History Bump

I'll give this one a whirl:

Goggin focuses primarily on the discourses that permeate the culture of publishing in the nine journals. These discussions describe trends in the field, from which Goggin is able to determine (and chart the arc of) the growth of the field through the metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche employed. I'm not sure if she gets to irony because I haven't done but skimmed the book and she ends in 1990, which seems like a logical place for the self-reflexive part.

a blurb of attempting to make this work...

chrisageyer: Becky posted a number of prompts on the blog - that's what I'm working with.
tyratae: i'm still having trouble w/metonymy/synecdoche here--inmost dictionaries (unfortunately) they're reduced to almost-synonyms. & copying his distinctions didn't clarify that for me.
chrisageyer: Here's where a text like E. W. Bullinger's "Figures of Speech in the Bible" comes in really handy. wish I had it here at the moment...
tyratae: he says things i adore, but they're small things outside of the overall structure of his trope-thing. i'm trying to get the trope-thing, but the terminology keeps thwarting me.

Fundamentally, I like the move towards critiquing the objective within the creation of the empirical--insofar as the subjective can never be separated from any aspect of the reserach process that White suggests.

i think in terms of the actual text I examined, it would be interesting if adam's included a self-critical analysis of the reasons/interpretations she made about the actual texts she chose (especially when they are student texts within a particular historical moment)

Becky - I'm having trouble understanding this question, which is why I went for the last question first.

Are White's intro precepts that science (logic) has no terms for evaluating one version of reality over another, and that the tropics of poesy offer an alternative way to get a handle on what's going on...

or is he proposing that you can use these four specific tropes and that they're somehow archetypal?

Derek and I have been discussing whether the poetic terms in White are just labels on the same buttons you press to key in logic operations, or whether they are truly truly different in the outcomes they evoke.

If the latter (of our speculations), one way to evaluate a work on, eg, comp history would be to evaluate its consideration of the subject through the four tropes. Does it take an ironic approach of identifying oppositions? Does it take a metaphoric approach by comparing what happened in the subject area to some other series of events? Does it identify the parts of the whole (for instance identifying the forces that made the event possible), or take a single event and claim that it represents a shift in the entire sensibility of the culture?
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