Stylistic Sandcastles: Rhetorical Figures as Composition’s Bucket and Spade

      William FitzGerald

      Rutgers

      For all a rhetorician’s rules teach nothing but to name his tools.

      — Samuel Butler, Hudibras

      Aposiopesis? Metalepsis? Zeugma? What did my students think when first introduced to these and other terms? I know because they told me. “How do you expect us to remember them? They’re all Greek!” I replied that I did not expect they would remember them, not all of them, at least not for very long. I confessed that I didn’t remember all of them either. “But do we really use them?” All the time—far more than you realize—was my early and repeated assurance until it became clear that, just like the discovery delighting Moliere’s bourgeois gentilhomme—that he had been speaking prose his whole life—my students acknowledged they have been performing rhetorical figures by the dozens for much of their life. I emphasized that I was simply providing names, albeit unfamiliar names, for verbal effects abundant in everyday language as well as in literary and academic prose. I hoped to convince them that there is much to be gained from being on formal terms with antonomasia or synecdoche and recognizing them as useful tools for their own acts of composing.

      For my students in “Go Figure,” an elective course in style centered in rhetorical figures, meeting litotes and polyptoton was akin to being transported by time machine (or “magic treehouse”) to scenes of classical rhetorical education. Such scenes are strikingly different from the modern composition classroom, where terms such as enallage or homeoteleuton are at best a footnote. What I did was not so very strange, I think. Efforts in time travel are in keeping with pedagogical initiatives such as Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee’s Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, a textbook inspired by the pioneering work by Edward P. J. Corbett in Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student. If any difference is to be noted in my approach from these, it is in the realization that the figures—the tropes and schemes of classical rhetoric—need not be reclaimed, exactly. To the contrary, the figures are alive and well, as they have always been, if also occluded by current models of writing instruction. More than a subject of antiquarian interest, I argue, rhetorical figures remain a vital, but under-valued, resource for composition pedagogy. Their utility is particularly evident in a multimodal era, when textual, oral and visual performance have become open to new understanding.

      This chapter expands on this reasoning to imagine a place for rhetorical figures in contemporary composition. It does so, first, through a reading of style in rhetorical tradition focused on the role of ornament (the broadest term for figurative elements of language) and, second, through an account of a recent course on figures for what light it sheds on possibilities for a figure-rich pedagogy. In brief, I propose that approaches to composition through style will be most fruitful if ornament is brought into conjunction with other stylistic virtues of clarity, correctness and propriety.

      The Rise and Fall of the Figures

      In her magisterial account of the figures in Rhetorical Figures in Science, Jeanne Fahnestock observes that what would later come to be understood as ornament in a merely decorative sense was first appreciated in more forceful terms, when rhetoric was a phenomenon of speech more than of writing. As Fahnestock explains, the earliest notions of ornamentum are not reducible to present-day notions of embellishment. Rather, ornament was closer in meaning to “armament,” akin to the “gear” a foot soldier carries into combat (1999, p. 18). In military terms, a well-prepared rhetor is not only appropriately dressed for the occasion but fully equipped for a mission. One meaning of ornament that bridges decorative and functional notions is the insignia that mark one’s military rank and station. If the canon of invention can be likened to an arsenal from which arguments are drawn and the canon of arrangement (in Greek, taxis) likewise imagined as a tactical deployment of those arguments in the field, the various figurative devices may be analogized to the thrusts and parries by which one engages an enemy in close quarters.

      I appreciate these martial conceits for rhetoric in their emphasis on effective use of force. This chapter, however, offers a more playful image for style in its pairing of bucket and spade—tools for building stylistic sandcastles. Although couched in symbols of child’s play, my concerns are equally serious as those animating Fahnestock’s investigation of figurative devices in science. Despite the gradual eclipsing of a once lively figurative tradition, the figures offer a vibrant pedagogy of ornament. Powerful tools for constructing arguments, the disappearance of figures from the composition classroom at all levels of the curriculum comes at a significant loss to fluency, and with that loss a corresponding loss of agency. Fortunately, their reappearance—through a return to a pedagogy of ornament—is not something difficult to achieve.

      I read this loss of a “feel” for figures in composition as symptomatic of style’s ongoing marginalization. It has much to do with anxiety about the status of “literary” language in relation to scientific and technological discourse. It likewise has to do with the perceived status of composition studies in relation to other academic disciplines. For the figures can be seen as rhetoric at its most trivial or cosmetic. Or old fashioned—so many Latin and Greek terms! As Keith Rhodes observes in this volume, style-centered pedagogy risks being labeled uncool or “stodgy” (“Styling”). Rhodes is correct that the contemporary dismissal of style, conceived as a focus on writing at the sentence-level, has typically been expressed as critiques on clarity or correctness—virtues turned to vice through excess. Similar critiques can be leveled at belletristic notions of grace or writing “with style.” My approach to ornament moves in a different direction entirely.

      For on close inspection, the figures represent opportunities to connect students to a felt sense of writing (and speaking and designing) as rhetorical performance. By way of hypophora, the figure of reasoning by question and answer: Why bother teaching the figures when students cannot write clearly and correctly? Because the figures are crucial to a fully developed rhetoric of style. Without them, effective writing remains elusive. By some combination of imitation, instruction, and instinct, successful communicators acquire a robust repertoire of figures appropriate to the contexts in which they compose.

      I am by no means the first to call for a reinvigorated canon of style in the teaching of composition. One need only turn to recent accounts of style’s manifold practices and shifting fortunes in the rich collection of essays in T. R. Johnson and Tom Pace’s Refiguring Prose Style (2005) or in Paul Butler’s masterful Out of Style: Reanimating Stylistic Study in Composition and Rhetoric (2008) and T. R. Johnson’s provocative A Rhetoric of Pleasure (2003) to confirm that over the past decade scholars in composition have approached rhetoric’s central canon afresh. On a parallel track, Barry Brummett claims that style is now “the basis for a rhetoric that undergirds today’s global culture” (Brummett, 2008, p. xiii, emphasis in original). Style has become a contemporary lingua franca—a semiotic code or performative grammar of display in various modes, e.g., speech, dress, and habits of consumption. Brummett identifies in