5 Stylistics as rhetoric
Introduction
This chapter, and the next two, define stylistics according to different traditions. The very titles of these three chapters are A-as-B constructions, whereby a specific term (A) is imagined as a generic one (B). Examples such as My daughter as a bird or My life as a movie offer us specific and generic terms that are unrelated. Daughters are daughters and birds are birds; only by a feat of the imagination can we think or speak of daughters as birds. Yet that feat of the mind, known as categorisation, is a vital technique of definition. That said, to define stylistics as rhetoric, applied linguistics or literary criticism, to categorise it as such, may seem odd. As I show in this chapter, stylistics comes from rhetoric, historically speaking, which makes stylistics and rhetoric closely related terms. Georges Molinié puts it this way in his treatise on French stylistics: ‘In the beginning there was rhetoric, and since two ancestors are needed, let us say that Aristotle was the founding father’ (Reference Molinié1997: 5; my translation). As I explain elsewhere (Hamilton Reference Hamilton, Fix, Gardt and Knape2008), the other ancestor of stylistics, albeit a more recent one, is linguistics. However, in this chapter I argue that without rhetoric in the past, there would be no stylistics in the present. In what follows, I discuss the study of rhetoric and style in the ancient world, and the consequent shift from rhetoric to stylistics after the fifteenth century. Then, I briefly discuss two definitions of stylistics, before concluding with a short analysis of a recent editorial.
Studying rhetoric and style in the ancient world
The formal study of rhetoric as we know it in the west started with the ancient Greeks, who systematised it for didactic reasons. For Aristotle, rhetoric was ‘the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion’ (Reference Aristotle and Roberts1954: 24). This is a useful definition given its broad scope which, as we will see later, encompasses style. In Rhetoric, Aristotle also introduced three main genres of rhetoric: deliberative, forensic, and epideictic (Reference Aristotle and Roberts1954: 31–4). Deliberative rhetoric is political and involves questions about the future. A question such as ‘Should NATO go into Syria?’ is a deliberative one. Forensic rhetoric is judicial and involves questions about the past. A question such as ‘What caused the space shuttle Challenger to explode in 1986?’ is a forensic one, fit for a courtroom. Finally, epideictic rhetoric may be ceremonial or functional and is often concerned with the present. President Obama’s famous eulogy in Tucson on 12 January 2011, or Sarah Crompton’s encomium (Reference Thomas2012) praising Thomas Heatherwick, the British designer who created the amazing Olympic cauldron for the 2012 London Games, are but two rather recent examples. Arguably, literature is another kind of epideictic rhetoric, and we might better understand the connection between rhetoric and stylistics if we recall the role literature played in rhetorical education.
Most teachers of classical rhetoric in the past probably aimed to help students become effective speakers and writers, rather than talented poets or playwrights. And yet, texts such as Aristotle’s Rhetoric contain many examples from literature. This is especially true of book III of Rhetoric, where Aristotle discusses style. Presumably, Aristotle was not breaking new ground by including literary examples. As Jeanne Fahnestock notes, ‘Rhetorical training drew on all genres and considered all texts in terms of their effectiveness. There was no special domain of “literariness” in the rhetorical tradition’ (Reference Fahnestock2005: 216). It thus seems that any example was useful no matter where it came from as long as it helped students learn how to compose their own texts with style in any of the three genres. As Bennison Gray maintains (Reference Gray1973: 508), the epic poems of Homer and Virgil were integral to education in ancient Greece and Rome, not only for the purpose of literacy but also for the purpose of commentary. Modern criticism’s belief that literature should be put upon a pedestal is thus unusual given the history of western education. Whether they know it or not, scholars today in stylistics who value literature, not for its own sake but for the sake of pedagogy, are following in the footsteps of the rhetorical tradition.
Another interesting aspect of rhetorical education was its bilingual nature. As Gray states:
From the Romans on, there is no question that education was bilingual, even when it ceased to be so in the sense that the child ceased in practice to learn Greek as well as Latin. For classical Latin literature, written on Greek models, with a highly Grecized vocabulary and in a very conservative Latin with borrowings from the archaic, produced the same results. The Aeneid was intended to resemble the Iliad and Odyssey, and insofar as it did resemble them linguistically, it could be studied in just the way they were, even by those students for whom colloquial Latin was the native idiom.
