Page 46 - Critical and Cultural Theory

RHETORIC
reference to: (1) approaches to rhetoric developed within an illus-
trative range of historical and cultural contexts; (2) the role played
by rhetoric in the deconstructionist theories of Jacques Derrida
and Paul de Man.
The idea that rhetorical devices are a distinctive feature of
literary texts (especially poetry) was central to the programme of
New Criticism: a critical trend inspired by T. S. Eliot and pursued
by critics such as Cleanth Brooks, R. P. Blackmur, Allen Tate, W.
K. Wimsatt, M. C. Beardsley and R. Penn Warren in the 1940s
and 1950s. The New Critics saw the text as a complex structure of
meaning, or organization of language, to be analysed with close
reference to its rhetorical devices and specifically with a focus on
irony, paradox, tension and ambiguity. They wanted literary criti-
cism to develop into an autonomous science, capable of studying
texts as specialized constructs and in specialized ways. They
rejected Positivism, the philosophical doctrine that sought to
subsume all disciplines to the laws of physics and viewed language
as a neutral medium for the transcription of facts, by stressing
that literature manipulates language through special (rhetorical)
techniques that render it far from transparent. The critic's task, in
this context, consists of isolating the devices through which a text
is constructed and on the effects these produce, independently of
the author's intentions and of the reader's emotions. To evaluate a
text according to either of these functions, argue Wimsatt and
Beardsley in The Verbal Icon (1954), means confusing the text and
its origins - 'Intentional Fallacy' - or the text and its results -
'Affective Fallacy' - (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1972). Texts, in this
programme, must be assessed in terms of whether or not they
work - i.e. whether or not they possess internal coherence and are
able to handle their rhetorical devices satisfactorily.
New Criticism anticipates later developments in critical theory
by emphasizing the importance of the text itself rather than
peripheral speculations about its origins and its results. However,
New Criticism proposes a somewhat limited approach to rhetoric
by advocating that: (1) a text's obscurities and contradictions,
produced by its rhetorical structure, must be clarified and resolved
- rhetoric, in other words, must be domesticated; (2) rhetorical
language is seen as peculiar to literary texts and hence divorced
from ordinary language. An important reassessment of rhetorical
language comes with the writings of the Formalist critic and

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