Abstract

In this essay, we demonstrate how rhetorical analyses of style can maintain their focus on linguistic patterns while simultaneously attending to material ones. Focusing on the trope of metonymy and the figures of incrementum and epistrophe, we show how these devices represent different modes of material-semiotic addressivity, resiliently turning and reconfiguring the rhetorical ecologies they capacitate. Using three case studies—a corpus of news articles about water quality amid extensive wind turbine development in Chatham-Kent, Ontario; traditional and “rogue” pain scales; and scientific literature about CRISPR—we explore the stylistic affordances of epistrophe, incrementum, and metonymy, showing how these “turnings” allow resilient material-semiotic articulations. We conclude by suggesting how our framework may be applied and extended to other topics and how this understanding of tropes and figures may align with other research trajectories in RSTM.