Linguistic differences between students and the texts they studied was first apparent when ancient Greeks who spoke the Attic dialect studied Homer’s epic poems, which had been composed a few centuries earlier, mainly in the Ionic dialect (Gray Reference Gray1973: 506). Although students who spoke Latin studied in Latin later in Rome, more advanced Roman students of rhetoric also studied in Ancient Greek (Fahnestock Reference Fahnestock2011: 7). European students of rhetoric then studied for centuries mainly in Latin, which gradually became a dead language. Today, while English students may sometimes feel that the English used in texts from a few centuries ago is a foreign language, students who now study rhetoric or stylistics in foreign languages have more in common with students from the past than they may realise.
To return to the ancient world, students copied out the epic poems recited by their teachers, who had to ensure the poems were copied down properly. This is how students learned to read, write and increase their vocabulary. A grammaticus would have been the boys’ first formal teacher, the one who taught them reading and writing – or grammatike in Greek and literratura in Latin (Gray Reference Gray1973: 506). Later, a teacher of rhetoric could then take over. In the Middle Ages, Latin translations of the Bible replaced epic literature, although the bilingual method of instruction remained intact, with the epic text on the left of the page and the student’s translation and commentary on the right side. According to Gray (Reference Gray1973: 508), ‘The type of the literary treatise from antiquity on was the commentary, which, with its line-by-line translation and linguistic description of the text, varied rarely by excursions into less verbal areas such as character consistency and allegorical justification of questionable passages, embodied the schoolroom method of literary study.’ The specific study of style arguably began with these commentaries and continued with the advanced study of rhetoric (see Copeland and Sluiter (Reference Copeland and Sluiter2009) for examples of Medieval commentaries). According to Fahnestock, because ‘[a]dvice about style in the rhetorical tradition builds on a mastery of language basics while preparing the student for life as an active citizen’ (Reference Fahnestock2011: 7), it seems that understanding style was important from the classroom of childhood to the active life of adulthood.
Students of rhetoric usually studied its five so-called canons, which consisted of:
(1) invention, or knowing how to create arguments
(2) arrangement, or deciding how to organise arguments
(3) style, or understanding what forms and figures to use and when
(4) memory, or mnemonic techniques for memorising speeches, for instance
(5) delivery, or knowing how to give a speech or compose a text properly.
For many years the syllabus covered these five canons, but they developed in different ways over time. For example, Aristotle (and later Cicero) laid down rules for arrangement that were adhered to for centuries and remain useful today. Meanwhile, emphasis on memory and delivery, vital in oral cultures, waned as writing and printing grew in importance after the fifteenth century. However, the remaining two canons – invention and style – never lost their allure. Aristotle, for instance, wrote about style in book III of his Rhetoric, and he offered no fewer than twenty-eight common topics for inventing arguments in book II. Since then, generation after generation, finding something to say and saying it properly have remained a problem. This is obvious in the example of staircase wit, or what the French call l’esprit de l’escalier. This shortcoming, which befalls even the best of minds at times, refers to coming up with a witty response, unfortunately when it is too late. It is not always easy to find something to say, to say it with style, and to say it when needed; timing is crucial, as the ancient Greeks knew full well with their concept of kairos. Even though it is better to have staircase wit than no wit at all, this example reminds us why invention and style are still relevant.
When we compare the fates of invention and style, there apparently was a change after the Middle Ages. Walter Ong’s bold claim that invention ‘received the lion’s share of attention’ (Reference Ong1968: 45) in rhetorical theory may be true up to 1500, but arguably less so afterwards. Texts on invention were popular well into the fifteenth century, as the anonymous Tria Sunt from Oxford at that time shows (Copeland and Sluiter Reference Copeland and Sluiter2009: 670–81). But according to Fahnestock, ‘of all the parts of rhetoric, style is arguably the most implicated in the others, since linguistic choice is the point of realisation for the rhetorical precepts and theories belonging to the other canons’ (Reference Fahnestock2011: 7). Other hypotheses about the centrality of style abound. For instance, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson provocatively state:
Rhetoric took pride of place in formal education for two and a half millennia. Its very rich and complex history is worth detailed study, but it can be summarized in a few sentences. Essentially the same substance was passed on by eighty generations of teachers to eighty generations of pupils. If there was a general tendency, it consisted simply in a narrowing down of the subject matter of rhetoric: one of its . . . branches, elocutio, the study of figures of speech, gradually displaced the others, and in some schools became identified with rhetoric tout court. . . . This narrowing was not even offset by a theoretical deepening. Pierre Fontanier’s Les figures du discours does not substantially improve on Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, despite the work of sixty generations of scholars in between.
