Out of Style: Reanimating Stylistic Study in Composition and Rhetoric - Softcover

Butler, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0874216796 ISBN 13: 9780874216790

Publisher: Utah State University Press, 2008

Synopsis

Paul Butler applauds the emerging interest in the study of style among scholars of rhetoric and composition, arguing that the loss of stylistics from composition in recent decades left it alive only in the popular imagination as a set of grammar conventions. Butler’s goal in Out of Style is to articulate style as a vital and productive source of invention, and to redefine its importance for current research, theory, and pedagogy.
    Scholars in composition know that the ideas about writing most common in the discourse of public intellectuals are egregiously backward. Without a vital approach to stylistics, Butler argues, writing studies will never dislodge the controlling fantasies of self-authorized pundits in the nation’s intellectual press. Rhetoric and composition must answer with a public discourse that is responsive to readers’ ongoing interest in style but is also grounded in composition theory.

About this title

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OUT OF STYLE

Reanimating Stylistic Study in Composition and RhetoricBy PAUL BUTLER

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2008 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-679-0

Contents

Acknowledgments......................................................................................ix1 Introduction: Reanimating Style in Composition and Rhetoric........................................12 Historical Developments: Relevant Stylistic History and Theory.....................................253 Out of Style: Reclaiming an "Inventional" Style in Composition.....................................564 Style in the Diaspora of Composition Studies.......................................................865 Style and the Public Intellectual: Rethinking Composition in the Public Sphere.....................1146 Back in Style: Style and the Future of Composition Studies.........................................142Notes................................................................................................160References...........................................................................................163Index................................................................................................176

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION Reanimating Style in Composition and Rhetoric

OVERVIEW: STYLE AND LANGUAGE

As a student in the French School at Middlebury College, I wrote a stylistic analysis of nineteenth-century French poet Jos-Mara de Heredia's sonnet (1978, 117), "Les Conqurants" ("The Conquistadores"), completely unaware at the time that the study of style is part of a rhetorical tradition that began more than 2,500 years ago. Examining the poem from several perspectives-phonological (sound and rhythm), syntactic, lexical, semantic, and rhetorical-I looked at such features as the poet's use of explosive consonants and stops (including enjambment) as devices to convey the harshness of the conqueror's "brutal" departure; the later contrast with certain liquid and nasal consonants and the repetition of assonant vowel sounds to signal a shift in mood after the discovery of an exotic new land; the poet's reversal of syntax, first to speed up and then to slow down the rhythm of the poem; the sonnet's changing lexical field, with an opposition between nouns with masculine and feminine genders that parallels the poem's increasingly ameliorative movement from conquest to hopeful acceptance; and the contrastive use of rhyme to reflect the imprisonment of the conquerors who, literally and figuratively, break away from their native country to an alluring new world. While analyzing the poem's stylistic features and patterns, I was able to demonstrate how Heredia deployed various elements of form to help achieve his overall effect. I now know that my analysis of the sonnet falls under the rubric of stylistics-or the study of style-whose history in literature complements its ancient counterpart in the history of rhetoric and its equally dynamic history in the field of composition.

In composition studies, the salient features of style-which Richard Ohmann defines as "a way of writing" (1967, 135)-are often different from those in literature, and the texts examined are generally non-literary prose rather than poetry or fiction. Like literary stylistics, however, composition's approach to style has clearly been influenced by linguistics, the study and description of language phenomena in units up to and including the sentence, and by rhetoric, the study and use of language in context to inform, persuade, and produce knowledge. Some of the linguistic and rhetorical features I examined in Heredia's sonnet include sound and rhythm, vocabulary, diction, register, syntax, and semantics, as well as figures of speech like tropes (e.g., metaphor) and schemes (e.g., parallelism). Although various other elements (e.g., phonetics and graphics) are also relevant to style, I argue that stylistic features are part of descriptive and interpretive frameworks-from classical rhetoric, discourse analysis, linguistics, and literary theory, history, and criticism, for example-that link their objects of study to the ways one goes about studying them.

Depending on what aspect of a stylistic relationship is being emphasized, one of several definitions of style might be used, each one representing a different theoretical approach to the topic. Indeed, it is fair to say that any definition of style involves one of several long-standing debates that have informed the study of the canon throughout history. Thus, for example, when Ohmann defines style as "a way of writing," he is taking the position that style is a choice (of words, syntax, etc.) a writer makes among alternative forms. His broader argument is that style (or form) is separate from content (or meaning), and for him this "dualistic" theory underpins a central question: "If style does not have to do with ways of saying something ... is there anything at all which is worth naming 'style?'" (Ohmann 1959, 2). While this perennial form-content issue is discussed in detail below, its brief mention here is intended to indicate the complexity surrounding the question of what constitutes "style." The counterpart to Ohmann's dualistic view of style is an "organic" position, often attributed to Aristotle, asserting that form and content are inseparable. Another definition of style-the unique expression of an individual's personality ("style is the man")-raises the question of whether style is an unconscious process or a matter of conscious control among writers (Milic 1971, 77). Defining style as a unique or idiosyncratic-sometimes, an extraordinary-use of language implies an opposing norm or a standard, ordinary use that raises theoretical debates about whether to identify style with social groups or with characteristics of an individual's personality. Still another question focuses on whether style is measured subjectively, by so-called impressionistic techniques, or objectively, through the application of quantitative measurements, especially computers.

