Rhetorical Device Quotes

The reality is that there's no such thing as political correctness; it's a rhetorical device to depersonalize oppression. Being cognizant of and careful with historic trauma of others is what "political correctness" means. It means that the powerful should never attack the disempowered--not because it "offends" them or hurts their "feelings" but because it perpetuates toxic, oppressive systems.

I've been in love with you for weeks.' There's no such thing,' she says. 'It's a rhetorical device. It's a bourgeois fallacy.' Haven't you ever been in love, then?' When I was younger,' she says, 'I allowed myself to be constructed by the discourse of romantic love for a while, yes.' What the hell does that mean?' We aren't essences, Vic. We aren't unique individual essences existing prior to language. There is only language.

But the reality is that there’s no such thing as political correctness; it’s a rhetorical device to depersonalize oppression.

Irony sucks, you know?" Roger nodded. "That it does. Safely confined to the pages of novels, it's an interesting rhetorical device; encountered loose in the real world, it's a beast with steel claws and mirrors for eyes.

Walk out the door knowing that if that Sudden-Death Rhetorical Device Bus were to mow you down, you would have zero regret in your style. Wear your (proverbial) fabulous hat today.

The fault, of course, is not in religion, but in the fanatic of every religion. Fanaticism remains the greatest carrier of the spores of fear, and the rhetoric of religion, with the hysteria it so readily generates, is fast becoming the readiest killing device of contemporary times.

THE MIND OF THIS COUNTRY, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.” In 1837, Emerson struck that note mainly as a rhetorical device, in a young nation obviously engaged in building up its intellectual capital.

Authority. Strength. Words. The power of a command, like a sorcerer's spell, saved me. I knew what skills I needed. I learned how to wield consonants and vowels, rhetorical devices, entire languages, like a finely-crafted blade.

In fiction, especially in texts that are framed by a storytelling situation, aporia is a favourite device of narrators to arouse curiosity in their audience, or to emphasize the extraordinary nature of the story they are telling. It is often combined with another figure of rhetoric, "aposiopesis", the incomplete sentence or unfinished utterance, usually indicated on the page by a trail of dots...

Reader, if thou intendest to go any farther, I would entreat thee to stay here a little. If thou art, as many in this pretending age, a sign or title gazer, and comest into books as Cato into the theatre, to go out again, - thou hast had thy entertainment; farewell!

That is called paralipsis, or, from the Greek, apophasis,” Rusty informed her. “A rhetorical device by which you add emphasis to a subject by professing to say little or nothing about it.” He was tapping his foot with glee. “Also, a rhetorical relative of irony, whom I believe you went to school with.

It is the simplest phrase you can imagine,” Favreau said, “three monosyllabic words that people say to each other every day.” But the speech etched itself in rhetorical lore. It inspired music videos and memes and the full range of reactions that any blockbuster receives online today, from praise to out-of-context humor to arch mockery. Obama’s “Yes, we can” refrain is an example of a rhetorical device known as epistrophe, or the repetition of words at the end of a sentence. It’s one of many famous rhetorical types, most with Greek names, based on some form of repetition. There is anaphora, which is repetition at the beginning of a sentence (Winston Churchill: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields”). There is tricolon, which is repetition in short triplicate (Abraham Lincoln: “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people”). There is epizeuxis, which is the same word repeated over and over (Nancy Pelosi: “Just remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs”). There is diacope, which is the repetition of a word or phrase with a brief interruption (Franklin D. Roosevelt: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”) or, most simply, an A-B-A structure (Sarah Palin: “Drill baby drill!”). There is antithesis, which is repetition of clause structures to juxtapose contrasting ideas (Charles Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”). There is parallelism, which is repetition of sentence structure (the paragraph you just read). Finally, there is the king of all modern speech-making tricks, antimetabole, which is rhetorical inversion: “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” There are several reasons why antimetabole is so popular. First, it’s just complex enough to disguise the fact that it’s formulaic. Second, it’s useful for highlighting an argument by drawing a clear contrast. Third, it’s quite poppy, in the Swedish songwriting sense, building a hook around two elements—A and B—and inverting them to give listeners immediate gratification and meaning. The classic structure of antimetabole is AB;BA, which is easy to remember since it spells out the name of a certain Swedish band.18 Famous ABBA examples in politics include: “Man is not the creature of circumstances. Circumstances are the creatures of men.” —Benjamin Disraeli “East and West do not mistrust each other because we are armed; we are armed because we mistrust each other.” —Ronald Reagan “The world faces a very different Russia than it did in 1991. Like all countries, Russia also faces a very different world.” —Bill Clinton “Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.” —George W. Bush “Human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.” —Hillary Clinton In particular, President John F. Kennedy made ABBA famous (and ABBA made John F. Kennedy famous). “Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind,” he said, and “Each increase of tension has produced an increase of arms; each increase of arms has produced an increase of tension,” and most famously, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Antimetabole is like the C–G–Am–F chord progression in Western pop music: When you learn it somewhere, you hear it everywhere.19 Difficult and even controversial ideas are transformed, through ABBA, into something like musical hooks.

