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I will outline its major features.
Texts
Both iterations of “Go Figure” opened with an introduction based on Arthur Quinn’s accessible, idiosyncratic Figures of Speech: Sixty Ways to Turn a Phrase (1995). An excellent text in many ways, Figures of Speech proved useful in the early weeks of the course. Clever thematic arrangements and witty commentary put students at ease and for the most part Quinn does not introduce too many terms at once. However, the examples Quinn draws upon to illustrate the figures, from the Bible, Shakespeare, and other literary sources, are rather limited in appeal. In the absence of a wealth of authoritative and accessible materials from which to choose, Quinn proved to be a reasonable point of entry.
Much of the material one might share with students can be found on a handful of websites, most notably Gideon Burton’s “Silva Rhetoricae: The Forest of Rhetoric” (http://rhetoric.byu.edu).(“Silva”) hosted by Brigham Young University. This comprehensive overview of classical rhetoric includes a deep catalog of rhetorical figures and helpful classification schemes. Non-academic sites include Robert Harris’ annotated catalog of figures at “Virtual Salt” and Jay Heinrich’s “It Figures,” a playful examination of contemporary uses of the figures through sardonic blog entries.
In both iterations of “Go Figure,” we turned to primary texts from rhetorical tradition with short excerpts from Aristotle’s Rhetoric, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, Quintilian’s Institutes and Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence as historical interludes. In addition, we read Jeanne Fahnestock’s magisterial overview, “The Figures as Epitomes,” the introduction to Rhetorical Figures in Science (1999). All of these texts are appropriately challenging, but in the context of upper-division language study, they provided a necessary intellectual framework.
In each iteration, we turned in later weeks to a deeper engagement of tropes. In 2007, we read George Lakoff and Mark Turner’s More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor(1989). In 2010, we read George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By (2003). Each of these texts offered something distinct and valuable. Metaphors We Live By demonstrates how profoundly metaphor, and by extension all figurative thought, structures ordinary experience. My students appreciated its scope and intellectual heft and regarded it as an important book. Metaphors We Live By generated some of our richest discussions. Yet, on the whole, More Than Cool Reason, with its pronounced tilt to literary and stylistic concerns, holds greater promise for integrating stylistic theory and practice. It offers strategies for reading poetic texts structured by figurative devices such as simile or allegory. In general, English majors found More Than Cool Reason most valuable. Finally, in both iterations, we read Kenneth Burke’s profound “Four Master Tropes.” More than any other text, this essay communicated the indispensability of figuration to our ways of seeing things.
In 2010, “Go Figure” featured two additional texts to broaden coverage of style in composition beyond the figures. Chris Holcomb and Jimmie Killingsworth’s Performing Prose: The Study and Practice of Style in Composition (2010) is among the most promising pedagogical treatments of style to date. A thorough, yet accessible, guide to stylistic analysis, Performing Prose proved a useful spine, especially with its exercises in style. Its treatment of the figures in separate chapters devoted to tropes and schemes among other topics allowed it to serve as a broad overview of prose style. Finally, Richard Lanham’s Style: An Anti-textbook (1974) offered a philosophical perspective on our goals, particularly in its emphasis on going beyond precepts of clarity and efficiency in thinking about the virtues of style.
Activities
Daily activities of “Go Figure” were responsive to the range of stylistic exercises provided by Performing Prose, even before this text’s use in a second iteration. Such exercises draw on a classical tradition of style pedagogy re-introduced to modern audiences through Edward P. J. Corbett’s Classical Rhetoric and the Modern Student. (This book’s unit on style is published by Corbett and Robert Connors as Style and Statement.) Central to this pedagogy are practices of imitation and amplification. Following in this tradition, we would on a weekly basis get inside various figurative devices through word-for-word and looser imitations and by efforts to generate figures on demand or impose figures on existing texts.
With a nod to Renaissance pedagogy, we turned to exercises in copia, or abundance, in the tradition of Erasmus, specifically his influential textbook, De Duplici Copia Verborum et Rerum (1512). As Tom Pace details in “Inventio and Elocutio,” Erasmus offers in De Copia practical means for achieving fluency in thought and expression. “Exercise in expressing oneself in different ways will be of considerable importance in general for the acquisition of style” (Erasmus, 1978, p. 302). As a culminating activity, “Go Figure” adopted Erasmus’ celebrated exercise in sentence variation, based on his own 200 variations (in Latin) of the sentence “Your letter pleased me very much.” Students in “Go Figure” were asked to compose 50, 100, or even 200 variations on a sentence of their choosing and, in doing so, demonstrate as many figurative elements as possible.
Beyond producing more varied sentences, we embraced opportunities to practice figurative techniques of balance, repetition, omission and contrast, among other moves. The object of these activities in “Go Figure” was to link style with invention and thereby internalize a stylistic repertoire upon which to draw in novel contexts in the belief that verbal fluency contributes to rhetorical dexterity. Students in “Go Figure” discovered that exercises performed independently of assigned papers help them employ stylistic elements more effectively in those papers. Indeed, most students wished they had been exposed to the figures and related exercises much earlier, when it might have better prepared them for the writing they did in college.
The most enjoyable activity was a Figure Journal featuring the figures as found objects. In each iteration of “Go Figure,” students compiled 25 to 30 entries illustrative of the range of figurative elements encountered in various media. In the tradition of commonplace books, students prepared individual entries for specific figures by providing an example, a definition, and a brief analysis of how this figure worked in a given context. Twice each term, I collected these journals to read and grade, offering commentary or corrections to any misunderstandings. They were a joy to read because the examples were fresh and reflected increasing understanding of the figures as vehicles for creative and persuasive expression. Many students put great effort into compiling and designing this journal as a window onto popular media, literary texts, oral conversations, text messages and tweets, advertising rhetoric, religious discourse, etc. They drew from verbal and visual domains. In fact, in the final weeks of the course we turned specifically to figures in visual rhetoric, looking at tropes and schemes in political cartoons, print ads, websites and other visual texts. But for time, we could have explored visual figuration more extensively. Even so, this modest effort helped us to understand how figures perform across media and modes.
In the final activity of the course students completed individual projects with a six to eight page essay analyzing figurative language in a particular context. Among the more notable outcome of the course for me was the realization that the figures are productive sites of rhetorical analysis. Writing about the figures presents students opportunities for academic writing. Most recently, students wrote about strategies of copia in motivational speaking, centered on Vince Lombardi; on the use of color as metonymy in Irish rebel ballads; on the figure of paradox in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In the first iteration of “Go Fgure,” students addressed such topics as the satiric uses of antithesis in opinion pieces by Maureen Dowd; the use of anaphora in religious language; and the function of isocolon and homeoptaton, or rhyme, in Dr. Seuss. The point to be emphasized is that study of the figures generates intellectual curiosity and practice with the figures generates compositional fluency.
Going Forward
“Go Figure” was imagined as a deceptively easy way into rhetoric under the premise that overt attention to argumentation and invention was more difficult. Beyond the use of ornamentation as hook, “Go Figure” was premised on a belief that style is a legitimate and productive portal into rhetorical theory and practice. It posits that attention to formal and functional dimensions of style effectively engage latent interest in rhetoric among a generation of multimodal multitaskers.
Even so, I confess anxiety. Looking