Dismissing rhetoric is not new, of course, as Plato’s critique of it in Gorgias and Phaedrus reminds us. Whether or not any intellectual progress was made between Quintilian and Fontanier is irrelevant here, but the ‘narrowing’ of rhetoric mentioned above is pertinent. Sperber and Wilson, who have re-shaped the contemporary study of pragmatics, make two major claims. On the one hand, they equate style with figures alone, but we need look no further than this very Handbook to see that while interest in figurative language remains strong in stylistics, topics such as phonology, semantics, dialogue and pragmatics are also important today. On the other hand, the claim that rhetoric was restricted to figures alone requires some explanation.
Moving from rhetoric to stylistics
After Rome, rhetoric continued to be taught and used by various scholars in the Middle Ages (Copeland and Sluiter Reference Copeland and Sluiter2009), but in the Renaissance, the re-discovery of classical texts, their translation into vernaculars and widespread circulation thanks to printing, helped to rejuvenate rhetoric. As Brian Vickers explains, ‘Rhetoric reached its highest degree of influence, in modern times, in the great expansion of European education between 1500 and 1750. At every level of society, for every literary genre, as for the arts of painting, architecture, and music, rhetoric was an indispensable accomplishment for the civilized man or woman’ (Reference Vickers1988: 196). The sixteenth century was thus a turning point for rhetoric, which is also when its narrowing down began. Evidence for this can be seen in the reduction of the style canon itself to the study of just four main tropes: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony. Vickers (Reference Vickers1988: 439) says he is unsure who started this practice yet nevertheless blames ‘Talon (1547), Ramus (1549), Vossius (1605), Keckermann (1606), Farnaby (1625), and Smith (1657)’. Peter Ramus (1515–72) was particularly influential. As a professor in Paris, he promoted ‘a curtailed rhetoric focusing almost entirely on stylistic features’ (Cockcroft and Cockcroft Reference Cockcroft and Cockcroft2005: 10). According to James Herrick, ‘Rhetorical treatises after Ramus tended toward discussions of style and ornament’ (Reference Herrick2001: 163), which suggests there was a pre-Ramus and post-Ramus period in the history of rhetoric. But his ‘narrowing down of rhetoric’ (Cockcroft and Cockcroft Reference Cockcroft and Cockcroft2005: 10) might have been motivated by institutional concerns. Since the history of ideas is but the history of people in specific places and times, we should remember that the aim of Ramus to circumscribe rhetoric was expressed at a time of confusion over disciplinary boundaries (Cockcroft and Cockcroft Reference Cockcroft and Cockcroft2005: 11). The circumscription of rhetoric starting in the sixteenth century might thus be understood in this context.
Unsurprisingly, these developments had consequences. A main one was that rhetoric was ‘detached from its expressive and persuasive functions, and [was] brought down finally to a handful of tropes’ (Vickers Reference Vickers1988: 439). Herrick would agree, given his opinion that ‘[r]hetoric’s capacity as a practical art of discourse concerned with discovering arguments toward the resolution of important issues was largely lost’ after Ramus (Reference Herrick2001: 163). Ramus is usually recalled as a controversial figure, not because he was a Protestant (and thus murdered during the infamous 1572 massacre of French Protestants), but because he was constantly criticising Aristotle, Cicero and others. His reconfiguration of rhetoric was nevertheless highly influential. As Vickers writes, ‘The reforms of Ramus and Talon [his friend] may indeed have separated rhetoric from dialectic, but in their systematic development of elocutio, and their espousal of the vernaculars, the Ramists had a beneficial influence in applying rhetoric to literature’ (Reference Vickers1988: 206). In an odd twist of fate, then, just as literature fed into rhetoric in the past, rhetoric seems to have fed into literature from the sixteenth century onwards.
