The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

mind’, caught, allegedly, from a somewhat
too free association with the two thousand
years of rhetorical tradition which he outlines
in a hundred pages of prefatory
material. We are left with the provocative if
eristic implication that Gorgias of Leontini
made a demonstrable and significant
contribution to Hamlet.
All of this is not to say that the ‘garden
of eloquence’ is naught but a jungle of
verbiage, nor to disparage the occasional
fine flowerings in the pioneer work of
such twentieth-century writers as Father
Ong, Wayne C. Booth, Richard McKeon
and Kenneth Burke. A fair case could
even be made out to show that the infinite
variety and lack of cohesion in rhetoric
and rhetorical studies is favourable to
independent thought, original research
and heuristic scholarship. And certainly
the long and complex history of the
influence of rhetoric on Western thought
is too important a subject to be ignored
by serious investigators into language and
literature. Yet the fact remains that the
resurgence in the twentieth century of
scholarly interest in rhetoric did not produce
a substantial body of important
thought or impressive research. There is
not a single well-regarded general history
of the subject, there are surprisingly few
careful studies of the theories held in
various periods, and there is a marked
paucity of modern theoretical treatises
which will withstand more than a few
minutes’ critical scrutiny. And beyond
that, the relationships of rhetoric to history,
literature, linguistics, homiletics,
law and philosophy have seldom been
investigated in any detail, let alone understood
on more than a superficial level.
Looked at from a constructive point of
view these all too obvious gaps and shortcomings
in rhetorical studies constitute the
one major advantage which rhetoric has
over many of its academic neighbours: it
Rhizome 205
has yet to be exploited to the point where
its body of knowledge is inevitably repetitious,
replete with miniscule observations
and haunted by portents of collision with
dead ends.
Cf. STYLE, a term with a similar basic
meaning and a similar wide range of
connotations and thus power to evoke
contention. Both ‘style’ and ‘rhetoric’
signify systems of conventional (hence,
variously prescriptively teachable) verbal
devices for the ‘ornamentation’ of a discourse.
If style often suggests artificiality,
self-indulgence or preciousness, rhetoric,
because it is initially a verbal art for
persuasion often connotes design, insincerity,
even lies. Alternatively, the
availability of hundreds of rhetorical
handbooks – lists and examples of figures
and schemes – produced over the last two
thousand years may suggest a mechanical
shallowness of linguistic technique.
Attempts to make the term exploratory
and critical rather than normative and
technical (e.g. I. A. Richards, Philosophy
of Rhetoric, 1936; Wayne C. Booth, The
Rhetoric of Fiction, 1961) play down the
evaluative dimension and the sinister side
of ‘persuasion’. Booth’s book also shows
that it is, unfortunately, all too easy to
neglect the linguistic aspects of persuasion;
here ‘rhetoric’ is being used in an
essentially untraditional sense.
Wimsatt and Beardsley’s Literary
Criticism, A Short History (1957)
provides an elementary account of the
classical and medieval tradition.
TGW
Rhizome The term ‘rhizome’ was
first used by the French writing/thinking
team of Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) and
Félix Guattari (1930–92) in 1976,
although its currency as a theoretical
concept derives from the introduction to
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and