Rhetoric of Style

Rhetorics of Style

• Official Styles– Academicese/legalese– Engfish

Judith Butler

• The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Pisteis

• ethos• pathos• logos

A Good Man Speaking Well

Hugh Blair and the Enlightenment Style

Sarah Grimke1792-1873

Frederick Douglass

1818-1895

Richard Weaver (1910-1963)

• Ideas have Consquences (1948)

• The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953)

• Language is Sermonic

Kenneth Burke (1897-1993)

• Marx, Freud, Nietzsche• Rhetoric: “Symbolic means

of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols.”

Wayne C. Booth (1921-2005)

• The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961)

• A Rhetoric of Irony (1974)

• The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (1988)

Barry Brummett

Key Passage (xi)

• Style is a complex system – Of actions, objects, and behaviors

• Used to form messages that – Announce who we are, who we want to be, and

who we want to be considered akin to• With rhetorical influence on others– by which power and advantage are negotiated,

distributed, and struggled over in society.

• “As a system of signs, style undergirds how we structure experience and perception—hence, how we structure our thoroughly capitalized global society” (42).

Components

• Primacy of the Text• Imaginary Communities• Market Contexts• Aesthetic Rationales• Stylistic Homologies