Limiting rhetoric to style, or to just a few tropes, might have started in the sixteenth century, but it took a long time. Vickers admits ‘it is not easy to reconstruct the process by which this atrophying has come about’ (Reference Vickers1988: 439), but several names nevertheless stand out after the sixteenth century. For instance, Vico (1668–1744) famously emphasised metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony in his work. He was a ‘Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Naples for forty years’ (Vickers Reference Vickers1988: 183) although ‘he would have preferred to teach law’ (C. Miller Reference Miller2012: 24). The title of a recent book, Vico and the Transformation of Rhetoric in Early Modern Europe (Marshall Reference Marshall2010), implies just how important Vico was to rhetoric. His idea that rhetoric could ‘be exploited for a variety of purposes, both contradictory and complementary’, and his ‘implementation of rhetoric for immediate purposes, including both historical reconstruction and political persuasion’, were things he put into practice in Naples (C. Miller Reference Miller2012: 24). In the twentieth century, the historian Hayden White claimed that Vico’s four tropes inspired his own work on historiography (Vickers Reference Vickers1988: 440–1). After Vico in Italy, there was Du Marsais in eighteenth-century France. Gérard Genette apparently felt that ‘the final process of reducing it [rhetoric] to the study of tropes took place with the publication in 1730 of the treatise Des Tropes by Du Marsais’ (Vickers Reference Vickers1988: 451). Like Vico before him, Du Marsais focused on metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony. However, when Fontanier re-edited the work of Du Marsais in 1818, he ‘rejected irony’ to focus only on metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche (Vickers Reference Vickers1988: 451).
Many writers in Germany, France and England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – such as Goethe, Büchner, Wordsworth, De Quincey, Lamartine, Vigny, Hugo, Stendhal and Flaubert (Vickers Reference Vickers1988: 197–8) – studied rhetoric as students at a time when elocutio was gaining in significance. In the twentieth century, however, reducing rhetoric to tropes had severe consequences. The process of elimination seems to have gathered pace when Roman Jakobson decided to focus on just two tropes alone: metaphor and metonymy. Vickers, who excoriates Jakobson for different reasons, many of them methodological, notes there were things that Jakobson misunderstood. Take, for example, Jakobson’s distinction of contiguity and similarity relations. The pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herrennium makes it clear that ‘contiguity’, according to Vickers, ‘is a variant form of “similarity”, not a polar opposite to it. What Jakobson does is to take the binary oppositions that he has established for linguistics – combination / substitution, code / context, paradigmatic / syntagmatic – and then forcibly impose these on the two tropes that he has picked out’ (Reference Vickers1988: 444). Jakobson’s famous axes of contiguity and similarity, relied on partly to differentiate metaphor from metonymy, seem more similar than different, thus making their differentiation problematic. You cannot distinguish metaphor from metonymy in terms of contiguity and similarity if the former is but another kind of the latter. Furthermore, Jakobson’s alignment of metaphor with poetry, and of metonymy with prose – which Eikhenbaum had already proposed in 1923 (Vickers Reference Vickers1998: 451) – is misleading. In short, trying to fit all of style or rhetoric or literature into just two categories makes them hopelessly ‘malleable’ and ‘too vast to be usable’ (Vickers Reference Vickers1988: 447).
Last but not least in Vickers’s diatribe is Paul de Man. Several publications by de Man, notably those with the word ‘rhetoric’ in the title, would suggest a real interest in rhetoric. Yet Vickers explains in detail how some of the texts de Man writes about, such as Rousseau’s Essai sur l’origine des langues or Nietzsche’s 1872–3 lectures on rhetoric in Basel, seem to have been deliberately misrepresented. By going back to the texts de Man discusses in his ‘rhetoric’ essays, Vickers suggests that their unfair distortion was carried out to intentionally condemn rhetoric. De Man set metaphor against metonymy à la Jakobson, showed the limitations of each one, made them ‘negate each other’, and then reached the conclusion that since neither trope was adequate, rhetoric was hopeless and could be abandoned (Vickers Reference Vickers1998: 459). Because Vickers argues at length (in Chapter 9 of In Defence of Rhetoric) about the unfair treatment rhetoric has been subjected to over the past few centuries, his harsh critique of Jakobson, de Man and others is understandable in its context.
Moving from Ramus to Vico, from Du Marsais to Fontanier, and from Jakobson to de Man, is a brutally succinct way of saying how we went from rhetoric to style, and then from four tropes to three, from three to two, and from two to one, until we were left with almost none. But why did the circumscription of rhetoric and style occur at all? As I mentioned earlier, uncertainty over disciplinary boundaries might have led scholars to limit rhetoric to style, and then style to a few tropes or figures, to clarify divisions of labour. The complicated birth of academic disciplines after the fifteenth century, and the linguistic turn the human sciences took in the twentieth century, reveal that rhetoric underwent changes in different places at different times. A positive justification may be found in more recent research in cognitive linguistics, which shows how metaphor (G. Lakoff and Johnson Reference Lakoff and Johnson1980) and metonymy (Langacker Reference Langacker2008) define our conceptual and linguistic systems. Vickers suggests yet another cause as well. Deconstructionists such as de Man seem to ‘be expressing modern anxieties about language, with the curiously self-satisfying claim that language is an unreliable tool,’ he writes, ‘but they ought not foist those anxieties on to rhetoric’ (Vickers Reference Vickers1988: 459). Having said that, there might be some cause for hope.
