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January 15, 2005

Trope/troping/tropical (White intro)

  1. from Crowley, Sharon. Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students. New York: MacMillan, 1994. "A trope . . . is any substitution of one word or phrase for another" (194). "Neither ancient nor modern rhetoricians have ever been able to agree about what distinguishes this class of ornament from figures" (213). There are ten standard tropes.

  2. from Kellner, Hans. "Hayden White." Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.
    In order to explain and describe, we interpret. In order to interpret, we search for means of persuasion. Persuasion can only be accomplished through tropes. In Metahistory, White describes a four-part theory of tropes (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony) for historical analysis. These four tropes "describe the logically possible relationships between part and whole."

  3. from White, Hayden. "The Real, the True, and the Figurative in the Human Sciences." Profession (1986): 15-17.
    "[T]ropology is the theory of the relation between the figurative and the literalist dimensions of discourse and, as the basis of a method of inquiry, provides an instrument not only for the identification of misrepresentations in the thought of others but also for the construction of one's own discourse to the extent it is a report of facts and also—and above all—in interpretation of their meanings" (17).

Posted by senioritis at January 15, 2005 08:44 PM

Comments

Chris,
The reference librarian I called can't get into the Johns Hopkins Guide through the library's link either; there's a known problem at the JHU end. The library "outage" page (links from the main page -> databases -> "What's New In Electronic Resources -> Outages)

lists a mirror site: http://muse.uq.edu.au
for Project Muse, but the Guide itself appears to be separate and inaccessible till they fix
their router problem.

Becky, any secondary route to this info?
clo

Posted by: Carolyn Ostrander at January 8, 2005 04:06 PM