Redefining Rhetorical Figures through Cognitive Ecologies: Repetition and Description in a Canadian Wind Energy Debate

ABSTRACT

While current cognitive approaches to rhetorical figures portray them as internalized to the brain, rhetorical figures emerge through embodied experiences within an environment, crystallizing material patterns and bringing elements of a cognitive ecology into relief. In particular, figures of repetition coordinate regularities in the environment, linking repeated items into relational relationships. Figures of description such as enargeia enact sensory education, making salient aspects of the environment perceptible. A situated example involving a controversy over wind turbine installation in Canada shows how rural community members use these figures to coordinate sensory information and persuade others to understand the issue differently.

Notes

1. The author wishes to thank the two RR reviewers for this article, Sarah O. Hallenbeck and Chris Mays, for their helpful suggestions and comments. This article was largely written during a fellowship at the National Humanities Center (NHC). The author would like to thank the library staff of the NHC for their assistance and the 2019–2020 fellows cohort for their support.

2. For scholarly discussions of incrementum, consult Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in Science; Jack, “The Extreme Male Brain?”; Abeles, The Agricultural Climax and Darwin’s Evolutionary Rhetoric; Abeles, Singer, and Jack “Resilient Turns: Epistrophe, Incrementum, Metonymy”.

3. Littlemore also identifies dynamic/developmental aspects of cognitive ecology, which would attend to cultural and personal histories of rhetorical figures. She cites the example of the expression, “the boss upstairs,” which references the British cultural history of the manor house, in which the servants lived downstairs and the family they served lived upstairs.

4. Perhaps the earliest reference to hydrographia as a rhetorical figure is in Abraham; Fraunce’s 1588 book, The Lawier’s Logicke, p. 64, in which the term appears alongside related figures of description such as anemographia (description of wind) or dendrographia (description of trees). I thank Brooke Andrade from the National Humanities Center for tracking down this term.

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Notes on contributors

Jordynn Jack

Jordynn Jack is Chi Omega Term Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her scholarly work focuses on the rhetoric of science, gender, health humanities, and genre. She is the author of Science on the Home Front: American Women Scientists in World War II (University of Illinois Press, 2009), Autism and Gender: From Refrigerator Mothers to Computer Geeks (University of Illinois Press, 2014), and Raveling the Brain: Toward a Transdisciplinary Neurorhetoric (Ohio State University Press, 2019). Her work has also appeared in venues such as College English, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and Quarterly Journal of Speech.