Rhetorical stylistics and literary stylistics
The intense focus on figures or tropes certainly contributed to the rise of stylistics. Yet arguing that rhetoric became stylistics, or that stylistics overtook rhetoric, may be too simple. According to Molinié (Reference Molinié1997: 5–10), there is not one kind of rhetoric but three. The first type focuses on argumentation, which began with Aristotle’s Rhetoric and continues today in fields such as pragmatics, including the theory of relevance developed by Sperber and Wilson (Reference Sperber, Wilson, Bender and Wellbery1990). The second type, focusing on figures of style, began with Aristotle’s Poetics (and, I would add, book III of his Rhetoric), and continues today in stylistics. The third type of rhetoric is normative and prescriptive, regarding both the production and the analysis of literary and non-literary texts. Molinié feels this third type can involve the other two, given the tendency of some rhetorical theorists to combine the first two types in their manuals about this third type (Reference Molinié1997: 10). If he is right, this may explain how the work of Jakobson or others in stylistics in the 1950s or 1960s could coexist, for instance, with The New Rhetoric (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca Reference Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca1969).
Lest we forget, the term stylistics usually refers to the linguistic analysis of literary texts, especially in France, where there is a sharp divide between la stylistique (for literature) and l’analyse du discours (for everything else). In English stylistics, however, recent definitions carefully avoid the word literature. For instance, Simpson calls stylistics ‘a method of textual interpretation in which primacy of place is assigned to language’ (Reference Simpson2004: 3), while Peter Verdonk calls stylistics ‘the study of style, which can be defined as the analysis of distinctive expressions in language and the description of its purpose and effect’ (Reference Verdonk2002: 4). These definitions imply that English stylistics can involve non-literary texts too. And yet, Fahnestock distinguishes ‘rhetorical stylistics’ from ‘literary stylistics’. She notes that ‘stylistics’ (without a modifying adjective) normally refers to ‘literary stylistics’ before admitting:
While a rhetorical stylistics can be, and often is, deployed to identify the unique features of a text or rhetorical artist, its goal is not the discovery of uniqueness per se. Its theoretical aim is rather the identification of functional features in language that have a predictable potential no matter who uses them, so that given similar purposes, it is likely that authors will choose similar functional structures.
For Fahnestock, the goal of (literary) stylistics is to identify markers of a particular writer’s style, whereas the goal of rhetorical stylistics is more general. She also notes that stylistics usually involves literary texts, whereas rhetorical stylistics typically involves non-literary texts. The difference she finds between rhetorical stylistics and literary stylistics follows from a basic distinction: students in a Rhetoric course aim to produce primary texts, whereas students in a Stylistics course aim to produce secondary texts. Granted, both students of rhetoric and students of stylistics may produce commentaries on (or analyses of) texts written (or spoken) by others. However, while students of stylistics might stop after writing a secondary text about a primary text, students of rhetoric may continue onward to produce their own primary texts, such as speeches or proposals. Of course, nothing prevents teachers of stylistics from having students write poems, plays or novels as part of the course, thus problematising the primary text / secondary text divide. But for Fahnestock, at least, stylistics and rhetorical stylistics use different materials and have separate aims, which leads me to my analysis.
Analysis of an editorial
Here I focus on a recent editorial from the 3 September 2012 edition of The Detroit Free Press. Sentences have been numbered for the purpose of analysis.
Student-teacher nexus is still key to achievement
1 Michigan is logging a lot of firsts this week: the first two school districts converted to charter systems; the Detroit debut of the soon-to-be-statewide Educational Achievement Authority to buoy underperforming schools; increased opportunities for high school students to take community college classes; more charter schools; and the possibility of more cyber schools.
2 But all these systemic firsts should not detract from what matters most for the majority of Michigan’s children: the first day of school, when student meets teacher and the on-the-ground activity known as education begins.
