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as consensus has yet been reached about specific pedagogies to enact a stylistic vision. Still, prophesies may be self-fulfilling when, the zeitgeist read accurately, incipient stirrings leveraged into concrete outcomes.
This is the situation with respect to composition as a stylistic art. The present moment is open to curricular revisions in ways that resonate with Brummett’s cultural insight that style has acquired renewed rhetorical agency. This moment is not unlike previous moments, notably in the English Renaissance, when style assumes a character marked by energy and experimentation. Indeed, contemporary discussion of style’s wax and wane seeks to make sense of the sources from which, in the subtitle of Paul Butler’s Out of Style, this “reanimating” occur. Similarly, Johnson and Pace announce a “refiguring” of prose style. Both texts find warrant in notions of restoration, a “once and future” paradigm in which style again plays a vital role in rhetorical education.
I concur with these sentiments, even as I admit that such calls may be overly sanguine in their estimation of style’s prospects for reanimation in the near term. Yet on the whole, I believe such calls to be warranted. Marginalized during a “process” era of composition studies, style may emerge “post-process” as equal partner with canons of invention and arrangement and, significantly, memory and delivery. In other words, renewed attention to matters of form and performance signal that style has something to contribute to composition beyond nostrums on clarity and correctness. My efforts in reanimating style or, in the words of Keith Rhodes, in “making style practically cool and theoretically hip” take this “refiguring” announced by Johnson and Pace literally, even though none of the essays in Refiguring Prose Style address figurative dimensions of language in a sustained way (this volume). Refiguring the figures addresses the contrast between their prominent role in classical rhetoric and their conspicuous absence today.
The most obvious and crucial difference between classical and contemporary contexts is performative mode—speech vs. writing. As Jay David Bolter and David Grusin observe, later media “remediate” prior media by “representation of one medium in another” (Bolter & Grusin, 2000, p. 45). Classical rhetoric largely imagines performance as speech even as the technology of writing transforms speech. Indeed, “style” (from the Latin stylus, a pointed tool for inscription) complicates neat distinctions in a remediated landscape as the English translation of Greek lexis and Latin elocutio—both terms for speech. The term “figure of speech” links the verbal and the visual in a dynamic pairing in which words perform acrobatic turns (tropes) and other visible patterns (schemes). The account of the figures presented here bridges speech and text, but also recognizes fluidity of mode.
Strolling through the Garden of Eloquence
Amid calls for a stylistic renaissance, not all reanimated pedagogies are commensurate. If past is prologue, various rebirths of style will differ in their aesthetic, philosophical and political commitments, in their streams of inspiration, and in their agendas. What is most valued in prose and its encoding in specific curricula varies from context to context. Obvious though this may be, it bears mentioning when imagining room for figures in an expanded style curriculum.
Consider the focus on clarity in Joseph Williams’ Style: Lessons and Clarity and Grace. This popular text is one response to a crisis in literacy exacerbated, Williams notes, by an unproductive emphasis on grammatical correctness and arbitrary conventions. Yet Williams’ approach to style is not identical with that of Richard Lanham, whose Revising Prose resembles Style in its advice against nominalizations and for strong agent-action pairs in subject-verb relations. Despite similarities, the differing motivations of Williams and Lanham are evident. Style reflects Williams’ background as a linguist—his PhD is from the University of Wisconsin—and its substantial debt to cognitive psychology. Indeed, Williams’ stylistic precepts have an empirical basis in research on the efficient communication and retention of information.
By contrast, Lanham’s Revising Prose (famous for its “paramedic method”) offers a decidedly political critique of language practices it would seek to remedy. In this respect, Lanham works in a tradition epitomized by George Orwell’s celebrated essay, “Politics and the English Language.” But Lanham’s concerns with style are broadly humanistic rather than narrowly political. Lanham goes after bureaucratic prose not for its inefficiency only, but for its vulgarity and dehumanizing character. He is far more explicit in articulating ethical concerns in drawing connections between our prose and our character. “The moral ingredient in writing, then,” Lanham writes, “works first not on the morality of the message but on the nature of the sender, on the complexity of the self” (Lanham, 1974, p. 106). Joseph William is likewise concerned with ethics. Recent editions of Style feature a final chapter on the “Ethics of Style.” Here, however, ethics refers to a writer’s relations with an audience, rather than to a diffuse, if no less important, linkage between the activity of writing and character development. While these differences are not inconsequential, Williams’ and Lanham’s remedial projects are kindred spirits in many respects. For one, they represent style as a stage of composing that follows upon activities of invention and arrangement. Both Style and Revising Prose approach style an act of revision and of adapting to the needs of an audience.
While yet more radical differences in understanding and teaching style could be juxtaposed, my purpose is not to delineate motives and means in contemporary approaches to style. Rather, it is to note that surface similarities in style or in style pedagogy can conceal greater variability in the objectives of style, i.e., to what ends style or the teaching of style is directed. Indeed, variability across contexts and change over time are arguably style’s most distinctive attribute. Certain things are in style and go out of style, only to come back in style again. We can speak of idiosyncratic styles as well as of style being a reflection of particular historical periods, social movements and cultural traditions. In lay terms, style is recognized as precisely those elements that vary from performer to performer, age to age, or situation to situation.
But what dimensions of style persist across multiple contexts and conditions? Notwithstanding variations in style, conceptions of style, and approaches to teaching style, a spine of tradition extends back more than two millennia. Largely Aristotelian, this stylistic tradition is still relevant, even dominant, in the present era. As noted at this essay’s beginning, this tradition is centered in precepts of clarity, correctness and appropriateness. Style’s traditional virtues (each with an attendant vice), continue to be represented as desiderata in countless textbooks. Yet to these a fourth may be added in the virtue of ornament (or force)—the domain of the figurative. Writing in Aristotelian tradition, Theophrastus (c. 370-c. 285 BCE) is credited with codifying these virtues in On Style, a lost treatise known to Cicero and thus a vital link between Greek and Latin accounts of style. In important respects, my approach is Theophrastean in seeking to square style’s triangle by returning ornament to the stable of virtues.
From earliest days, ornament (in Latin, ornatus) has had a complicated relationship with style’s other virtues. As the force produced through figuration, ornament links style with other dimensions of discourse, other canons of rhetoric. Leaning left, toward invention, ornament discovers appropriate form for arguments. Leaning right, toward delivery, ornament gives speech liveliness of expression and emotive force. As Jeanne Fahnestock observes in Rhetorical Figures in Science, the use of figures was especially associated in Ciceronian tradition with the grand style, the highest of style’s three levels; by contrast, the plain style, the lowest level, was notable for a lack of verbal embellishment (1999, p. 19). Such associations suggest that the figures function primarily as vehicles for, or triggers of, emotion. However, Fahnestock points out, thinking about figuration this way, though widespread, obscures a more complex relationship between figures as tools for argument and figures as carriers of emotional affect. By way of example Fahnestock considers aposiopesis, the figure by which a speaker, overcome with emotion (e.g., anger or sadness), breaks off speech in mid-sentence. In this instance, Fahnestock contends, dimension of pathos and logos of this performative gesture cannot really be separated (1999, p. 19).
Thinking about figures as the embellished expression of thought otherwise plainly expressed—what Fahnestock terms “value added theories” of figuration—papers over a productive tension between two ways of understanding the structural properties of figurative language: “artful”