly effective. Such paradoxes may, of course, be treated simply as curious historical shifts. Thus, one might claim that rhetoric was at one time