Some Thoughs on Tropes

What the Hell is a Trope?

• Machine for producing effects.
  • Through text (usually).
  • Nietzsce: “nonliteral significations”
  • Quintillian: “a pattern of speech which differs from the ordinary”
  • In either case, meant to draw attention to some point by making the language used stand out from the normal flow of language.

Sidebar: Rhetoric as Attention management

• Look over here, not over there!
• Tropes as machines for managing this.

Some Tropes

• Repetition
  • We’ve already talked about
  • Other Forms:
    • Alliteration: “repetition of a leading consonant in a phrase”
      • “Too Much Talent in Tennessee?”
      • “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers”
    • Consonance: “repetition of a consonant anywhere in a phrase”
      • “some mammals are clammy”
      • “Kurdish Control of Kirkuk Creates a Powder Keg in Iraq”
    • Assonance: “repetition of a vowel sound anywhere in a phrase”
      • Poe: “Hear the mellow wedding bells”
      • Coleridge: “That solitude which suits abstruser musings”
• Hyperbaton
  • A departure from “normal” word order.
    • Normal?
  • Churchill: “This is the kind of impertinence up with which I will not put.”
  • Edgar Allen Poe: “Object there was none. Passion there was none.”
  • What could be some uses for this?
• Circumlocution
  • Using many words when few will do.
  • “a tool used for cutting things such as paper and hair” when “scissors” will do.
  • Other Forms:
    • Equivocation (using it to deceive ppl)
      • “Margarine is better than nothing. / Nothing is better than butter. / Therefore margarine is better than butter.”
    • Euphemism (avoiding offensive words “Unrequested fission surplus”)
      • “Big boned” instead of “fat”
  • What could be some uses for this?
• Irony
  • “Creating an incongruity or discordance between what one says or does and what one means or what is generally understood”
  • Saying “good times” when, in fact, things are not good.
  • The fact that Alanis Morrissette’s song, “Ironic,” contains nothing ironic in any of its myriad examples.
• Synecdoche
  • “Substitution of a part of something for the whole.”
• Metaphor
  • “a figure of speech and or phrase that one word as being or equal to a second object in some way.”
  • Asks us to picture one thing as another, entirely different thing.
  • “The man is a pig” is a metaphor because a pig is like an unhygienic person (at least in our minds) and therefore, we know what they mean.
  • Shakespeare: “All the world’s a stage.”
• Metonymy
  • “a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by the name of something intimately associated with that thing or concept”
  • Where metaphor works by similarity, metonymy works by a notion of contiguity.
  • “White House” for president
  • “The Crown” for the King
  • “Wall Street” for the mass of capitalism

Analyzing Tropes

• Draw your attention to something.
• Next step in a rhetorical analysis: why? What does this do for the writer? Why draw my attention to this, in this way.