Killingsworth - Tropes

Through an appendix of his text, A Grammar of Motives – “Four Master Tropes,” (following Giambattista Vico’s scholarly thoughts), “Burke connects four classical figures with four habits of mind of conceptual attitudes more easily recognized by modern readers: metaphor with perspective, metonymy with reduction, synecdoche with representation and irony with dialectic (503)” (Killingsworth, 123). With this distinction made, M Jimmie Killingsworth moves to assess the differences between how we come to understand and identify these tropes.

Beginning with metaphor, Killingsworth first introduces metaphor as most would likely describe it – in distinguishing the technique as separate from simile. But beyond this distinction, Killingsworth wants something different. Rather than identifying metaphor as a comparison, she wants us to view it as an “identification – a way of bring together seemingly unlike things” (123). She asserts that “In this sense, metaphor is a strong identification, while simile and analogy are more cautious attempts to link unlike things” (123). This is a very important assertion to note, because Killingsworth soon states that “In this way, we can see that metaphor is not merely one technique among many but is instead a crucial way of thinking, attempt to bridge conceptual gaps, a mental activity at the very heart of rhetoric” (123). He essentially finds that metaphor is only a small portion of the required tools that a human utilizes to “find common ground among persons, places, things and ideas usually divided” (123). He cites an example on the following page (124) that, as he describes, places the metaphor in a type of equation; like a ratio. “Breath is to human life as wind is to the season of autumn” (124) – this immediately permits the audience to view the autumn season that is being described as an animated entity. “The appeal to nature thus becomes a way of reconciling human beings to the passage of time” (124). A very common aspect of metaphor comes in the appeal to the human body – in a method of identification and understanding. We commonly use bodily metaphors to express an understandable and identifiable psychological state – example; “I’m feeling low today” is an expression that itself expresses a lack of energy – with the “ultimate ‘down’ state” as death (125).

Metonymy is introduced as the “substituting (of) a thing for a closely associated (contiguous) thing” (127). A strong example of this substitution can be observed in our understanding of the term “The Crown” as another reference to the Queen of England – or how we identify “Washington” as a synonymous symbol of our government. The best example of a metonym comes with Captain Ahab and the white whale that we know as Moby Dick. The whale comes to represent many things; the inscrutable and impossible-to-understand nature as well as Ahab’s failure in life – manifesting the opportunity for him to symbolically end his life’s failure. Representation, much like metonymy, is used as a method of substitution – however the distinction between the two should be made. “The main function of synecdoche in these and all other cases is to simplify and focus the attention; it is a device of emphasis” (131). For example, “Say you are writing a paper on problems in education aid, for an example, you choose a story about a bad teacher you had in high school. Your example serves a representative function; your hope is that your readers will have had similar experiences that, taken together with yours, form something like a data set. Your story is a representative part of the whole set” (131).