You’re too old to be open-minded and tolerant,” said Rosie. “I’m too old not to be.” She sucked coolly on her cigarette again, then waved it at Rosie to punctuate her point. Not for the first time, Rosie envied smokers their rhetorical device. “I’ve lived life. I know what’s important. I’ve seen it all by now. You think he’s the first boy I ever saw in a bikini? He’s not. You think your generation invented kids who are different?

The New Yorker Cadwallader Colden, in his Address to the Freeholders in 1747, attacked the wealthy as tax dodgers unconcerned with the welfare of others (although he himself was wealthy) and spoke for the honesty and dependability of “the midling rank of mankind” in whom citizens could best trust “our liberty & Property.” This was to become a critically important rhetorical device for the rule of the few, who would speak to the many of “our” liberty, “our” property, “our” country.

The idea of bearing witness is often very problematic as a concept, as a rhetorical tool, and as a literary device. We no longer need James Nachtwey to fly to war-torn Bosnia. Everyone is a photographer now, so we are all witnesses. We live in a surveillance economy where we are constantly just bearing witness. Which means that the capacity to see does not automatically become the capacity for action. What is the function of seeing something, and saying something, if it doesn’t lead to concrete action or change?

[Professor Greene's] reaction to GAMAY, as published in the Yale Daily News, fairly took one's breath away. He fondled the word "fascist" as though he had come up with a Dead Sea Scroll vouchsafing the key word to the understanding of God and Man at Yale. In a few sentences he used the term thrice. "Mr. Buckley has done Yale a great service" (how I would tire of this pedestrian rhetorical device), "and he may well do the cause of liberal education in America an even greater service, by stating the fascist alternative to liberalism. This fascist thesis . . . This . . . pure fascism . . . What more could Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin ask for . . . ?" (They asked for, and got, a great deal more.) What survives, from such stuff as this, is ne-plus-ultra relativism, idiot nihlism. "What is required," Professor Greene spoke, "is more, not less tolerance--not the tolerance of indifference, but the tolerance of honest respect for divergent convictions and the determination of all that such divergent opinions be heard without administrative censorship. I try my best in the classroom to expound and defend my faith, when it is relevant, as honestly and persuasively as I can. But I can do so only because many of my colleagues are expounding and defending their contrasting faiths, or skepticisms, as openly and honestly as I am mine." A professor of philosophy! Question: What is the 1) ethical, 2) philosophical, or 3) epistemological argument for requiring continued tolerance of ideas whose discrediting it is the purpose of education to effect? What ethical code (in the Bible? in Plato? Kant? Hume?) requires "honest respect" for any divergent conviction?

Middle-class Americans might be invited to join a new elite by attacks against the corruption of the established rich. The New Yorker Cadwallader Colden, in his Address to the Freeholders in 1747, attacked the wealthy as tax dodgers unconcerned with the welfare of others (although he himself was wealthy) and spoke for the honesty and dependability of “the midling rank of mankind” in whom citizens could best trust “our liberty & Property.” This was to become a critically important rhetorical device for the rule of the few, who would speak to the many of “our” liberty, “our” property, “our” country.

Anaphora is effective in the building of a movement because it increases the intensity of an idea, and intense ideas sear themselves into our brain. There’s a reason why Winston Churchill chose anaphora as his go-to rhetorical device to rally the British people in World War II: We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. Business leaders often shy away from anaphora because they believe it’s a tool reserved for political speeches. Actually, anaphora can be seamlessly and comfortably incorporated into business presentations meant to inspire audiences to see the world differently.

