Armed to the teeth
Reading through "Four Master Tropes," I was trying to keep the prompt in mind and trying to apply the tropes to rhetoric. I found that I needed a refresher, though, on Burke's perception of rhetoric--I've found myself incorporating my own ideas of rhetoric and ambiguity too much into my responses as of late--so I returned to _Elements of Dramatism_ to look at the discussion there:
"Rhetoric, the aim of which is identification, is only necessary when there is a dispute over meaning, significance, or implication; when, in other words, the basis for identification or cooperation is ambiguous or uncertain. Dramatism would keep us alert to ambiguity, while rhetoric would explore and even exploit that ambiguity to influence people's attitudes and actions.
"For these reasons, Burke believed that interpretation itself was a form of rhetoric, an attempt to reduce uncertainty and thus to motivate action. ...As a system for studying the use of language to foster identification, rhetoric has the power to turn upon its own creations as a meta-perspective, an interpretation of our interpretations" (9).
Armed with that I took the plunge into Burke's discussion of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. I have not dealt much with any of them in a formal setting since high school--and I have never been able to keep metonymy and synecdoche apart. It seems that the former is part of the latter, according to Burke, so maybe it's somewhat excusable to feel that they are so interrelated as to be easily mixed up.
They fall under the general term of "rhetorical tropes," but I had never really thought of them in terms of rhetoric. I've always very narrowly thought of at least half of them as under the control of the poets. It's not that I confine my use of them to my poetry, but I have not been necessarily as aware of them as I perhaps ought to have been.
Rhetoric surveys the available means and chooses from among the weapons at hand. Among those linguistic weapons are the tropes. I found a definition of this particular term at http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/tropes.html: "figures of speech with an unexpected twist in the meanings of words." I was surprised by just how much this definition suggests an exploitation of ambiguity--where better place for ambiguity to rest than in "an unexpected twist of meanigns"?
But I am, admittedly, not exactly answering the question very fast. I'm hoping that by laying out the definitions in front of me, I might better understand how things are interconnected--and I thought that leaving the trail of how I arrived at whatever point I reach might be of some use...
The trope that most caught my attention was metonymy, which Burke has equated with "reduction" ("Four Master Tropes" 503). Of the four tropes, I believe I gained the most understanding of this through Burke's discussion (and the least understanding about irony--in fact, I began to question whether I had a clue as to what irony was while I was reading that).
Metonymy is a subcategory of synecdoche: "Metonymy may be treated as a special application of synecdoche" ("Four Master Tropes" 509). And, therefore, reduction is a subcategory of representation ("Four Master Tropes" 507).
When all is said and done, metonymy operates by "convey[ing] some incorporeal or intangible state in terms of the corporeal or tangible" ("Four Master Tropes" 506). Since I came across Burke's use of the term, I've had a particular fascination with circumferences, and I keep wanting to link this definition of metonymy back to the concept of narrowing circumferences. It also goes back to the concept of merging and dividing in that a given intangible comes to be associated with a tangible item and is divided from other meanings. It's isolated. It's confined to a meaning, classified in terms of an object, and is able to be exploited by the person who confined it to that association.
I found it intriguing that metonymy can bring us from a concept such as "shame" to the physical manifestations ("Four Master Tropes" 507). It reminds me of the Debra Hawhee presentation last fall at the Hutton Lecture Series where she was talking about the link between sound and gesture as Burke understood it. I looked up my response paper to her lecture. Here's how I summarized her ideas at that time:
"The theory runs that the entire body, including the mouth and larynx, is committed to any given gesture it performs. That is, no part of the body is at ease when the person is tense or performing some gesture. The position that the larynx and mouth assumed during certain gestures seems to have led naturally to certain sounds.
"She [Hawhee] mentioned a link between language and attitude and that as language evolved, gestures were stifled and attitude was communicated through words."
I'm trying to decide whether this is an example of metonymy. It seems like the concepts should be linked somehow at the very least.
