Abstract
ABSTRACTRecent investigations of the communicative challenges posed by mental illness offer opportunities for exploring how tacit philosophies of communication and ontologies inform how sufferers of depression frame their experience as a lack in the ability to communicate meaningfully with others. I read William Styron’s memoir about depression as a response to what rhetorical scholars call rhetorical disability to help facilitate insights into tacit philosophies of communication in the text that become explicit as Styron narrates breakdowns in the signifying power of language. A tone of rhetorical dissociation characterizes his memoir as he employs both biomedical diagnostic discourses to make sense of his immediate existential situation as well as figurative and metaphorical passages to convey these extraverbal experiences to nondisordered audiences. This rhetorical style reveals a parallel tension between representational and constitutive views of language within communicative praxis. Exploring how Styron narrates his inability to communicate his experience to others as a moment of rupture in communicative praxis helps illuminate interconnections between moods, ontology, and communicative praxis more generally.
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