Rhetorical stylistics

Abstract

This article explores the nature of the stylistics embodied in the classical and early modern rhetorical tradition and argues that rhetorical stylistics differs in its assumptions and purposes from contemporary literary stylistics. Three areas of difference are discussed. First, rhetoric was a productive not an analytical art, and its criteria for language choices were radically functional and audience-based. Rhetoricians like Quintilian, for example, favored choices for ease of comprehension. Second, rhetorical stylistics, while recognizing genre differences, did not distinguish a separate domain of the literary. The system of rhetorical pedagogy incorporated ‘fictional’ genres and considered texts of every variety as potential ‘donors’ of examples of effective language use. Early modern rhetoricians considered all texts secular by default in comparison to the unique category of language in the Bible. Third, the language arts from antiquity through the early modern period were taught in three overlapping disciplines: grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. In the last of these arts, the least understood today, stylistic advice played a surprisingly formative role in the construction of arguments. Figures of speech understood in this last context encode specific lines of arguments. A reassessment of the rhetorical tradition on the part of contemporary proponents of stylistics requires an appreciation of these differences.