A New ‘Rhetoric’ for Modernism?

Abstract

This article traces the emergence and evolution of ‘rhetoric’ as a historical key term of metaliterary discourse. In the modernist period, the term ‘rhetoric’ was given a conspicuously central role in the heated debate over literary style and its relation to ordinary language, not incidentally after rhetoric’s fall from grace as an academic discipline over the course of the 19th century. Scores of writers (e. g. Symons, Yeats, Hofmannsthal, Gourmont, Pound, Eliot) attacked ‘rhetoric,’ variously (and often vaguely) defined as convoluted poetic diction, moralistic or political preaching, and meaningless abstraction. Yet, the broader cultural context in which this anti-rhetorical discourse was situated reveals a climate of widespread suspicion of language as a sign system, with the term ‘rhetoric’ functioning as a receptacle for feelings of dissatisfaction with language. In contrast, Jean Paulhan’s sophisticated reappropriation of ‘rhetoric’ in Les fleurs de Tarbes (The Flowers of Tarbes) and other writings reasserted confidence in language and its commonplace expressions, and in the “arts of writing.” Paulhan’s proposed solution helps us to shed light on a demonstrable tendency in modernist poetics to incorporate rather than simply expel rhetoric – a search for a properly modernist rhetoric.