He singled out aspects of Quality such as unity, vividness, authority, economy, sensitivity, clarity, emphasis, flow, suspense, brilliance, precision, proportion, depth and so on; kept each of these as poorly defined as Quality itself, but demonstrated them by the same class reading techniques. He showed how the aspect of Quality called unity, the hanging-togetherness of a story, could be improved with a technique called an outline. The authority of an argument could be jacked up with a technique called footnotes, which gives authoritative reference. Outlines and footnotes are standard things taught in all freshman composition classes, but now as devices for improving Quality they had a purpose. And if a student turned in a bunch of dumb references or a sloppy outline that showed he was just fulfilling an assignment by rote, he could be told that while his paper may have fulfilled the letter of the assignment it obviously didn’t fulfill the goal of Quality, and was therefore worthless.

Darwin singled out the eye as posing a particularly challenging problem: 'To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.' Creationists gleefully quote this sentence again and again. Needless to say, they never quote what follows. Darwin's fulsomely free confession turned out to be a rhetorical device. He was drawing his opponents towards him so that his punch, when it came, struck the harder. The punch, of course, was Darwin's effortless explanation of exactly how the eye evolved by gradual degrees. Darwin may not have used the phrase 'irreducible complexity', or 'the smooth gradient up Mount Improbable', but he clearly understood the principle of both. 'What is the use of half an eye?' and 'What is the use of half a wing?' are both instances of the argument from 'irreducible complexity'. A functioning unit is said to be irreducibly complex if the removal of one of its parts causes the whole to cease functioning. This has been assumed to be self-evident for both eyes and wings. But as soon as we give these assumptions a moment's thought, we immediately see the fallacy. A cataract patient with the lens of her eye surgically removed can't see clear images without glasses, but can see enough not to bump into a tree or fall over a cliff. Half a wing is indeed not as good as a whole wing, but it is certainly better than no wing at all. Half a wing could save your life by easing your fall from a tree of a certain height. And 51 per cent of a wing could save you if you fall from a slightly taller tree. Whatever fraction of a wing you have, there is a fall from which it will save your life where a slightly smaller winglet would not. The thought experiment of trees of different height, from which one might fall, is just one way to see, in theory, that there must be a smooth gradient of advantage all the way from 1 per cent of a wing to 100 per cent. The forests are replete with gliding or parachuting animals illustrating, in practice, every step of the way up that particular slope of Mount Improbable. By analogy with the trees of different height, it is easy to imagine situations in which half an eye would save the life of an animal where 49 per cent of an eye would not. Smooth gradients are provided by variations in lighting conditions, variations in the distance at which you catch sight of your prey—or your predators. And, as with wings and flight surfaces, plausible intermediates are not only easy to imagine: they are abundant all around the animal kingdom. A flatworm has an eye that, by any sensible measure, is less than half a human eye. Nautilus (and perhaps its extinct ammonite cousins who dominated Paleozoic and Mesozoic seas) has an eye that is intermediate in quality between flatworm and human. Unlike the flatworm eye, which can detect light and shade but see no image, the Nautilus 'pinhole camera' eye makes a real image; but it is a blurred and dim image compared to ours. It would be spurious precision to put numbers on the improvement, but nobody could sanely deny that these invertebrate eyes, and many others, are all better than no eye at all, and all lie on a continuous and shallow slope up Mount Improbable, with our eyes near a peak—not the highest peak but a high one.

told his supporters that the campaign had “pushed this country in the direction of peace,” adding, “If we pushed the day of peace just one day closer, then every minute and every hour and every bone-crushing effort in this campaign was worth the entire effort.” When there is no overriding issue on which a campaign was based, the losing candidates have often offered a laundry list of causes for which they promise to keep fighting. This particular rhetorical device has been

Cartoons in newspapers have proven to be an effective means of rallying support during times of war, often by the simple device of depicting the enemy as subhuman or even monstrous — much as they did during the Reformation.

Lin­guists have a name for a state­ment with a seem­ingly inevitable des­ti­na­tion that ends up some­where else: a gar­den path sen­tence. It’s typ­i­cal in com­edy, as in a mil­lion Grou­cho Marx lines: “Out­side of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” This device is also called a “para­pros­dokian,” which means “con­trary to expec­ta­tion,” though there is some con­tro­versy over whether this is really a term from clas­si­cal rhetoric or a mod­ern neologism.

There, all people are seen as born equally free, meaning that each is presumptively at liberty to act, until those who would limit a person’s freedom give good reasons for such limits. This presumption of liberty is not just a rhetorical device or an arbitrary preference for a convenient starting point in philosophical debates. Rather, it makes clear that those who claim the right to rule others have the burden themselves to justify that claim. That is what the right to equal freedom means: just as the person who asserts a claim in any argument has the responsibility to prove that claim, so one cannot be expected to prove he ought to be free.