3 Set aside the politics, the debates about choice, even the impacts of budgets and policy decisions made in Lansing, and there’s still the inescapable fact that it is the interaction between teacher and student that really counts.
4 The potential lying within each child is what excites parents and teachers dedicated to their profession.
5 The nurturing of that potential is often not the stuff of poetry.
6 For parents, it means instilling good eating and sleeping habits, and disciplining themselves enough to run an organized household and ensure a school-day routine.
7 Good teachers also know how to make organization and routine work to provide a backdrop where every child can learn.
8 As tumultuous as the politics surrounding schools can be, most people seem happy with their child’s school (even while complaining about schools in general).
9 And, in fact, good teaching happens in schools all over the state.
10 In a study released in July (www.mackinac.org/17256), the conservative Mackinac Center assessed high school test scores against a measure of poverty to rank school performance on a more level playing field – and found charter schools and traditional district schools intermixed throughout their results.
11 Charter schools are not a panacea, and some seemingly well-off suburban districts appear to be not doing much more than going through the motions.
12 Parents and the community need to get and stay involved to ensure the schools that matter to them are making an actual difference.
13 It is also sobering to remember that Michigan has raised the benchmarks for student achievement to align better with standards for college readiness, and tests scored on those benchmarks show schools still face a big gap in boosting students onto that track.
14 There are signs of progress, but there are also signs of problems, such as a widening gap in achievement between white and minority students.
15 Parents, neighbors and policymakers alike need to remember that as Michigan’s population stagnates – and grows older – each schoolchild becomes an increasingly precious resource.
16 That’s what matters as school starts, and every Michigander has an investment in encouraging all students to reach their full potential.
A rhetorical analysis can entail many different factors, ranging from the generic to the specific. First, this text can be classified as belonging to a specific genre: it is an editorial. Strictly speaking, it is neither forensic nor epideictic; rather, it is deliberative, exhorting readers to help improve schools. It thus relates more to the future than to the past, even if there are moments of praise and blame here.
Second, as for kairos (timing), the fact that the editorial ran on Monday 3 September is important. Every rhetorical act is a situated one, and in the USA the first Monday of September is Labor Day, a national holiday that unofficially marks the end of summer. Labor Day is the May Day of America since 1 May is not an American holiday. Traditionally, the new school year in Michigan begins on the first Tuesday of September, just after Labor Day. Therefore, it is entirely fitting to run an editorial about education on the eve of the new academic year. What is more, on the first day of the week in the first week of September before the first day of school, it is also appropriate to refer to several ‘firsts’ [1].
Third, apart from kairos there is invention, a canon of classical rhetoric. Common topics are one tool for inventing arguments, and at least two of them give rise to the editorial. Following Aristotle, Richard Lanham writes, just as we can argue about ‘what can and cannot happen,’ so too can we argue ‘from consequences, good and bad’ (Reference Lanham1991: 167). The editorial mentions ‘the possibility of more cyber schools’ in [1], but its main focus is the possibility of improving schools. Exhortation occurs specifically in [12] and [15]. The common topic of possibility is embodied in modality: parents and the community (meaning neighbours and policymakers) ‘need to get and stay involved’ [12] and ‘need to remember’ [15] why education is so important. The fact that they ‘need to’ do this implies they are not now doing so. As for the negative consequences of the status quo, [13] and [14] refer to students who are unprepared for university, and to differences between white and minority students. Meanwhile, [15] implies that properly educating children should be a priority in a state with a population that ‘stagnates – and grows older.’ By writing about the negative consequences of the status quo, and about what is possible in the future, the authors of the editorial draw on at least two common topics from classical rhetoric for inventing arguments.
