Englis h 5 7 3 0 rhetoric



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identification
As defined by rhetorician Kenneth Burke, identification is "any of the wide variety of means by which an author may establish a shared sense of values, attitudes, and interests with his readers."  Of course, as Burke goes on to maintain, "identification is affirmed with earnestness . . . precisely because there is division."
-"Friendship, lust, love, art, religion--we rush into them pleading, fighting, clamoring for the touch of spirit laid against our spirit.  Why else would you be reading this fragmentary page--you with the book in your lap?  You're not out to learn anything, certainly.  You just want the healing action of some chance corroboration, the soporific of spirit laid against spirit"
(E. B. White, One Man's Meat)
-"Most writers find the world and themselves interchangeable."
(E. B. White, Wild Flag)
- "That I should want you at all suddenly strikes me as the height of improbability, but that, in itself, is probably the reason.  You're an improbable person, Eve, and so am I.  We have that in common.  Also a contempt for humanity, an inability to love and be loved, insatiable ambition--and talent.  We deserve each other . . . and you realize and you agree how completely you belong to me?"
(George Sanders as Addison DeWitt in All About Eve, 1950)

induction 
Method of reasoning by which a rhetor collects a number of instances and forms a generalization that is meant to apply to all instances.

invective 
A discourse that casts blame on somebody or something.   Petrarch's Invectives against the Doctor, for example, is an archetypical Renaissance confrontation of rhetoric and medicine, as well as a primitive encounter of Humanism and science, or at least pseudo-science.
-"A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir to a mongrel bitch: one whom I will beat into clamorous whining if thou deni'st the least syllable of thy addition."
(Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Lear, II.2)
--"Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the snivelling, dribbling, dithering, palsied pulse-less lot that make up England today. . . . God, how I hate them!   God curse them, funkers.  God blast tghem, wishwash.  Extermine them, slime."
(D.H. Lawrence, letter to friend and editor Edward Garnett)
--Mr. Wiggin: ". . . I see. Well, of course, this is just the sort of blinkered philistine pig-ignorance I've come to expect from you non-creative garbage. You sit there on your loathsome spotty behinds squeezing blackheads, not caring a tinker's cuss for the struggling artist. You excrement, you whining hypocritical toadies with your colour TV sets and your Tony Jacklin golf clubs and your bleeding masonic secret handshakes.   You wouldn't let me join, would you, you blackballing bastards.  Well I wouldn't become a Freemason now if you went down on your lousy stinking knees and begged me." 
(John Cleese in Monty Python's "The Architect Sketch")
-"Ahhhh . . . hey!  If any of you are looking for any last minute gift ideas for me, I have one.  I'd like Frank Shirley, my boss, right here tonight.  And I want him brought from his happy holiday slumber over there on Melody Lane with all the other rich people and I want him brought right here!  With a big ribbon on his head!   And I wanna look him straight in the eye and I wanna tell him what a cheap lying no-good rotten fourflushing low-life snake- licking dirt eating inbred over-stuffed ignorant bloodsucking dogkissing brainless dickless hopeless heartless fatass bugeyed stiff-legged spider-lip worm-headed sack of monkey shit he is!  HALLELUAH . . . HOLY SHIT!  Where's the Tylenol?"
(Chevy Chase in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation)

invented ethos
Proofs from character that are invented by a rhetor or are available by virtue of the rhetor's position on an issue. Contrast with situated ethos.

invention
The first of the five canons of rhetoric; the art of finding available things to say or write in any situation.

