Tropes and Public Secrets

In "Appeal Through Tropes", Killingsworth discuses the different types of tropes and there effects on language. He starts by saying that "trope" in its most basic form is a figure of speech. He then narrows his use of the word trope in saying "I prefer the term trope to figure of speech because figures of speech are also figures of thought and figures of writing" (121). He uses trope because it is more inclusive (121). Killingsworth gives us four different tropes: Identification/Metaphor, Association/Metonymy, Representation/synecdoche and Distance/Irony. He makes his use of trope more concrete but still flexible in saying that in rhetorical language the use of tropes is "pervasive and unavoidable" (122). Tropes are spread throughout our language and can't be avoided. Killingworth has to see the term as flexible because he believes that tropes are "expressing the emotional quality of our relationship to the world" (122). Since tropes deal with the emotional, they can be left to interpretation; so Killingsworth sees them as being flexible enough to argue for their persuasive power and importance. Tropes are ways to create persuasiveness and to enhance language. 

The first trope Killingsworth discusses is identification/metaphor. Killingsworth defines metaphor as "a way of bringing together seemingly unlike things" (123).  Metaphor is a "crucial way of thinking, an attempt to bridge conceptual gaps" (123) This trope is at the very heart of Sharon Daniel's Public Secrets. She brings together two different things, people in prison and people outside of prison, as a way to show the injustice of our judicial system and how awful our prisons can be. Through this project, the audience is able to see the misunderstanding of inmates that happens by the public, the people on the outside of the prison walls. She uses this project to "bridge the conceptual gaps" seen in the ways the public views prisons. There is also a clear irony going on in Public Secrets. Killingsworth says that the trope of irony "involves inversions and reversals. It turns meanings and expectations upside down. It often involves saying one thing and meaning another” (131). You can see this in the title. Public means concerning the people as a whole and existing in open view. If something is public it is open to everyone. The word secret deals with keeping some information quite or not telling everyone. The title is ironic in that the two words used in the title are essentially opposites. The titles of the different sections show irony too. Inside/Outside, Bare-life/Human-life, and Public Secrets/ Utopia are all "inversions and reversals" and mean different things.

Public Secrets can be interpreted through heteroglossia. Killingsworth is not simply narrating her findings but allows many inmates and individuals to narrate their own stories.  In "Discourse in the Novel", Bakhtin talks about heteroglossia and says the it is another's voice coming through the author's text as a way to "express authorial intentions but in a refracted way" (324). Daniels is using the words, stories and voices of others to support her claim about the injustice that is our prison and judicial system. Tropes and heteroglossia are used by Daniel to prove her point and support her claim.    

Works Cited:

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. “Discourse in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl        Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. 259-331.

Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. “Appeal Through Tropes.” Appeals in Modern Rhetoric: An Ordinary-          Language Approach. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2005. 121-135.