Fourth, there is arrangement, another canon of classical rhetoric. According to Lanham (Reference Lanham1991: 171), an introduction – or prooimion in Greek and exordium in Latin – should be designed so that it ‘catches the audience’s attention’. The narration ‘sets forth the facts’ while the division ‘sets forth points stipulated (agreed on by both sides) and points to be contested’. The proof ‘sets forth the argument that supports one’s case’ while the refutation section ‘refutes opponent’s arguments’. Finally, the peroration ‘sums up arguments and stirs the audience’. This kind of arrangement may seem complex, but at the very least a deliberative text will contain an introduction, a statement of the issue or narrative, a proof and a conclusion (Crowley and Hawhee Reference Crowley and Hawhee1999: 198). Although Crowley and Hawhee on the one hand, and Lanham on the other, offer slightly different ideas on arrangement, we can nevertheless see that the editorial is arranged in a particular manner. The headline and [1] get readers’ attention, while the last half of [16] provides a moving conclusion. Because the case is an ‘ambiguous’ one, meaning ‘there is some doubt about the issue’ (Crowley and Hawhee Reference Crowley and Hawhee1999: 203), the decision to objectively spell out facts in the introduction seems particularly fitting. But the sentences from [2] to [15] follow an unexpected order. The ‘narration’ from [2] to [9] combines facts and opinions in order to support the claim that ‘it is the interaction between teacher and student that really counts’ [3]. The ‘inartificial proof’ or ‘evidence’ (Lanham Reference Lanham1991: 166) that ‘good teaching happens in schools all over the state’ [9] is provided by the Mackinac Center’s report cited in [10]. The same evidence supports the argument at the end of [10] that ‘charter schools and traditional district schools’ have ‘intermixed’ results. This is meant to refute the opinion that charter schools are always better, and it supports the newspaper’s opinion that ‘Charter schools are not a panacea’ [11]. The refutation continues from [11] to [14], where problems in all schools are mentioned, including those readers might think are good. The conclusion comes in [15] and [16], urging readers to take action in ‘encouraging all students to reach their full potential’.
The fifth factor to consider is style. The series of ‘firsts’ in [1] is organised in a teleological way: what has already happened, what will happen soon and what might happen in the future. The more conventional pattern of listing elements from shortest to longest (Fahnestock Reference Fahnestock2011: 245) is not followed in this series. Metaphors are also used such as ‘buoy’ [1], ‘level playing field’ [10], ‘panacea’ [11], and ‘signs of progress’ [14], which is an instance of the event structure conceptual metaphor (G. Lakoff and Turner Reference Lakoff and Turner1989). There are antitheses as well; for instance, [2] contrasts with [1] to mark a shift in foregrounding, while ‘organization and routine’ in [7] contrasts with the ‘tumultuous’ politics of education in [8]. Meanwhile, within [8] there is a contrast between ‘schools in general’ (which people dislike) and ‘their child’s school’ (which ironically they like). Sentences also vary in length and syntactic complexity. There are 27 words on average in each sentence, much more than the Ellegard norm of 18 words reported by Leech and Short (Reference Leech and Short2007: 90). The greatest syntactic complexity can be seen in [1], [2], [10] and [13], while the shortest and simplest structures can be found in [4], [5] and [9]. Perhaps the most interesting sentence is [3] given its iconicity: ‘Set aside the politics, the debates about choice, even the impacts of budgets and policy decisions made in Lansing, and there’s still the inescapable fact that it is the interaction between teacher and student that really counts.’ The two halves contrast with one another, with three things to ‘Set aside’ listed on the one hand, and one ‘inescapable fact’ to face on the other. As Fahnestock notes, ‘English sentences can easily carry modification to the left and right’ (Reference Fahnestock2011: 209), and this is what happens here. The cleft construction in the second half of [3] results from a branch to the left, while post-verbal modification of the first half of [3] reflects a branch to the right. The structure is iconic since its complex form – 4 clauses in 37 words – mimics its complex content. Finally, regarding register, the editorial is formal rather than informal. Lanham’s rule – ‘the more important the topic, the higher the style’ (Reference Lanham1991: 174) – helps explain the choice here between plain, middle or grand style. Yet the authors use some register shifts to build rapport with readers. While the syntax, punctuation and vocabulary (‘panacea’) tend to be formal, phrases such as ‘the stuff of poetry’ [5], ‘going through the motions’ [11], and ‘big gap’ [13] are less formal and thus more familiar. In general, the less frequent the form, the more formal it is, while the more frequent it is, the less formal it is.
The sixth and final factor involves the artistic proofs of ethos, logos and pathos first described in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. In simple terms, ethos refers to character and pathos to emotions, while logos refers to evidence, forms and arguments. The editorial appears in The Detroit Free Press, a liberal newspaper read across Michigan. Some might not like the editorial, but the text is well written and contains no technical errors, which enhances its ethos. (By definition, an editorial has no by-line, so its authors are anonymous. Some may say that authorial anonymity defines propaganda, but the editorial board on the newspaper’s masthead is not anonymous.) Shifts in register, as well as images of ‘the first day of school’ and ‘the on-the-ground activity known as education’ [2], also enhance ethos since the editors become more intimate and more closely identified with readers (Crowley and Hawhee Reference Crowley and Hawhee1999: 120). Furthermore, the authors seem intelligent, favourably citing a report by a ‘conservative’ think tank. Left-wing readers of the paper might interpret this citation of a source from the rival camp as proof that the editors are reasonable and fair, rather than dogmatic or ideological. Still, the emphasis on community in [11], [15] and [16], rather than individual students themselves, would not surprise regular readers of the newspaper. For example, a conservative reader responded online to the editorial by writing that the Free Press ‘is speaking in liberal code words again’. But recognising that both teachers [3] and parents [6] help to educate school children nevertheless bolsters the editorial’s ethos.
