Culler -- Chapter 5

1. Culler -- Chapter 5 Rhetoric, Poetics, and Poetry

2. Rhetoric/Poetics • The definitions have shifted about through time, right, but basically, • Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, the language and thought that is used to construct discourse. • Poetics the attempt to account for literary effects by looking at writing and reading conventions.

3. Rhetoric/Poetics • Poetry is, of course, rhetorical language in that it works to persuade. • Plato thought poetry was frivolous and distracting and banned it from his republic. It persuaded people to slack off. • Aristotle found it useful because it allowed people to release their pent up emotions. It persuaded people to live vicariously, instead of looking for trouble.

4. Rhetorical Figures:They’re what make something literary • All language, really, is figurative. We’ve just forgotten what the original substitutions were. “Grasping” a “hard problem.” • Metaphor -- treats something as something else. Links by similarity. • Metonymy -- moves from one thing to another. Links by contiguity. • Synecdoche -- substitutes part for whole. • Irony -- juxtaposes appearance and reality.

5. Genreswho speaks? • Poetic or Lyric = narrator speaks in 1st person • Epic or Narrative = narrator speaks in his own voice, but allows characters to speak in theirs. • Drama = characters do all the talking

6. Or, GenresRelation of speaker to audience • Drama = author concealed from audience • Lyric = poet turns back on listeners, and pretends to talk to himself or to someone else. • Prose = author addresses audience throughout.

7. Poetry as word and act • Poem as structure made up of words • How does sound produce sense? • Poem as event (an act of the poet, an experience of the reader) • relation between poet and narrator • how do we determine this? • why is this discussion of “voice” important?

8. Poetry as utterance overheard • When we read poetry or hear it read, we imagine or reconstruct a speaker and a context • identify a tone • infer a posture • infer a situation • infer concerns and attitudes of speaker • We ask, what might lead someone to speak this way?

9. The extravagance of lyric • What about poems that address the wind or a tiger or some other usually not addressed object? • O wild west wind . . . • Tiger, tiger burning bright . . . • Aspiration to the sublime -- something beyond the human. It invokes prophetic, inspirational, mystical power of word spinner, the mystical, the magical

10. Poems doodle and riddle us. • And it’s this playing with us, by us, that is important in reading poetry. • Don’t treat a poem like you would a conversation -- assume it has a structure of its own. • Read it as if it were an aesthetic whole • All parts should fit together harmoniously.

11. So, let’s practice. • P. 684 -- My Last Duchess • Dramatic situation. Who is speaking? What’s going on? What’s he saying? Do trust him? Like him? What’s his problem with his last Duchess? • How does the structure add to sense? • Which words do you notice? How do they affect the sense you make? • Any figurative language? How does it work? • What’s the theme, do you think?

12. Wild Nights--Wild Nights • P. 708 • Who’s the speaker? What’s the situation? What’s the tone? Where do you imagine her to be? Where is her lover? • Language: Rhythm? Diction? Figurative language? • Theme?

13. Leda and the Swan • P. 718 • What’s the situation? Who is speaking? To whom? Why? • Form and structure? • Language? • Theme?