Sunday, October 30, 2011
Tropes and Sublimity
Killingsworth's extended look at tropes was rather intriguing, especially in the way that he extends how the different types of tropes work and interact with so many different parts of rhetoric and language in general. He really makes a great argument for how essential tropes are in language and rhetoric. Killingsworth writes, "Metaphor is everywhere, and so is the kind of value-laden, emotional language usually associated with rhetoric, no matter how hard scientific and academic writers may try to avoid it.(122)" This mention of "emotional language" somewhat hearkens back to Longinus's notion of sublimity in writing. Tropes somewhat take on a role as a piece of or contributor to sublimity. Metaphor and other types of trope would give Longinus's "greatness of thought" idea the opportunity too be sublime in the way that it is written. Longinus might say that Homer's Iliad has a large amount of trope adding to its sublimity while the Odyssey doesn't use it as much when he compares the two works as both having potential of sublimity, but Homer only executes it in the Iliad. If how a work is written is part of what can gauge a literary work's sublimity, then the use of tropes presumably would add to the sublime value of that literary work as well. Sublimity makes a text more vivid and realistic, and as Killingsworth explains, "Tropes tend to connect the abstract to the concrete. (122)" The more that a reader can in a sense "see" the events that are being written about, the more sublime a text should be considered. Tropes allow for a better understanding of a writing by adding another dimension to explanation in language.
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I really like the connection you have made between Killingsworth's definition of tropes and the issue of the sublime. As you mentioned, metaphors, specifically, are easily recognizable and occur so frequently that their use makes it easier for people to understanding any given situation or idea. To further this point, Killingsworth writes, "metaphor is not merely one technique among many but is instead a crucial way of thinking, an attempt to bridge conceptual gaps, a mental activity at the very heart of rhetoric" (123). Based on this statement, it seems that metaphors themselves, can be viewed as tools that are able to enhance language and general comprehension. For example, in a conversation, if the topic being discussed is not being properly interpreted by one of the participants, it is likely that the speaker may utilize a metaphor to make a relatable comparison. Therefore, the use of the figure of speech not only encourages creativity within text, it simplifies the communication process.
ReplyDeleteI don't quite think that it's totally safe to say that the primary difference between the Illiad and the Odyssey was the use of tropes and I'm not quite sure what role tropes play in sublimity. I actually think that tropes may destroy sublimity. It seemed that one of the thing that many of the paintings that we looked at in class was that there was a lot about the painting that we didn't know and just had to guess or assume or imagine on our own. And the whole point of the metaphor is to make the audience understand thus eliminating all of the space that we can use our imagination.
ReplyDeleteI think I agree with BrMccla a little bit,the paintings in the Sublime style weren't exactly vivid, I actually found them to be quite ambiguous. Metaphor on the other hand, the goal of metaphor seems to be to allow the reader to have insight on the author's definition of a thought, concept, word etc. The Sublime allows the reader to put his own meaning into the discourse, but metaphor makes things more rigid maybe?
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