Due Monday, 9/10 in Class. You can either bring in your chosen terms on a separate page, or print this assignment sheet.
Here are some of the flowers, the tropes, of rhetoric that will likely be a bit less familiar to you:
Paralipsis: Stating and drawing attention to something in the very act of pretending to pass it over. A kind of irony.
Pleonasm: Use of more words than is necessary semantically. Rhetorical repetition that is grammatically superfluous.
Epistrophe: Ending a series of lines, phrases, clauses, or sentences with the same word or words.
Litotes: Deliberate understatement, especially when expressing a thought by denying its opposite.
Ennoia: A kind of purposeful holding back of information that nevertheless hints at what is meant. A kind of circuitous speaking.
Effictio: A verbal depiction of someone’s body, often from head to toe.
Chiasmus: Repetition of ideas in inverted order.
Asyndenon: The omission of conjunctions between clauses, often resulting in a hurried rhythm or vehement effect.
The pieces we’re reading next week (Blundell, Strauss, Harris) are extraordinarily rich in their use of rhetoric. Browse the flowers of rhetoric along the right-hand column on the Forest of Rhetoric site, and see if you can pluck out 3-5 of them that describe something one of our authors does. Again, it’s not like we’re going to say, in our RAs, that so-and-so used litotes on this or that page, but having this trope in mind—a very common trope that we all have used—might help us notice or unpack very specific rhetorical strategies that the author employs.
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