(Re)figuring Composition through Stylistic Study

Abstract

As stylistic study is revived within composition, figures of thought, a neglected subcategory of the larger category of figures, have a great deal to offer our student readers and writers. These figures can shift students' attention away from content and argument toward other equally important but often ignored aspects of prose, thereby enriching students' rhetorical repertoires. This focus on style also contributes to our understanding of composition as a discipline and its relationship to the field of rhetoric.

Notes

¹I extend sincere thanks to RR reviewers Paul Butler and T. R. Johnson for their detailed feedback and guidance. I am also grateful to Don Bialostosky for his valuable insights and consistent encouragement and patience throughout the long process of writing this article. Finally, I would like to thank Thomas Recchio for reading a recent draft of this piece and offering suggestions that helped me rethink and reframe my inquiry.

²Below, Jeanne Fahnestock's recent elaboration of Quintilian's understanding of figures of thought will serve as the basis for my discussion of these stylistic devices. Unlike a trope, which is “language transferred from its natural and principal meaning to another for the sake of embellishment,” a figure “is a configuration of language distinct from the common and immediately obvious form” and “can be formed out of words used in their proper sense and in a normal order” (Quintilian, Insitutio Oratoria 9.1.4, 9.1.7).

³Jeanne Fahnestock notes that “in the twentieth century, it is common to speak only of tropes and schemes and to forget entirely the figures of thought as a category—though individual devices, such as the rhetorical question, have survived the demise of their category” (11).

⁴Below, I will, however, include a sample student response to a recent assignment that asks students to notice the interactions that prose makes manifest.

⁵ A Room of One's Own, based on the oral text from her lectures at Newnham and Girton, is far more figured than “Women and Fiction,” the article on the same topic Woolf wrote for The Forum in 1929.

⁶Although rhetorical questions have been classified in a range of ways, Quintilian categorizes them as figures of thought, and they appear first on his list of these figures in Book IX, Chapter 2. Fahnestock follows Quintilian's lead.

⁷You'll recall that one of the “lies” or, more precisely, characters that Woolf creates in A Room of One's Own is Judith Shakespeare, William Shakespeare's sister. Woolf creates Judith to show the inequalities that are responsible for the lack of women writers. Woolf argues that even if Shakespeare had a sister who was equal to William in genius, she would not have had the opportunities to pursue and perfect her talents because of her sex. Woolf uses the character of Judith Shakespeare to inspire her audience of young women to become the women writers that are missing from the history she details.

⁸I acknowledge Dr. Kirstin Hanley for sharing with me a version of this assignment, which inspired the creation of my own.