Tropes of the Composing Process

Abstract

term tropes-like the term itself-has been given various definitions through the centuries. One definition groups it with under the general heading of style. Edward P. J. Corbett, for example, treats and figures as peculiar niceties of an expressive style, limiting them to the stylistic bric-a-brac which, if suitably employed, make ... prose lively and clear (94). Corbett's use of the term can be traced back as far as Gorgias of Leontini, who-according to Suidas-invented rhetoric by borrowing the oral formulas and figurative devices of Greek poetry and using them in making speeches (Sprague 32). Another understanding of tropes, however, begins with Vico, who claims that all the first [which he classifies as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony] are corollaries of [a] poetic logic, which is the basis of the wisdom of ancient, pre-civilized cultures (129). Vico anticipates Nietzsche, Freud, Kenneth Burke, Hayden White, and many other recent critics who have expanded our understanding of figurative language, calling these four class concepts (Vico 128-31).1 As concepts, these represent not simply the dynamic, imaginative nature of the pre-civilized mind; they map the development of human thinking itself, manifested in the myths, literature, and discourse human beings create. Hayden White, a student of Vico, has pointed out that logic may be merely a formalization of tropical strategies that prefigure our descriptions, explanations, and ideological stances toward the object of a field of study (Tropics 17). White's historian and the composition theorist are similar in this respect. Both do not search for facts so much as they invent the relationships between these facts, relationships inherent in the tropical nature of language itself. master tropes organize fields of study and shape the way theorists describe their object-in this case the composing process (White, Metahistory ix-xii, 1-9; Burke, in Appendix D, Four Master Tropes, Grammar 503-17). Tropes are inescapable; they operate consciously or unconsciously, even in our discourse about discourse. Our theoretical language reveals the turns we 1. literature on is extensive. Besides those writers mentioned in my essay, I am also indebted to the work of Ricoeur, Jakobson, Lakoff and Johnson, de Man, Genette, Richards, Black, Ortony, Pepper, and Derrida. Phillip K. Arrington is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Michigan University where he teaches in the Written Communications Program and is Director of Writing Programs. His article The Traditions of the Writing Process is forthcoming in Freshman English News.