Handbook of Semiotics

Rhetoric and Stylistics

Rhetoric and Stylistics Rhetoric, the ancient art of persuasion, and stylistics, its younger descendant, are programmatically included in the semiotic field by those who consider semiotics to be the discipline which studies the''life of signs within society " (cf. Saussure 2.1), those who define it as a "translinguistic" science of the text (cf. Barthes 5.), and those who follow Morris's project of a semiotics that transcends syntactics and semantics with pragmatics. Yet, although many have argued that text semiotics has become a modern successor of rhetoric and stylistics, few attempts at a semiotic foundation of those disciplines have been made so far. Also, their place within the sciences of discourse , particularly their relationship to poetics , often remains uncertain. 1. Grammar, Rhetoric, Poetics, and Stylistics From its birth in Sicily in the fifth century B.C. until its alleged end in the the nineteenth century , rhetoric, in its relation to other sciences of discourse, passed through several phases of '~splendor and misery" (see Kennedy 1963; 1972; 1980; 1983, Todorov 1977, Ueding & Steinbrink 1986, and the journal Rhetorica Iff. [1983ff.] for the history of rhetoric). 338 • RHETORIC AND STYLISTICS 1.1 Rhetoric and Poetics Originally, rhetoric was the art and theory of public speech. Aristotle (ca. 335-34 B.C.) clearly distinguished this diSCipline from poetics and discussed both in separate treatises (cf., e.g., Herrick 1965). His poetics is a theory of literature, dealing with the epic, drama, and (only indirectly) lyric. The essence of poetry is characterized as imitation (cf. Literature 2.1), while persuasion is defined as the essence of rhetoric. In terms of semiotics, poetry is thus defined in its semantic and rhetoric in its pragmatic dimension. The "degeneration" of rhetoric came with a shift of emphasis from a practical art of persuasion in social contexts to an art of mere eloquence or even of deceit. Within a narrower scope, rhetoric developed an elaborate system of ornaments of speech, the so-called rhetorical figures. As such, it took a new direction but also reached a new zenith as literary rhetoric (cf. Lausberg 1960). In this form, rhetoric from the thirteenth century until the Renaissance merged with poetics. In this tradition, some modern scholars still define poetics as a branch of rhetoric (cf. Arrive 1979: J3). 1.2 Rhetoric, Grammar, and Logic The medieval canon of the seven liberal arts comprised a trivium of three language arts: grammar, dialectic (= the medieval logic), and rhetoric. While grammar was defined as the art of correct speech (ars recte loquendi) , rhetoric was the theory and praxis of technically and morally good speech (ars bene dicendi) (cf. Lausberg 1960: 35-40). In his Rhetoric (I, 1-2; II, 20, 22), Aristotle discusses both parallels and differences between the art ofpersuasion and logic, or dialectic : Both are concerned with methods of reasoning and argumentation. But the methods ofgiving evidence by means of induction or deduction (syllogism) are different. Logic obtains proofs by means of syllogisms based on premises from which conclusions follow by necessity . But in rhetoric, persuasion is often achieved by apparent proof only. Here, induction proceeds by giving factual or fictive examples , and deduction by incomplete syllogisms (cf. Lausberg 1960: 199-200), based on commonplaces or contingencies. Such rhetorical syllogisms are called enthymemes. (For a discussion of their basic forms see Barthes 1970a: 201-206.) Aristotle saw in the enthymeme "the most effective of the modes of persuasion " (I, 1). 1.3 Rhetoric and Stylistics Ancient rhetoric included stylistics in the branch of elocutio. Traditionally, three styles (genera) were distinguished (in various versions ~ cf. Wimsatt &: Brooks 1957: 102-103): the lofty or "sublime," the middle or common, and the plain style. But in a broader sense, ancient stylistics comprises the whole sphere of elocutio, in particular the rhetorical ornaments (ornatus) of tropes and figures. Significantly, these are now often referred to as stylistic figures. Today, stylistics has been called "rhetoric's most direct heir" (Ducrot &: Todorov 1972: 75) or a "modern rhetoric" (Guiraud 1954: 5~ cf. Colin 1973). This judgment places stylistics in the tradition of a rhetoric restricted to the study of ornatus. Yet, rhetoric in its original, broader sense differs from stylistics in three typical respects: (1) While stylistics is basically concerned with textual surface structures, mostly variants of lexical and syntactic expression , rhetoric provides rules for the organization of a whole discourse. In this respect, rhetoric is more comprehensive than stylistics. (2) While stylistics is mostly interested in the language characterizing an individual author (or epoch), rhetoric...