Here's a brief overview of the texts we've read as they relate specifically to style, and more specifically figurative language. (Citations aren't properly formatted yet.) I'm not sure yet if this will make it to my final essay, so I thought I'd post it here.
Style,
the third of the five canons of rhetoric, is the arrangement of words to vivify
and clarify expression. Style as an intentional rhetorical strategy can be
traced back to the Sophist Gorgias, whose compositions were drenched in four figures:
antithesis, isocolon, parison, and homoeoteleuton. Gorgianic rhetoric was, in fact, so stylized that
it is often “characterized as overly antithetical and symmetrical and overly
alliterative and assonant” (Bizzell and Herzberg 42). Despite his fervent and
sometimes clumsy attempts, Gorgias’s use of figures initiated a rhetorical trend
that others refined into a tradition. Aristotle made plain the importance of
style, saying “For it is not enough to know what we ought to say; we must also
say it as we ought” (Rhetoric III.1). He claimed that the virtue (aretê)
of style is clarity, the primary aim of speech (Aristotle, Rhetoric III.2). While
Gorgias and Aristotle employed a handful of figures, Greek and Roman
rhetoricians continued to expand the catalog of figures. The first-century text
Rhetorica ad Herennium describes 45 figures
of diction (10 of these are separated into a special category) and 19 figures
of thought, making it the earliest extant detailed treatment of figures. Cicero
briefly takes on the topic of style in De Oratore, admitting that there was
then a “very minute species of knowledge” (trans. Calvert 181) on the subject. Cicero suggests figurative language “may give
compactness and coherence, and a smooth and equable flow, to language” (trans.
Calvert 187). Quintilian synthesized theories of rhetoric in Institutio Oratoria, adding a strong
component of moral philosophy in his discussions of style, insisting that a “good
speaker be a good man,” but that such goodness could be taught.