Because these multiple-and often competing-definitions of style are sometimes confusing, I define style as the deployment of rhetorical resources, in written discourse, to create and express meaning. According to this definition, style involves the use of written language features as habitual patterns, rhetorical options, and conscious choices at the sentence and word level (see Connors 1997, 257), even though the effects of these features extend to broader areas of discourse and beyond. The term "rhetorical," while informed by a rich history in oral discourse, refers specifically to written language as it is used to inform, persuade, and generate knowledge for different purposes, occasions, and audiences. This definition not only accommodates several perspectives on language, but also accounts for ways in which language theories can aid the deployment of style in various contexts. While I am adopting a rhetorical definition of style that includes qualities like tone, emphasis, and irony, certain linguistic concepts are also relevant. For example, some of the phenomena I used to analyze Heredia's poem (e.g., diction and syntax) are linguistic as well as rhetorical. However, as Sharon Crowley argues in "Linguistics and Composition" (1989), the use of linguistics in the study of style is problematic in that "American linguistics habitually privileged the spoken over the written word" (492) and thereby avoided the more complex structures used, for instance, by professional writers. Furthermore, Crowley acknowledges the general deficiency of linguistics as an organizing system: "To date, no linguistically based stylistic taxonomy has appeared that begins to rival the scope of that developed ... by classical rhetoricians" (491). In addition, Susan Peck MacDonald asserts that "one of the unfortunate disciplinary accidents of the late twentieth-century period is that trends in linguistics have been out of synch with English" (MacDonald 2007, 609).

For my purposes, then, I am focusing on the features of style that can be described locally through rhetoric, even though the effects of those elements are not necessarily local, but extend to more global features of discourse or to readers' responses (see Williams 2005, 351). One example of a language phenomenon that functions precisely in this way is the concept of "cohesion," which M. A. K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan define as the "relations of meaning that exist within the text, and that define it as a text" (1976, 4). Even though cohesion can be described locally-for example, the cohesive device "exophora," or the use of pronouns that have an antecedent in a previous sentence, is a device occurring within individual sentences-it is manifested only globally, or throughout a text, where it refers to the relational effects of the pronoun use, or what the authors call "non-structural text-forming relations" (7). As Stephen Witte and Lester Faigley explain in "Coherence, Cohesion, and Writing Quality," "For Halliday and Hasan, cohesion depends upon lexical and grammatical relationships that allow sentence sequences to be understood as connected discourse rather than as autonomous sentences" (Witte and Faigley 1997, 214). Louise Wetherbee Phelps adds that cohesion, as used in composition, "has been reserved for stylistic features of texts (language) in global contrast to their semantic and pragmatic aspects of structures (meaning)" (1988, 174). In Cohesion in English (1976), a book that had a profound impact on composition studies when it appeared, Halliday and Hasan explain further how cohesion passes from language into meaning and discourse structure:

The concept of cohesion is set up to account for relations in discourse ... without the implication that there is some structural unit that is above the sentence. Cohesion refers to the range of possibilities that exist for linking something with what has gone before. Since this linking is achieved through relations in meaning ... what is in question is the set of meaning relations which function in this way: the semantic resources which are drawn on for the purpose of creating text. (10)

In acknowledging, as Halliday and Hasan do, that stylistic effects extend to patterns of meaning beyond sentences, I contend nonetheless that efforts to attribute linguistic features to discourse, sometimes called "text linguistics," have been unsuccessful. For example, scholars like Francis Christensen attempted to devise a rhetoric (or grammar) of the paragraph analogous to a sentence-based model. In "A Generative Rhetoric of the Paragraph," Christensen argued that "the principles used [in his article 'A Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence'] were no less applicable to the paragraph" (1978, 76). Yet, composition scholars like Paul Rodgers (1966) rejected Christensen's "sentence-expanding" notion of "the average paragraph as a 'macro-sentence or meta-sentence,'" because he felt that the principles were not transferable. Similarly, Rodgers critiqued what he called Alton Becker's attempt "to analyze paragraphs 'by extending grammatical theories now used in analyzing and describing sentence structure'" (73). In addition, W. Ross Winterowd ultimately "emphatically repudiated" his own previous contention that "the sentence is the most productive analogical model for exploration of 'grammar' beyond the sentence" (1986, 245). Similarly, Frank D'Angelo's (1976) effort to extend syntactic structures to larger stretches of discourse-one he attempted to develop into a "full-fledged theory and pedagogy of composition" (Crowley 1989, 496)-was never taken up broadly by scholars in the discipline.

