Abstract
Reviews 129 to rebrand old ideologies and invent new rhetorical repertoires with direct appeal to twenty-first-century audiences both at home and abroad. Reading The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong is a true delight, a delight that is made possible by Xing Lu s dispassionate and deeply engaging study of political rhetoric in modern China in general and Mao's transformative rhet oric in particular. As China continues to make its presence importantly felt on the world stage, understanding and developing a productive dialogue with its rhetoric is imperative. The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong should serve as an efficacious guide toward this urgent task confronting today's rhetori cians and politicians of all persuasions. Luming Mao University of Utah Marie Lund, An Argument on Rhetorical Style. Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2017, 220 pp. $25 (paper). ISBN 9788771844344 In An Argument on Rhetorical Style, Marie Lund builds on the work of Maurice Charland on constitutive rhetoric to advance constitutive style as an original contribution to rhetorical theory. To what extent is Lund's claim to have made an original contribution to centuries-long thought about style borne out by her argument? The first part of An Argument on Rhetorical Style is conceptual, distin guishing "constitutive style" from other ways of theorizing style. Lund draws on Wolfgang G. Muller's analysis to organize a taxonomy. In Topik des Stilbegriffs (1981), Muller identifies two tropes as dominating concep tions of style in the West: "style as dress" and "style as the man." Both have complicated histories. Style as dress would seem to see style as divorced from underlying ideas and, therefore, as decorative. But in the Renaissance, where the style as dress trope flourishes, Lund notes that ornatus was often thought of more as armament than decoration (58): for example, in John Hoskins' Directions for Speech and Style. Still, in so far as the live canons are thought of as a sequence, traditional rhetoric has fostered the idea that stylistic concerns are belated. With regard to "style is the man," this too is a complicated trope. When Comte de Buffon wrote in "Discourse on Style" that Le style c'est Thomme meme, he meant something quite different from both Quintilian who claimed that speech is commonly an index of character (Institutes, 11.1.30) and from the Romantics with their emphasis on the uniqueness of a personality as reflected in speech. Regardless of these diffe rences, Lund's claim that we have often theorized style as the formal embodiment of the speaker or writer's personality" (208) is true enough. Muller's two tropes of style serve as the ground on which Lund mounts her claim for a third topos: style as constitutive: "Wolfgang Muller is responsible for the first two topoi, while the last [constitutive] is my own invention," Lund writes (208). She reviews previous work on the figures 130 RHETORICA and on style generally to place her work in context and to shore up her claim of originality. Among scholars working on the rhetorical figures, Jeanne Fahnestock receives the most attention. Although Fahnestock does consider the figures as constitutive in her Rhetorical Figures in Science (p.22), she does not oppose constitutive to decorative, as Lund does. Instead, she distinguishes figures as functional or not—as advancing an argument or distracting from it. Fahnestock shows that even in scientific argument, figures are present and often serve a functional purpose by for mally epitomizing the structure of a scientific argument. For example, in the argument Darwin advances in the Origin that gradual change in response to natural selection turns variations from incipient species to new species, Fahnestock shows that the formal qualities of this argument are captured in the figure gradatio that characterizes Darwin's style (Fahnes tock 113-14). But it would be wrong to say that the gradatio is constitutive of the argument because gradatio, like all figures, is in itself skeletal, lacking evi dence and is not, therefore, probative. Lund also discusses Lakoff and John son on cognitive metaphor. But their point is that metaphor is a generative cognitive process—and therefore relates to invention. If a metaphor goes unnoticed, can we say it contributes to style? Lund's...
- Journal
- Rhetorica
- Published
- 2020-01-01
- DOI
- 10.1353/rht.2020.0032
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