irony  
Use of words to convey the opposite of their literal meaning. A statement or situation where the meaning is directly contradicted by the appearance/presentation of the idea.   Verbal irony (also called sarcasm) is a trope in which a speaker makes a statement in which the actual meaning differs from the meaning that the words ostensibly express. Irony of Situation is a trope in which accidental events occur that seem oddly appropriate, such as the poetic justice of a pickpocket getting his own pocket picked. Dramatic irony involves a narrative in which the reader knows something about present or future circumstances that a character in the narrative  does not know.  In that situation, the character acts in a way we recognize to be grossly inappropriate to the actual circumstances, or the character expects the opposite of what the reader knows that fate holds in store.
--"This is often called an age of irony, and certainly public life is coloured by what Samuel Johnson defined as: "A mode of speech in which the meaning is contrary to the words." Recent careers have been built on irony, such as David Letterman's and Jerry Seinfeld's. But, of course, irony has been with us since antiquity. Anatole France, who won the 1921 Nobel Prize for literature, claimed that a world without irony would be like a forest without birds: "Irony is the gaiety of meditation and the joy of wisdom." Irony, both a figure of speech and a way of looking at the world, lay beneath Jane Austen's style and gave Socrates his way of teaching. Shakespeare made Mark Antony the theatre's most famous ironist by having him call Julius Caesar's assassins "honourable men," meaning they were dishonourable men. Almost anyone in the United States who says "I believe the president" is an ironist.  That's just the problem, according to the new irony police: It makes cynics of us all. We are irony-oppressed. Mockery has become a way of life (in the Elizabethan era, irony was sometimes called "drye mocke"). It's elitist, too: It depends on double meaning and a double audience, divided into those who understand and those who don't. It corrodes honest speech and honest feeling while encouraging greed and cruelty. Irony, its enemies say, is private, selfish and indifferent, while earnestness is public, generous and concerned. For those who dislike the tone of life as we live it now, irony has become a villain."
(Columnist Robert Fulford, Globe and Mail, 18 September 1999)
--"Irony has always been a primary tool the under-powered use to tear at the over-powered in our culture. But now irony has become the bait that media corporations use to appeal to educated consumers. It's like fake deer urine for yuppies, grungies, and the college grads. We come running to see someone show us a keen or different perspective on our important cultural institutions and beliefs, and all we get are decoys. It's almost an ultimate irony that those who say they don't like TV will sit and watch TV as long as the hosts of their favorite shows act like they don't like TV, either. Somewhere in this swirl of droll poses and pseudo-insights, irony itself becomes a kind of mass therapy for a politically confused culture. It offers a comfortable space where complicity doesn't feel like complicity. It makes you feel like you are counter-cultural while never requiring you to leave the mainstream culture it has so much fun teasing. We are happy enough with this therapy that we feel no need to enact social change. We become addicted to the therapy as a soothing process, and no longer consider its results." 
(Dan French in review of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, 2001)
[Gk. "dissembler"]
verbal irony: 
--"O heavens! died two months ago and not forgotten yet? Then there's hope a great man's memory may outlive his life half a year."
(Shakespeare, Hamlet)
--"Mr. Play It Safe was afraid to fly
He packed his suitcase and kissed his kids good-bye
He waited his whole damn life to take that flight
And as the plane crashed down he thought
'Well, isn't this nice.' And isn't this ironic . . . don't you think?"
(Alanis Morrissette, "Ironic" [Note: For the most part, Morrissette's lyrics generally mistake irony for misfortune; in these lines, the irony is verbal--"Well, isn't this nice"--rather than inherent in the situation.])
irony of situation:
--"I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear --
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.' "
(Shelley's "Ozymandias")
-In O. Henry's famous short story "The Gift of the Magi," a man sells his watch to buy his wife a set of fancy combs for Christmas, while she sells her hair to buy him a watch chain.
dramatic irony: Sophocles'  Oedipus Rex

isocolon
A succession of phrases of approximately equal length and corresponding structure.
[Gk. "of equal members or clauses"]
-"The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons." (Emerson)
-"Never in the history of mankind have so many owed so much to so few." (Churchill)
-"The bigger they are, the harder they fall."

kairos
(Pronunciation: "KY ross" or "KAY-ross")
The opportune time and/or place, the right time to say or do the right thing.  "Kairos is a word with layers of meaning; most usually, it is defined in terms of its Classical Greek courtroom nuances: winning an argument requires a deft combination of creating and recognizing the right time and right place for making the argument in the first place.   However, the word has roots in both weaving (suggesting the creation of an opening) and archery (denoting the seizing of, and striking forcefully through, an opening)."   (Eric Charles White)
See
-Dear Mother and Dad:

It has now been three months since I left for college. I have been remiss in writing this and I am very sorry for my thoughtlessness in not having written before. I will bring you up to date now, but before you read on, please sit down. YOU ARE NOT TO READ ANY FURTHER UNLESS YOU ARE SITTING DOWN. OKAY!