For similar reasons, I argue that style is not the equivalent of literary studies' "thematics" or its theory of "textual comparison" (Todorov 1971, 36), which attempts to apply stylistic features to whole bodies of work. Part of the reason for moving away from text linguistics came about with the understanding that language does not itself create or express meaning and that a great deal of what makes meaning is contextual and dependent on such "extralinguistic" factors as the reader and his or her responses to the text. In his analysis of a recently translated essay on style and pedagogy by Mikhail M. Bakhtin (see Bazerman 2005, 333-38), Joseph M. Williams explains the importance of these types of responses:

Most of the words we use to describe style displace our responses to a text into that text or its writer. When we say a sentence is clear, we mean that we understand it easily. When we say a speaker is coherent, we mean that we have no trouble following him or her. Such qualities are neither in the speaker ("You are clear") nor in the speaker's language ("Your sentence is clear"). They are in our responses to particular syntactic, lexical, and other features on the page (or in the air), uttered or written and heard or read in a particular context. (Williams 2005, 351)

Given the importance of our responses to numerous textual and non-textual features, it is clear that stretches of discourse beyond the sentence-what Rodgers, to cite one example, called a "stadium of discourse" (1966, 73)-reveal other important insights into language and meaning related to stylistic analysis. For example, in a slightly different approach, Winston Weathers attempted to define style more broadly in his article, "Grammars of Style" (1990). A "grammar of style," he suggested, is the "set of conventions governing the construction of a whole composition; the criteria by which a writer selects the stylistic materials, method of organization and development, compositional pattern and structure he is to use in preparing any particular composition." Weathers's argument that style includes the "conventions ... of a whole composition" (201) influenced some scholars who reconceived of style as arrangement, as in the Weathers-inspired collection Elements of Alternate Style (Bishop 1997). This approach, in fact, is suggestive of Young, Becker, and Pike's contention that style is part of the "universe of discourse," an idea they developed in their innovative text Rhetoric: Discovery and Change (1970).

THE BREADTH OF STYLISTIC INTEREST IN STYLE'S "GOLDEN AGE"

I argue that composition has developed a selective and biased memory of what I call the "Golden Age" of style study, roughly a three-decade period (from the 1960s to the mid-1980s) that overlaps with what is commonly known today as the "process movement." As evidence of this claim, I cite recent works that express renewed interest in the study of style during that time period, yet conceive of it narrowly-primarily as syntax. Two examples are Robert Connors's article "The Erasure of the Sentence" (2000) in which he discusses so-called "sentence rhetorics" (121), largely based in syntax, that he says disappeared around 1985: generative rhetoric, sentence combining, and imitation; and Crowley's article surveying linguistics and pedagogies of style from 1950 to 1980, where she suggests that in both structural linguistics and the transformational linguistics practice of sentence combining, the basis for the study of style was the use of "syntactic structures in English" (1989, 487). During the process era, Winterowd designated as "pedagogical stylistics" (1975, 253) the practical applications of largely syntactic methods that some considered the most useful for effecting improvement in student writing.

While it is true that syntax was a prominent focus of style study during the Golden Age, it certainly was not the exclusive focus, and the tendency to read other stylistic features out of accounts of that era reinforces composition's increasingly selective memory of it. What's more, the limited recollection adds fuel to today's nearly universal characterization of style as a "remnant" of current-traditional rhetoric, as the rhetorical antithesis of invention (see Chap. 3), and as focused on what some scholars, borrowing from Connors, refer to as "sentence-based pedagogies" (96). If, as I argue, the study of style during the Golden Age was not limited to a narrow focus on syntax or its use in developing syntactic maturity in student writing, then what did style studies, broadly construed, consist of during a period of composition history that overlapped with the discipline's process movement? Furthermore, what would a complete inventory of these stylistic practices comprise today? To answer that question fully, it is necessary to conduct historical research of the process era and Golden Age that goes beyond the scope of this book. Nonetheless, by pointing to some of the work that comprised the study of style at the time, I hope to give a sense of the future possibilities that exist for stylistic research, theory, and practice.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from OUT OF STYLEby PAUL BUTLER Copyright © 2008 by Utah State University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0874216796
• ISBN 13: 9780874216790
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 196