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A General Rhetoric
French
288 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1970
About the author
Jacques Dubois
129 booksJacques Dubois (1933–2026) was a Belgian literary theorist and academic who was Professor Emeritus of Literature at the Université de Liège. He invented the concept of the Literary Institution following the work of Pierre Bourdieu by analogy with other social institutions such as military, medical, and political. He was also a Member of the Groupe μ. In 1983, he was the main editor of the Manifesto for Walloon culture.
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March 11, 2019
Although some familiarity with literary devices — reading an introduction to the main ones would be a good idea —, and some basics of semiotics may be needed, as well as a few trips to Wikipedia to grasp some technical terms such as classeme, this book is surprisingly accessible. It strives to define classical rhetorical devices from first principles, and with barely any reference to the interpretation of those devices.
The approach is structuralist: the authors wanted to explain the inner workings of rhetorical devices without having to referrer to specific psychological or cultural phenomena besides the shared knowledge of some sort of baseline of what constitutes transparent language. Indeed, a rhetorical device in their view is a deviation from a "zeroth degree" which is affected by culture, norms of a literary genre, and the expectations created by an author. Starting from that, they analyze deviations from the zeroth degree at every level of language: the components of words, syntax, meaning, and the logical level (where you evaluate whether something can be true or not). They also draft how one could approach in the same way the levels of characterization, of narration, and how the context created by the text affects the zeroth degree. About narration, a structuralist account was given later by Genette in Narrative Discourse, and much earlier by Shklovsky in Theory of Prose. Note that later another book was published by the same collective about the interpretation readers can make of rhetorical devices in A Rhetoric of Poetry, thus furthering their project and distancing themselves further from a strict structuralist account of language and literature.
While some may find this kind of approach "dry", I think if you are dissatisfied with your intuition and spontaneous use of literary devices, having the powerful tools given by A General Rhetoric to think about them can greatly help your writing and finally dare to try using those devices you previously found mysterious or thought you could only use in a disappointing way. For example, I was already aware of the devices affecting syntax and found the effects they produced fascinating, but could not understand how one could use them besides the great masters; but now I'm far less afraid of them, and it's mostly thanks to this book. To a lesser degree, I could say the same thing about metonymies and how they differ from metaphors, about which this books gives a very interesting theory.
The approach is structuralist: the authors wanted to explain the inner workings of rhetorical devices without having to referrer to specific psychological or cultural phenomena besides the shared knowledge of some sort of baseline of what constitutes transparent language. Indeed, a rhetorical device in their view is a deviation from a "zeroth degree" which is affected by culture, norms of a literary genre, and the expectations created by an author. Starting from that, they analyze deviations from the zeroth degree at every level of language: the components of words, syntax, meaning, and the logical level (where you evaluate whether something can be true or not). They also draft how one could approach in the same way the levels of characterization, of narration, and how the context created by the text affects the zeroth degree. About narration, a structuralist account was given later by Genette in Narrative Discourse, and much earlier by Shklovsky in Theory of Prose. Note that later another book was published by the same collective about the interpretation readers can make of rhetorical devices in A Rhetoric of Poetry, thus furthering their project and distancing themselves further from a strict structuralist account of language and literature.
While some may find this kind of approach "dry", I think if you are dissatisfied with your intuition and spontaneous use of literary devices, having the powerful tools given by A General Rhetoric to think about them can greatly help your writing and finally dare to try using those devices you previously found mysterious or thought you could only use in a disappointing way. For example, I was already aware of the devices affecting syntax and found the effects they produced fascinating, but could not understand how one could use them besides the great masters; but now I'm far less afraid of them, and it's mostly thanks to this book. To a lesser degree, I could say the same thing about metonymies and how they differ from metaphors, about which this books gives a very interesting theory.
Displaying 1 of 1 review