We can easily change what President Bush said, to better convey his meaning and to strengthen the sound of his statement. There are two distinct parallelisms at work here, each of which would be better served by standing alone. One way of rewriting it would be: I like my buddies from west Texas. I liked them when I was young, I liked them when I was middle-aged, and I’ll like them when I’m old.

...but the problem was more fundamental. Powell and the State Department hoped an agreement with North Korea would be a positive step reducing the threat of nuclear war. Bush, Cheney, and the Vulcans, wedded to a view of the world as a Manichean contest between good and evil, rejected the idea of negotiating with a state they deemed immoral. If the United States had brought the evil empire of the Soviet Union to its knees, why deal with a state vastly smaller, weaker, and more repressive? Bush's response to Kim Dae-Jung's visit set the tone for the administration. The United States would not enter into an agreement that kept a brutal regime in power. For Bush, foreign policy was an exercise in morality. That appealed to his religious fervor, and greatly simplified dealing with the world beyond America's borders. 'I've got a visceral reaction to this guy...Maybe it's my religion, but I feel passionate about this.' Bush's personalization of foreign policy and his refusal to deal with North Korea was the first of a multitude of errors that came to haunt his presidency. Instead of bringing a denuclearized North Korea peacefully into the family of nations, as seemed within reach in 2001, the Bush administration isolated the government in Pyongyang hoping for its collapse. In the years following, North Korea continued to be an intractable problem for the administration. By the end of Bush's presidency, North Korea had tested a nuclear device and was believed to have tripled its stock of plutonium, accumulating enough for at least six nuclear weapons. Aside from their attachment to the idea of American hegemony, the worldview of Bush, Cheney, and the Vulcans was predicated on a false reading of history. A keystone belief was that Ronald Reagan's harsh rhetoric and policy of firmness had forced the collapse of the Soviet Union and ended the Cold War. In actuality, Ronald Reagan's harsh rhetoric during his first three years in office actually intensified the Cold War and heightened Soviet resistance. Not until Reagan changed course, replaced Alexander Haig with George Schultz, and held out an olive branch to the Soviets did the Cold War begin to thaw. Beginning with the Geneva summit in 1985, Reagan would meet with Gorbachev five times in the next three years, including a precedent-shattering visit to the Kremlin and Red Square. What about the 'evil empire' the president was asked. 'I was talking about another time, another era,' said Reagan. President Reagan deserves full credit for ending the Cold War. But it ended because of his willingness to negotiate with Gorbachev and establish a relationship of mutual trust. For Bush, Cheney, and the Vulcans, this was a lesson they had not learned. (p.188-189)

Ian Bogost writes about a ‘rhetoric of failure’ in games designed so that the player cannot win (2007, 85). One could put Tetris or Space Invaders in such a category – the blocks or missiles keep falling until the player fails to keep them at bay, meaning that you will always, ultimately, lose the game. The winning situation, if there is one, is to get a higher score than your friends. Perhaps, as Janet Murray wrote of Tetris, this is a metaphor for a typical American life (1997, 144).

People are often attracted to things which are forbidden to them. During the 1920s, for example, Prohibition in the United States caused illicit alcohol sales to skyrocket.

Google Earth was also under fire, blamed for aiding a deadly terrorist attack in Mumbai, but Hanke insisted that the debate over Google Earth or Street View had “mostly died off” in “the West.” He cleverly equated any resistance to Google’s incursions with the anti-freedom-of-expression interests of authoritarian governments and their “closed information societies.”35 This would become a standard rhetorical device for Google and its allies as they executed their offense.

The paths taken by strollers consist of a series of turnings and returnings that can be likened to “turns of phrase” or “stylistic devices”. A perambulatory rhetoric does exist. The art of “turning” a phrase has its counterpart in the art of “turning” course.

It was on the Thursday after September 11 that Persians first started making sense to me. All those years I’d been teaching it, I’d failed to notice the most obviously remarkable thing about it—the device that transmutes the raw and chaotic stuff of lived history into something bigger, something with a universal resonance. As I have said, the play was produced a mere eight years after the Greeks’ fabulous and unexpected victory over their immense foe. How much more striking, then, that Aeschylus—who, it’s perhaps necessary to point out, fought in the Persian Wars himself and lost a brother, called Cynegirus, in the aftermath of the great triumph at Marathon, a death that would become a popular talking point in the later Greek rhetoric about heroism— should have chosen to focus his imaginative sympathy not on the exulting Greeks, but on the sorrowing Persians. Which is to say that, in the very moment of their greatest victory, he asked his fellow Athenians to think radically, to imagine something outside of their own experience, to situate the feelings they were having just then—about themselves, about those others—in a vaster frame: one in which they might see that present triumph could induce a complacency that just might bring about future disaster.

