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February 09, 2005
Emplotment of Roen, Brown and Enos collection
Living Rhetoric and Composition: Stories of the Discipline
is a collection of stories by people who "fell in love" (xi) with the field. The editors collected "the professional histories of 19 rhetoricians and compositionists who explain how they came to fall in love with the written word and teaching" (xv). It may be a simplistic move on my part, but if emplotment as described by White is either romance, tragedy, comedy, satire, epic, etc. Then I would have to say this collection is emplotted like a romance. The goal was to tell a love story, actually 19 love stories, about people who met and, in a sense, married their profession. Though there are at times moments of sadness and elements of humor, the overarching theme of romance was set by the editors and created by the contributors.
In terms of the tropes of metaphor, metonymy, synechoche, and irony, I would classify this work as synecdoche as it understands "the particular as a microcosm of a macroscopic totality" (73). In other words, the differing narratives are expected to reveal truths that can "provide an orientation to the profession" (xvii).
Posted by vwatts at February 9, 2005 01:48 PM