Levels of Troping

In Killingsworth "Appeal Through Tropes" the normal convention of a trope being a "figure of speech" is asked to be left behind and for us to take in the possibility of tropes being more "inclusive" rather than simply a figure (208). In my PE for class I looked at tropes tools for not only literature, but because they are so frequently used in everyday speech, but everyday life in terms of communication and identification. I asked myself, inclusive of what? So in the quest for inclusiveness I realized that aspects of life (or discourse as Prof. Graban directed me) are the basis of troping. Literature is only useful if applicable to life (discourse) in a larger sense of using what we learn from literature and applying the text to something physical and three dimensional. That being said, just because a piece of literature may seem nothing more than pleasurable and purely for entertainment, the use of tropes is still usual (the lack of being seemingly impossible).

I looked at tropes in the larger lens of human relations and interacting with society. While reading, my understanding of the different tropes and their relationships to each other, then to the understanding and successful usage of them as a construction of knowledge. Construction implies there is a base, a building upwards. It may have simply been the organization of his essay that lead me to this idea, but I now view tropes as a stepping ladder, upon which the bottom step is the trope metaphor. Metaphor is the identification trope which attempts to bridge conceptual gaps (209). Once a comparison is established, contiguity comes next. Metonymy is the association tropes and is about habitual associations rather than shared attributes or features (209). After people establish associations with their identities, effective simplification is highlighted in terms of communicating. Synecdoche is the trope of representation, and is used for simplification and focusing attention. It is a device of emphasis (213). After people identify they then associate with others, which from there comes a sense of representation. I believe the next step is representation of self while among the representation and association, also known as irony. Irony is saying one thing and meaning another. I think it is the establishment of understanding the other three tropes and using them successfully in conversation with each other. Irony is the trope of distance, it works at the level of individual phrases and at the larger level of whole discourses (214).