In this essay I discuss and exemplify a wide range of nontraditional concepts and texts as they relate to the rhetoric of intertextuality. As a result of this inquiry, I hope to give teachers of writing and their students new strategies for understanding and producing discourse. More specifically, I hope to give readers new ways of thinking about the rhetorical situation, invention, genre, arrangement, and audience.

(1992). The four master tropes: Analogues of development. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 91-107.

In his essay The Function of Rhetorical Study at the Present Time, J. Hillis Miller remarks: the recognition that all language, even language that seems purely referential or conceptual, is figurative language and an exploration of the consequences of that view for the interpretation of literature represent, it seems to me, one of the major frontiers of literary study today (13). This view of language also represents one of the major frontiers of composition study. To connect this view of language to the study of composition, I propose that a theory of can be a means of relating composition theory to literary theory. More specifically, I would like to suggest that the four metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony - can provide a conceptual framework for the composing process and a guide to critical reading. Tropes have developed into an explanatory power in a great many disciplines, including rhetoric, linguistics, philosophy, history, and literary theory. Rhetoricians have catalogued and defined a large number of these tropes, four of which - metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony - have been considered the most important. Kenneth Burke labeled these the master tropes

Historically considered, the concept of the topic sentence seems to be related to the concept of the topoi in classical rhetoric-in the sense of a topos or topic as subject matter treated in a speech or a portion of a discourse, as a method of reasoning about a subject, and as a place or heading from which arguments are drawn. All of these senses of the word seem to have been maintained in the kind of advice given by 19th-century textbook writers about methods of constructing paragraphs. In order to construct a paragraph, the advice goes, the writer should embody the main idea of the paragraph (its subject) in a topic sentence. Then, drawing upon a list of commonplace methods of reasoning about the subject (in the form of headings, such as comparison, contrast, and cause and effect, that label relationships), the writer should develop the central idea contained in the topic sentence into a unified and coherent paragraph. This connection between the topic sentence and the classical topoi is eminently suggestive, but however interesting it may be, the fact is that as an independent concept the topic sentence did not begin to emerge until the mid-19th century. It first appeared in Alexander Bain's discussion of the paragraph in 1866, and it attained fuller development in the late 19th and early 20th century. But the 19th-century conception of the topic sentence has come under considerable attack in recent years because of its deductive origins and because one kind of research has revealed that many contemporary professional writers do not use topic sentences in their writing. I would like to argue, however, that in some kinds of writing the topic sentence can be a valuable rhetorical strategy because it can help writers to organize their ideas and it can help readers to follow the logical development of the writer's ideas. As a means of developing my argument, I would like to look briefly at the origin and development of the concept of the topic sentence, consider the criticisms that have been made of the topic sentence in the 20th century, and then, drawing upon readability research that discusses the topic sentence and schema theory, argue that this kind of research supports the value of using topic sentences in expository prose.

That anyone should want to use critical reading in analysis of advertising should be surprising if one accepts a broad conception of letters as including anything in print that worth studying. My idea of English studies supports point of view that our concern in English departments ought to be with critical reading and writing of all kinds of texts, just imaginative literature. In other words, we ought to be concerned as much with rhetorical inquiries as with aesthetic inquiries. In its own right, advertising provides a kind of distinctive knowledge about society. To some critics, advertising fills a genuine need by creating markets for new and valuable products and by expanding and strengthening economy. Advertising also reveals how techniques of science can contribute to better living. In addition, it informs people about available goods and services and invites them to secure good things of life-material comforts, entertainment, travel, and so forth. To some critics, however, advertising creates false values. These critics contend that since some products are basically alike, all too often advertisers appeal to people's baser instincts and emotions to sell their products. To stimulate demand for a product, they attach psychological values such as acquisitiveness, power, sexual pleasure, attractiveness, social approval, and competitive success, none of which are in product. To attain these values, all consumer needs to do to buy appropriate product. In brief, advertising an exercise in a special kind of persuasion. As if these criticisms were enough, advertisers have been accused of manipulating people without their consent at some deeper level of consciousness, of selling to id, as one critic put it (Seldin 442-43). A number of critics have commented on use of techniques in advertising. Vance Packard calls them hidden persuaders(3). Marshall McLuhan refers to them as subliminal pills for subconscious in order to exercise an hypnotic spell (228). They are not meant for conscious consumption. Their mere existence, asserts McLuhan, is a testimony to somnambulistic state of a tired metropolis (229). There evidence to suggest that some of these criticisms are justified. As early as 1934, James Rorty, in his book Our Master's Voice:Advertising, noted that the advertising man is, in fact, a journeyman psychologist (241). He