As for logos, the claim in [9] that teachers across the state do well generally is supported by the report cited in [10], showing how different schools may get the same results. While it is hard to persuade people to take action if they like the school their child goes to, yet dislike most schools in general, the text still exhorts readers to take action to improve Michigan’s schools. Examples, which are a form of logos (Crowley and Hawhee Reference Crowley and Hawhee1999: 176–8), are used from [11] to [14] to show why the status quo is negative. Neither charter schools, nor schools in leafy suburbs, are doing as well as they might. Despite some ‘signs of progress’, there is a ‘widening gap in achievement’ and measurable ‘problems’ whenever strict ‘standards’ or ‘benchmarks’ are used. There are also a number of logical cause–effect relations mentioned throughout the editorial. A decision in Lansing can ‘impact’ students as can the teacher–student relationship [3]. The ‘potential’ of children ‘excites parents and teachers’ [4], just as parents and teachers have influence over children [6]–[7]. Going to a charter school or a ‘well-off suburban’ one does not guarantee success [11]; rather, it seems better to go to a school where teachers, parents, neighbours, policymakers and the community ‘get and stay involved’ [12]. What is more, schools will only get better by ‘encouraging all students to reach their full potential’ [16], which is another implicit cause–effect relation.
Regarding pathos, it goes without saying that writing about children without getting emotional may well be impossible. The five ‘systemic firsts’ [2] might make readers proud, but mentioning the ‘potential lying within each child’ [4] and the ‘nurturing of that potential’ [5], and calling children a ‘precious resource’ [15], can move readers and increase their emotional involvement with the text. After all, who could possibly disagree with the idea that ‘all students’ should be helped ‘to reach their full potential’ [16]? Like the instant swimmer recipe joke – ‘Instant swimmer: just add water’ – there may be a failsafe recipe for pathos in rhetoric: ‘Instant pathos: just add children.’ Kindly writing about children is arguably the easiest way to move readers, and showing ‘how the issue affects everyone’ (Crowley and Hawhee Reference Crowley and Hawhee1999: 205) gets us emotionally involved. To conclude with pathos, we can also ‘demonstrate that the state of affairs violates community values’ (Crowley and Hawhee Reference Crowley and Hawhee1999: 213), and this is what the editorial does. In [12], readers are told to ‘get and stay involved’, and in [15] and [16] they are reminded why: bad schools are unacceptable in a state that loves its children.
Conclusion
Other experts in stylistics could undoubtedly extend my brief analysis above in many ways, but my point was to show how rhetorical stylistics involves looking at rhetoric and style. As I have hopefully shown in this chapter, rhetoric and stylistics are so closely related that it is not hard to see stylistics as rhetoric. The study of style began as a canon of rhetoric in the ancient world, then eventually came to define rhetoric as a whole after the fifteenth century. The study of style itself gradually focused on just a few figures or tropes before stylistics became a fully developed subject of its own in the late twentieth century, alongside rhetoric. If the story of how rhetoric became style, and how that canon became stylistics, seems too straightforward for some tastes, other alternatives are possible. Some may see stylistics as part of rhetoric; others may see it as rhetoric; and still others may see the two as co-existing. Just as work in rhetorical criticism continues (Jost and Olmstead Reference Jost and Olmstead2004), this very Handbook shows that work in stylistics continues, too. Telling the full history of stylistics would require more space, of course, but this chapter has hopefully given readers a new understanding of the special friendship rhetoric and stylistics have. As for the rhetoric of stylistics, that will have to be the topic of another paper.
Acknowledgement
I thank the University of Birmingham’s Department of English for its support in writing this chapter. A visiting fellowship in summer 2012 at its Centre for Advanced Research in English (CARE) enabled me to work on this project. I also thank the Colgate University Faculty Research Council for supporting this project.