LKC, Great way of linking
LKC,
Great way of linking metonymy with circumference, merging, and dividing. You well quote Burke's equating metonymy with synecdoche: "Metonymy may be treated as a special application of synecdoche" (GM 509). While reding "Four Master Tropes" I could not help but link together metonymy (reduction) with metaphor (perspective) and I had to read again the beginning of part III. The very beginning links metonymy with synecdoche: "Now, note that a reduction is a representation" (GM 507). Later on, Burke also brings into the equation metaphor: "Thus, a reduction (metonymy) overlaps upon metaphor (perspective) so likewise it overlaps upon synecdoche (representation)" (GM 507). Prior to this, Burke reminds us that he had developed "the relationship between metaphor and perspective" in P&C (GM 504), where he sees metaphor as perspective by incongruity. Would a perspective by incongruity would be a representation? That is, would metaphor be a kind of synecdoche? When I read Burke, I seem to understand his developments on the four major tropes. When I try to apply them, they seem so strongly related to each other that I become confused.
Your response reminded me of
Maria,
Your response reminded me of another quote from Burke: "Give a man but one of them, tell him to exploit its possibilities, and if he is thorough in doing so, he will come upon the other three" ("Four Master Tropes" 503). The word "exploit" really stuck out in that quote because it's a term used in reference to what rhetoricians are supposed to do with ambiguity. So I got to wondering if we can ever avoid using all these tropes if we are sufficiently doing our jobs as rhetoricians. What this quote also implies, though, is that the tropes are inseparable when it really comes down to it. There is overlap amongst them all if we examine them closely--we can't fully divide them from each other.
LKC, Indeed, there is
LKC,
Indeed, there is overlap amongst the tropes and our task as language users (and abusers, as Burke would say) would be to create/exploit ambiguities that these tropes may create.
LKC, Indeed, there is
LKC,
Indeed, there is overlap amongst the tropes and our task as language users (and abusers, as Burke would say) would be to create/exploit ambiguities that these tropes may create.
Poet as Rhetorician
I started reading _A Rhetoric of Motives_ last night and got to thinking about my response. I was talking about associating the tropes with poetry, not rhetoric, in my posting. Then I came across the introduction to the next book, in which Burke writes, "we seek to mark off the areas of rhetoric, by showing how a rhetorical motive is often present where it is not usually recognized, or thought to belong" (_A Rhetoric of Motives_ xii). This includes poetry, as Burke goes on to show in his discussion of such poets as Milton and Arnold. I consider poetry to be a rhetorical act, but I didn't really show that in my posting--I seemed to be confining it to a category of "art for art's sake." I guess I've never considered the tropes as fulfilling a rhetorical function even in that context because in high school we approached them as artistic feats, specimens of artistry, which I didn't particularly think of as akin to rhetorical motives.
War
Ironically, for today, the assignments happened to align for my classes in such a way that I was reading Burke's discussion of war and imagery of killing along side of Stephen Crane's _Red Badge of Courage_. I feel as if talking about armed folks are the inevitable topic of discussion for today.
What struck me in Burke is how much the world wars impacted his views and writing. I've been trying to keep an eye out on what he has to say about nationalism, specifically--which is more in Grammar of Motives than Rhetoric of Motives, where the discussion of war and killing is--and have been thinking that the U.S. policy of isolationism seems to be something he struggles against. Even beyond where he specifically talks about Hitler, war seems to be heavily weighing on his mind and influencing the way he sees the world. As we go on and read things a little farther removed from the war years, I'm curious to see what happens with this trend. Do those "formative" years impact his theory so much in later years? Though I suppose that we never really got away from war any time during the 20th century--we started almost immediately into a Cold War and when that ended officially, we were fighting in the Persian Gulf to drive Iraq out of Kuwait. War seems to be always amongst us in the 20th century, though it later seems to have a different feel than the world wars did.