Cr nn bsio t, Philaen? Calva es. Cr nn bsio t, Philaen? Rfa es. Cr nn bsio t, Philaen? Lusca es. Martial Epig. 2.33: The Epigrams are usually referenced, as here, by book and poem number; this poem, targeted at poor Philaenis, had an obscene denouement in its fourth and final verse, which I have dutifully omitted! The striking repetition, the technical term for which is ANAPHORA, was a favorite poetic and rhetorical device, typically used to achieve some sort of emphasis. Meter: hendecasyllabic, an “11-syllable” verse rhythm often employed by Catullus and Martial.

was a rhetorically deft presentation, delivered by a master storyteller. But there were problems with the story. Keynes himself had predicted a postwar boom, not a depression (so had Galbraith, in “194Q”). He had never claimed that monetary policy didn’t matter. He had opposed using high interest rates as a policy device because they were the most socially destructive method available for bringing down prices. He never claimed it didn’t work. And although it was true that Keynes had

There’s plenty of love in the world, but there’s even more hate. In fact, every time love increases, hate increases even more. Love is always directed towards a minority (or even just one person), and therefore indifference or active hate is directed towards the majority. Since love is conferred on the minority and hate on the majority, the growth of hate always outstrips that of love. Our world is now fantastically full of hate, and the more it preaches the rhetoric of “love”, the more the hate grows. The Devil himself couldn’t have constructed any better device than love for spreading hate!

It is now clear that the kōan about Mahakasyapa's receiving the flower after Sakyamuni's wordless sermon, as well as slogans like "special transmission outside the teaching" and "no reliance on words and letters"—originally separate items that came to be linked in a famous Zen motto attributed to Bodhidharma—were created in the Sung dynasty. First making their appearance in eleventh-century transmissions of the lamp texts, including the Chingte chuan-teng lu (1004) and the T'ien-sheng kuang-teng lu (1036), these rhetorical devices were designed to support the autonomous identity of Zen in an era of competition with neo-Confucianism and are not to be regarded as accurate expressions of the period they are said to represent. A close examination of sources reveals that Tang masters with a reputation for irreverence and blasphemy were often quite conservative in their approach to doctrine by citing (rather than rejecting) Mahayana sutras in support of teachings that were not so distinct from, and were actually very much in accord with, contemporary Buddhist schools.

You may recall that he concluded there are men who are capable of being persuaded of a truth through dialectic, which is to say sweet reason, or if you prefer, the inexorable progression of logic. And then, he asserted there are also those who cannot be instructed and therefore cannot be convinced of anything through argument based on knowledge, but rather require manipulation and persuasion through having their emotions played upon, which device he calls rhetoric.

Classical rhetoric allowed the speaker inventio—the choice of a topic and the division of the topic into constituent parts, along with elaborate arguments and devices to support the speaker’s thesis. For Paul, however, there is always one topic: Jesus. Wherever we go in the Bible, Jesus is the main subject. And even the breakdown of our topic is not completely left up to us—we are to lay out the topics and points about Jesus that the biblical text itself gives us. We must “confine ourselves” to Jesus. Yet I can speak from forty years of experience as a preacher to tell you that the story of this one individual never needs to become repetitious—it contains the whole history of the universe and of humankind alike and is the only resolution of the plotlines of every one of our lives.

It is best to avoid analogy except for purposes of suggestion, or as a rhetorical device for explaining an idea already arrived at by other means.

From concept,

This sentence is filled with unnecessary words, phrases and rhetorical throat-clearing devices and is marked by a generally bombastic tone.

