I think I've struggled this week in coming up with something to say about Burke's chapter on tropes because I felt a "well, yes, duh," kind of response to most all of his assertions, and it's difficult to discuss things you agree with so well (at least for me).

One such assertion is found on p. 506 in his discussion of metonymy:

"Language develops by metaphorical extension, in borrowing words from the realm of the corporeal, visible, tangible and applying them by analogy to the realm of the incorporeal, invisible, intagible; then in the cours of time, the original corporeal reference is forgotten, and only the incorporeal, metaphorical extension survives (often because the very conditions of living that reminded one of the corporeal reference have so altered that the cross reference no longer exists with near the same degree of apparentness in the 'objective situation' itself) [...]"

I thought Burke's analogy of metonymy to reductionism was an interesting one. I have always had a bit of trouble separating synedoche from metonymy...and metonymy from metaphor, for that matter. But, as Burke explains, each of these terms, though not, of course, exactly synonymous, participate in one another.

Metonymy may be treated as a special application of synedoche ... We might say that synedoche stresses a relationship or connectedness between two sides of an equation, a connectedness that, like a road, extends in either direction, from quantity to quality or from quality to quantity; but reduction [metonymy] follows along this road in only one direction, from quality to quantity. (509)

In Burke’s discussion of the four master tropes, he identifies the ways in which their functions overlap. Central in this discussion of the four tropes is the idea of transformation: Burke not only proposes new terminology for the tropes but identifies ways in which the tropes transform “reality “in their use of terminology. To the extent that one’s chosen terminology can always be construed as a strategic choice, the rhetorical dimensions of the tropes begin to emerge.

In concluding, Burke writes that “what goes forth as A returns as non-A” and identifies within this transformation the “strategic moment of reversal” (517). This description reminded me of his molten mass metaphor: is this strategic moment of reversal what happens when congealed crusts return to the molten mass and are reconstituted as a new crust?

For this week’s response I think I will stick to the term metaphor and try to come to some understanding of how Burke’s use of the term impacts my interpretation of his interpretation of rhetoric. According to Burke, the “Four Master Tropes” are “metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony,” which he labels as perspective, reduction, representation, and dialectic respectively. Burke’s primary concern with the “Four Master Tropes” is “not with purely figurative usage, but with their role in the discovery and description of ‘the truth’” (503).

Burke’s explanation of the “four master tropes” (especially that of metaphor and metonymy) is useful to understand Lacan’s term the Name of the father/the law of the father. According to Lacan, the father is just a name, a signifier. Regnault sees it primarily as a signifier and only secondarily as a person, a man (in Reading Seminar xi: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis 69). Burke mentions the relationship between metaphor (“a device for seeing something in terms of something else” GM 503) and perspective, which he explains in P&C; the two realms “are never identical” (GM 504). According to Lacan, the child encounters the desire of the mother but feels that the mother is obeying the law of the father; therefore, the mother becomes the law of the father as the child “sees the mother in terms of the father", he subsitutes perspective.

Burke’s explanation of metonymy and synecdoche helped me better understand Hayden White’s proposal in Metahistory (1973) that Marx is the philosopher of history who apprehended the past in terms of metonymy. White makes use of Burke's master tropes in his work Metahistory. While he shows that Marx’s outlook is metonymic, he also explains that it comes to a full romance. However, White seems to be divided between comedy (which for him is the emplotment that corresponds to synecdoche) and romance (metaphor) because Marx’s imagination, in certain respects, fits the old Greek formulation of comedy: the hero is one of us, the aim is to achieve something, a setback occurs, and then a victorious revolution happens. Burke’s explanation helped me make more sense of White’s analysis of Marx’s view. According to Burke, metonymy is “a substantial reduction” (GM 507).

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.