Centrality of Style, The. Группа авторов

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СКАЧАТЬ and mediums, style must also constantly adapt. Thus, multiple notions of style must always be taught seriously, escaping what might be seen as the binary—formal or creative3—stylistic system of many contemporary composition classrooms. On a more comprehensive note, I also pair these stylistic options in hopes of offering style as a bridge between classical and new media rhetoric, two fields that (as I hope this chapter illustrates) have much to learn from one another and that must necessarily come together to make a contemporary composition classroom whole.

      Definitions

      Before examining these stylistic pairings and continuums, however, I must establish a few definitions—attention, style, manipulation, and ethics. In his Economics of Attention Richard Lanham argues, “Information is not in short supply in the new information economy … What we lack is the human attention to make sense of it all …” (2006, p. xi). In such an economy, then, neither material possessions nor raw information are the capital; the human attention that interprets, focuses on, and deconstructs that data is. Whoever can get an audience to pay attention (and the right kind of attention) to his or her idea, product, or celebrity rules such an economy. Lanham posits that style (and this is the definition I build from here) is what directs such attention. Therefore, the best definition of rhetoric might be the stylistically focused “economics of attention.” The crux of Lanham’s argument is “oscillatio,” a rhetorical figure that illustrates how “we alternately participate in the world and step back and reflect on how we attend to it” (2006, p. xiii). We switch between looking at content and the stylistic devices that organize that content, but we have a hard time looking at both sides of the oscillation simultaneously. Manipulation, then, is the way in which writers attempt to focus their readers’ attentions on either the content of the argument or the style.4 Like all terministic screens, stylistic manipulation is inescapable because readers will always focus on something and good rhetors aid in that focusing. Something Lanham does not give much attention to, however, is the system of ethics that often gets applied to his concept of oscillatio.5

      In this chapter I use the framework of manipulation and ethics in hopes of challenging the common misconception in rhetoric, composition, and the general public that style is attached in fixed ways to morality. The three continuums I examine are the unsteady formulas upon which these fixed notions are calculated. For too long because style and rhetoric (and specific styles and rhetorics in particular) have been misconstrued as unethical slights of hand in popular thought, compositionists and stylisticians have responded by studying and teaching style as neutral and ethically transparent. Such a fearful reaction to accusations of rhetoric as trickery (and these have been present since Plato6 at least) has perpetuated the notion of “plain style” and severely limited stylistic options, especially in student writing. In this chapter I offer three diverging but equally “ethical” ways of performing style to disrupt the notion that clarity, or any other style claiming universality, is always the best option. I thus define ethics, like style, as an always local and contextualized process by which one negotiates an “appropriate” relationship between rhetor and audience. I do not endeavor to argue that style is never used unethically or that stylistic devices are neutral. In fact, style is never neutral. Because all style and language hides and reveals, all style is politically charged, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use it. Style, like language, is unavoidable, and all its manifestations should be embraced as rhetorical possibilities.

      II. Sublimity, Immediacy, and the Continuum of Attention

      Sublimity

      The Greek rhetorician Longinus (fl. ca. 50 C.E.) is the devil of stylistics.7 He illustrates what every lay audience finds wrong with rhetoric and what every rhetorician finds wrong with the study of style. His willingness to throw off any guises of dialogic persuasion, embracing, rather, an oratorical force that “tears everything up like a whirlwind” and “get[s] the better of every hearer” perpetuates an ideology that a brilliant rhetor should not allow his audience any sort of agency, ability to resist, or even a chance to respond to an argument (1972, p. 144). Such an “unethical” treatment of style is, in part, what has lead to Longinus’s relative excommunication from the rhetorical tradition in favor of viewing him as a literary critic. Yet, Longinus discusses rhetoric and designs his sublime to serve rhetorical purposes: “addressing a judge … tyrants, kings, governors …”, “hitting the jury in the mind”—“[sublimity] enslaves the reader as well as persuading him” (1972, pp. 164, 166, 161). And if one looks closely at Longinus’s On Sublimity, one begins to discover not unethical madness but, rather, a serious mode of rhetorical style designed around engaging an audience.

      Early in On Sublimity, Longinus defines the sublime:

      A kind of eminence or excellence of discourse. It is the source of the distinction of the very greatest poets and prose writers and the means by which they have given eternal life to their own fame. For grandeur produces ecstasy rather than persuasion in the hearer; and the combination of wonder and astonishment always proves superior to the merely persuasive and pleasant. This is because persuasion is on the whole something we can control, whereas amazement and wonder exert invincible power and force and get the better of every hearer. (1972, p. 143)

      Sublimity trumps persuasion because persuasion is controllable and permits an audience response, whereas sublime rhetoric is uncritiqueable because it overwhelms the listener. But what is most interesting about the machinations of Longinus’s style is where sublimity seeks to keep the audience’s attention. Although Longinus says the goal of the sublime is the goal of any great piece of literature, “eternal life” for the author, the sublime act doesn’t focus the reader on the greatness of the author: “The speaker vanishes into the text” (Guerlac, 1985, p. 275). Rather, it is the greatness of the oratory that captures the reader—the attention of the listener is so fully transfixed on the world created by words that when the listener snaps out of this sublime ecstasy they are “elevated and exalted… . Filled with joy and pride … [and] come to believe we have created what we have only heard” (Longinus, 1972, p. 148). Within the Longinian system, the audience doesn’t know from where ideas originate. As Suzanne Guerlac explains, “The transport of the sublime … includes a slippage among positions of enunciation … the destinateur gets ‘transported’ into the message and the destinataire achieves a fictive identification with the speaker” (1985, p. 275). The aesthetic arrest created by the sublime is so great that the actual moment of hearing and the author appear to have disappeared: “The artifice of the trick is lost to sight in the surrounding brilliance of beauty and grandeaur, and it scapes all suspicion” (Longinus, 1972, p. 164). Longinus seeks to eliminate the constructedness of language by erasing the reader’s memory, “hitting the jury in the mind blow after blow” with majesty (1972, p. 166). The sublime is a stylistic concussion. The listener remembers solely the ideas as if they experienced the subject of the speech for themselves. Longinus creates this immediacy and reader absorption through the numerous stylistic devices he lists in On Sublimity—complexity of emotion, asyndeton, anaphora, hyperbation, and hyperbole to name a few.

      Visualization (phantasia) is the first sublime device Longinus explores at length. He describes how image production through “Enthusiasm and emotion make the speaker see what he is saying and bring it visually before his audience… . There is much it can do to bring urgency and passion to our words…” (1972, pp. 159, 161).

      Mark Antony’s “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is an example of such visual urgency. Antony is attempting to gain control of the Roman crowd in order to help him avenge Caesar’s death. The first part of Antony’s oration relies on rhetorical persuasion and logic, resulting in analytical responses from the crowd: “Me thinks there is much reason in his sayings… . Mark Ye his words” (3.2.108, emphasis mine). But once Antony begins his sublime phantasia, reenacting the scene of Caesar’s murder using Caesar’s corpse (“Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabb’d”), there is a mass identification (3.2.176). The crowd becomes a mob, is elevated through a Longinian communal sublime, and seeks a somewhat mindless revenge,8 marked by the murder of the wrong Cinna. Antony uses the СКАЧАТЬ