As the rhetoric and power structures of old dissolve, from monarchy to capitalism to the space between a vocalized phrase and its indefinable mental inclination, this urge becomes heightened. And eventually, this conflict absorbs and finds its home within that foundation from whence it is borne, and from where its impact will fractal into every other component of power and being; the place where this dysphoria and this exchange occurs, now that we have unloosed the stop from our pressured throats, of the place it occurs, of the place it will be fought, of the place where it matters most- the mind. Because Mind as we know it and matter itself are no longer so perceptually separate. You are reading these words right now, but how? The voice is no longer an element confined in expression to the physical body. I press buttons with letters on them, just as my tongue presses the palate of my mouth as my diaphragm rises and I have told you something by the sound of my voice, I tell you something now, and you hear me, as we both engage with a device rooted in external reality- a computer screen, or the fluorescent face of a silicon phone- and you cannot tell me that Mind and this device through which we Know the things and engage with things and express things of the nature which the Mind is crafted by and through- are separate. Tell me you are not already integrated with this device you hold in your hands. Now this- this nexus- will be the stage where the battles of yore, which were fought upon dirt and in the sand and in lush, wild forests with sticks and spears and gunpowder, will now meet and address each other by name, and where they will wreak change with their fury as war is waged for territory of a different kind. And because of this, congratulations- you will be the stage, you will be the weapon, you will stand in the crossfire of wars that are not your own, as men always have through history and time, and “war” will be a different kind of thing. And, staying true to another law of humankind, like bronze, like iron, like steel, the same things that forge our tools will also craft our weapons. We don’t need nukes. We have the internet.

the case with Heidegger, Horkheimer, and Adorno. Their prose wears its difficulty as a badge of pride, on the grounds that philosophy needs to be challenging if there is to be any point to it.38 By employing allusions, ambiguities, word play, and an array of other rhetorical devices, these thinkers attempt to counter what they see as the increasing scientification and commercialization of language and thought.

As I read on, however, the prose itself rather than the content became the center of my attention. It was unlike the books they had made me read at school and had nothing to do with the mysteries I used to check out of the library. Later, when I finally went to college, I would be able to trace Vanner’s literary influences and consider his novel from a formal point of view (even if he was never assigned reading for any of the courses I took, since his work was out of print and already quite unavailable). Yet back then I had never experienced anything like that language. And it spoke to me. It was my first time reading something that existed in a vague space between the intellectual and the emotional. Since that moment I have identified that ambiguous territory as the exclusive domain of literature. I also understood at some point that this ambiguity could only work in conjunction with extreme discipline—the calm precision of Vanner’s sentences, his unfussy vocabulary, his reluctance to deploy the rhetorical devices we identify with “artistic prose” while still retaining a distinctive style. Lucidity, he seems to suggest, is the best hiding place for deeper meaning—much like a transparent thing stacked in between others. My literary taste has changed since then, and Bonds has been displaced by other books. But Vanner gave me my first glimpse of that elusive region between reason and feeling and made me want to chart it in my own writing.

The efforts to trace formal rhetorical devices back to Homer produced results conveniently available in the work known as De Vita et Poesi Homeri, which has come down to us among Plutarch's Moralia. The author sets out to prove that essentially everything in the form and content of literature, as well as in philosophical thought, was anticipated by Homer: figures of speech, adaptations of regular grammatical usage, figures of thought, styles of rhetoric, types of speech, and much else. The treatise lists about thirty-eight figures of speech and thought (there is some overlap between the two), and provides Homeric examples of each. It is significant that with a few exceptions (falling in the areas of military strategy and other practical aspects of culture) the author achieves his purpose without undue strain: all the figures identified by later teachers of rhetoric do occur in Homer, and the study testifies to the richness of the decorative features of Homeric style. This richness need not, of course, be the product of a sophisticated m d highly developed literary style, still less of a formal rhetorical teaching, and many of the figures are natural features of speech, found in the ordinary discourse of uneducated people. However, the frequency and variety of their occurrence within the conventional epic diction suggests that in this respect, as in all others, Homer is both making the fullest use of techniques developed by his predecessors and surpassing their achievement.

The efforts to trace formal rhetorical devices back to Homer produced results conveniently available in the work known as De Vita et Poesi Homeri, which has come down to us among Plutarch's Moralia. The author sets out to prove that essentially everything in the form and content of literature, as well as in philosophical thought, was anticipated by Homer: figures of speech, adaptations of regular grammatical usage, figures of thought, styles of rhetoric, types of speech, and much else. The treatise lists about thirty-eight figures of speech and thought (there is some overlap between the two), and provides Homeric examples of each. It is significant that with a few exceptions (falling in the areas of military strategy and other practical aspects of culture) the author achieves his purpose without undue strain: all the figures identified by later teachers of rhetoric do occur in Homer, and the study testifies to the richness of the decorative features of Homeric style. This richness need not, of course, be the product of a sophisticated and highly developed literary style, still less of a formal rhetorical teaching, and many of the figures are natural features of speech, found in the ordinary discourse of uneducated people. However, the frequency and variety of their occurrence within the conventional epic diction suggests that in this respect, as in all others, Homer is both making the fullest use of techniques developed by his predecessors and surpassing their achievement.