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the vast catalog of figures increasingly comes to be seen as irrelevant or, worse, indecorous. Shaking off an oral residue, written composition leaves the figures behind as an antiquated corpus (with a fearsome, foreign vocabulary) of stylistic devices. Once colorful flowers, the garden of eloquence turned to weeds.
In many respects, the figures are the last elements of classical rhetoric to fade away, not unlike that eerie smile of the Cheshire cat. The catalog of vital figures gradually contracted in response to changed circumstances in the production and reception of texts. In this shift from the production to the critical reception of texts, especially literary texts, the tropes, recognized as departures from literal meaning, became privileged over the schemes. Style became stylistics. This narrowing of the canon of style finds its apex in the notion of four master tropes (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony) with priority assigned to metaphor as the paradigm of figural as distinct from literal expression. Relatedly, the cleavage of poetic from persuasive discourse profoundly influences how the scope of composition is defined and, consequently, how style comes to be understood.
In many respects, recovery of a figurative pedagogy involves running this reel in reverse to reclaim the figures as dynamic elements of discourse for a multimedia age. In an era of montage and “remix,” rhetorical practices of ornamentation regain currency. The question, then, is what role can figurative pedagogy play when the print culture that has for so long defined stylistic conventions begins to yield to something new?
The Return of the Figurative: “Go Figure”
It may seem peevish to identify rhetorical tradition with the figures when much broader identifications are possible. In the wake of rhetoric’s reclamation in the last century, the figures are a narrow slice of rhetorical pie. Indeed, rhetoric’s recent rise to respectability and relevance comes about not by association with the figures but largely by moving beyond them (and beyond style, too) to reclaim invention, above all, as the heart of rhetorical inquiry. Even if one grounds composition in a rhetoric of style, there are many others ways to do so besides explicit, intensive instruction on the figures.
In this volume, William Kurlinkus emphasizes stylistic performance at the macro level through strategies of ethos writers use to engage readers (“An Ethics of Attentions”). Russell Greer similarly sets sights on the whole composition in dynamic relation to its parts (“Architectonics and Style”). And Denise Stodola reinforces the wisdom received from rhetorical tradition that practices of imitation at the sentence and passage level are indispensable aids to stylistic competence (“Using Stylistic Imitation”). To be clear, this essay, in concert with these other voices, imagines a place for figures in a comprehensive rhetorical pedagogy. It does so in the belief that the goals attendant to rhetorical education through style-focused pedagogies are most fully achievable when the figures are returned to a place of prominence.
Despite the availability of multiple frames for rhetorical pedagogy, the impulse to teach rhetoric through style, and style through figures, was one I embraced in “Go Figure: Style and Thought in Word and Image,” offered as an advanced elective. Now having occasion to teach this course several times, I would do so again, as a course in its own right and as a laboratory for exploring the pedagogy of style. My experience suggests that a figure-based pedagogy may be productively integrated into a range of pedagogical contexts from first-year composition and beyond. As previously noted, imagining a (re)turn to the figures requires that one understand their absence in the first place. This absence persists. Despite rhetoric’s return, even a perfunctory account of the figures is impossible to find in contemporary composition textbooks. One searches in vain for a treatment of litotes as an effective form of understatement, of ploce as strategic reinforcement through repetition, or of persuasive strategies of impersonation through prosopopoeia. Exposure to the figures, if it comes, comes in encounters with a small number of critical terms for the close reading of literature. Students typically have heard of metaphor, but not synecdoche, alliteration but not anaphora.
Even so, the remediation of text and image in emerging forms of digital media and across multiple modalities will continue to trouble written discourse as a paradigm of literacy. As we engage composition in various performative domains, the resources of figuration (if not necessarily their classical terms) will regain currency. This will occur because a robust visual and digital rhetoric, like their oral and written counterparts, depends on employing figurative resources in their semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic character as these resources are manifested in any performative domains. This presumption of relevance not only to a discursive past or present but, especially, to our discursive future served as warrant to this course on the figures.
Having taught courses in both prose style and in professional and technical communication with a strong emphasis in style—see Jonathan Buehl’s “Style and the Professional Writing Curriculum” in this volume—I discover that the figures are teachable in conjunction with other approaches, including the pedagogies centered on stylistic revision offered by Richard Lanham and Joseph Williams. In the case of “Go Figure,” I desired to put into practice a case eloquently made some time ago by Richard Lanham in Style: An Anti-Textbook (1974) and later in Analyzing Prose (2003). In these texts, Lanham calls for a return to the ludic, or playful, dimensions of language in writing instruction. I had my reasons for not calling the course “Fun With Figures,” but I took notions of play quite seriously in my goals for the course. It was necessary to do so given the daunting motivational hurdle: what to do about the arcane nomenclature? Indeed, only a sense of play can transport students to a time when the figures were alive and apply the insights gained from this experience to contemporary contexts.
I taught “Go Figure” twice, in 2007 and in 2010. In both iterations, I was amazed by how well students took to the challenge to learn new and confusing terms only to use them with increasing authority and insight. Their enthusiasm for the value of their new tools was eye-opening. Learning ten or twelve terms per week for the first half of the course along with their classification schemes proved less difficult than I initially imagined. Of course, this was possible because it is not the figures themselves that students had to learn, just their names. My students discovered have been meeting and using the figures all of their lives; they were only lacking a vocabulary.
Prior to the course, few had ever heard more than a smattering of terms they would encounter. As the course progressed, they routinely expressed surprise that they had not learned to assign useful names, whether in Greek, Latin or English, to seemingly ubiquitous phenomena. Indeed, my students were quite open to learning these terms, to puzzling through at times subtle distinctions between related terms, and to discovering new figures not found on venerable lists. They were eager to identify current instances of classical forms and to convince themselves that these rhetorical devices transcended language and era. They learned, for example, that syllepsis—a form of zeugma in which one word governs several others in unrelated senses (e.g., Alexander Pope’s “she stained her honor and her new brocade”)—was Greek in name only. They confirmed their ability to invent novel instances of a figure once its form and function were understood. They could identify contexts in which a particular figure might be effective and also those contexts when it was not.
Beyond learning individual figures, my students came to realize that the figures constituted an open-ended, yet not arbitrary, set of linguistic moves. It was not long before class discussion gravitated quite naturally to questions of form and meaning. What, exactly, is a figure? When is something not a figure? How do figures work? Are certain figures unique to one language or culture? How many figures are there? Often, then, our efforts to categorize figures and describe their effects would lead to questions that required more than a simple yes or no. Often, we would discover that language is complex enough that several figures might be interacting in a given expression.
To achieve these insights on my part and theirs, a range of learning activities beyond introducing, memorizing, and recalling of terms was required. After all, what fun is that? And what transfer value? Among such practices were exercises in imitation along lines outlined by Denise Stodola in “Using Stylistic Imitation” and in copia as described in Tom Pace’s “Inventio and Elocution” as well as an engagement with compilation through use of a commonplace book (see Zak Lancaster’s “Tracking Interpersonal Style”). Beyond these activities, the course afforded opportunities for analytic inquiry