The Liberation of the Icon: A brief survey from classical rhetoric to cognitive stylistics

Abstract

Summary The inextricable link between classical rhetoric and poetics manifests itself in the different emphases that their theoretical principles have received through the centuries. Thus, due to a complex of political and sociocultural factors, the late classical period and the Middle Ages placed all emphasis on the ornamental component elocutio (the ancestor of stylistics), while the Renaissance fully restored the logical components inventio and dispositio. Next the Romantics expectably revolted against rhetoric because by then it had again been reduced to a set of artificial stylistic prescriptions. Surprisingly, our century has witnessed a revival of rhetoric in its full scope. However, the most remarkable fact in this chequered history is that neither rhetoric nor poetics has ever given the reader any role in the process of meaning production. This situation remained unaltered through the centuries and even the influential literary theories formulated in the first three decades of our century perpetuated this passivity of the reader. Similarly, this century's major formalist linguistic theories ignored the reader in the process of signification. As a true interdiscipline, the “new stylistics” of the sixties followed suit by also disregarding the reader. At long last, the seventies witnessed the rise of literary and linguistic theories which get involved in real world contexts in which meanings are negotiated between speaker/writer and listener/reader. Modern stylistics also changed tack and switched from a formalist approach to a wide range of sociopragmatic and cognitive approaches.