Well then, I am getting along pretty well now. The skull fracture and the concussion I got when I jumped out of the window of my dormitory when it caught fire shortly after my arrival are pretty well healed now. I only get those sick headaches once a day.

Fortunately the fire in the dormitory and my jump were witnessed by an attendant at the gas station near the dorm, and he was the one who called the fire department and the ambulance. He also visited me at the hospital and since I had nowhere to live, because of the burned out dormitory, he was kind enough to invite me to share his apartment with him. It's really a basement room, but it's kind of cute. He is a very fine boy and we have fallen deeply in love and are planning to be married. We haven't set the exact date yet, but it will be before my pregnancy begins to show.

Yes Mother and Dad, I am pregnant. I know how much you are looking forward to being grandparents and I know you will welcome the baby and give it the love, devotion and tender care you gave me when I was a child. The reason for the delay in our marriage is that my boyfriend has some minor infection which prevents us from passing our pre-marital blood tests and I carelessly caught it from him. This will soon clear up with the penicillin injections I am taking daily.

Now that I have brought you up to date, I want to tell you that there was no dormitory fire, I did not have a concussion or a skull fracture. I was not in the hospital, I am not pregnant, I am not engaged. I do not have syphilis and there is no man in my life. However, I am getting a D in history and an F in science and I wanted you to see those marks in the proper perspective.

Your Loving Daughter
(Anonymous, "A Daughter's Letter Home")

litotes  
Understatement used deliberately, or the expression of an affirmative by the negation of its opposite.
[Gk. "plainness, simplicity"]
-"The grave's a fine a private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace."
(Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress")
-"Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if I had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice."
(Robert Frost, "Fire and Ice")
-"for life's not a paragraph/And death I think is no parenthesis"
(e.e. cummings, "since feeling is first")
-"It isn't very serious. I have this tiny little tumor on the brain." (J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye)

logos 
In classical rhetoric, the means of persuasion by demonstration of the truth, real or apparent.

loose sentence
A sentence grammatically complete before the end (opposite of a periodic sentence).  Phrases and clauses may give the appearance of being tacked on haphazardly.
-"I was born in the year 1632 in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; he got a good estate by merchandise, and leaving off his trade lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my mother, whose relations were named Robinson, a very good family in the country and from I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual corruption of words in England, we are now called, nay, we call ourselves, and write our name Crusoe, and so my companions always called me."
(Daniel DeFoe, Robinson Crusoe)

maxim
  (Also known as proverb.)
A familiar saying; a bit of community wisdom.
-"How easy it is to defeat people who do not kindle fire for themselves." (Kenyan maxim)
See also MAXIMS.

meiosis   (See tapinosis.)   
To belittle, use a degrading epithet, often through a trope of one word.
[Gk. "lessening"]
"rhymester" for "poet";  "shrink" for "psychiatrist"; "treehugger" for "environmentalist."

memory
The fourth canon of rhetoric. 

metaphor 
The traditional meaning of metaphor is an implied comparison between two unlike things that actually have something important in common.  Roman Jakobson has identified metaphor and metonymy as the primary tropes, passing down to modern critical thinking a basic distinction between metaphor as indicating similarity and metonymy as revealing contiguity.  Put another way, metaphor expresses the unfamiliar (the tenor) in terms of the familiar (the vehicle).  When Neil Young sings, "Love is a rose," rose is the vehicle for love, the tenor.   Metaphors may be visual as well as verbal: one image in a commercial or one shot in a film, for instance, may function in some comparative way with a preceding image or shot.   Christine Brooke-Rose (in A Grammar of Metaphor) settles on this plain definition: "metaphor . . . is any replacement of one word by another, or any identification of one thing, concept, or person with another."  See METAPHORS BE WITH YOU.
[Gk. "transference"]
- "Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York."
(Shakespeare, Richard III, I.i) 
- "The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet. black bough."
(Ezra Pound, "In a Station at the Metro")
- "My heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill." 
(William Sharp, "The Lonely Hunter")
- "Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food."
(Austin O'Malley)
- "Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come."  ( Matt Groening)
- "There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can't think without metaphors." 
(Mary Catherine Bateson)
- "George Bush was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple." (Jim Hightower)
- "Our house is made of glass . . . and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves."
(Joyce Carol Oates)
- "Language is a road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going."
(Rita Mae Brown)

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