By offering a strategic counter reading of our discipline's history, Out of Style undertakes a much needed rehabilitation of style for scholars and teachers in rhetoric and composition. What's especially promising here is Butler's closing argument--namely, that through style, scholars in our field can find a needed entry into public discussions about writing and can influence how our work gets represented in public discourses.

Frank Farmer
Conger-Gabel Professor of English
University of Kansas

[Butler] argues that a reanimation of style would not only help form better writing, but would also reanimate invention. And in the process he reinvigorates a history that is dynamic, a Golden Age of Comp. . . . A consciousness of style, of learning about, developing an affinity for, and teaching style will give us a way to counter public arguments against what we do, for we are constantly criticized. . . . This is a call for us to be stylin in public discourse.

Victor Villanueva
Chair of English, Auburn University
College Composition and Communication, 62.4

Chapter two, “Historical Developments: Relevant Stylistic History and Theory,” is an especially important chapter for everyone—yes, everyone—in composition studies to read.
--Rhetoric Review

The way Butler listens to his own sentences here, engaging us in the unfolding of his words and making us sense how time opens up as language is sounded out, brightens our minds, promising us time to languish in the pleasures of style. Butler’s opening moves—from recalling himself as a poetry lover, to recounting Richard Ohmann’s definition of style as “a way of writing” (qtd. in Butler 2), to raising what he takes to be the canonical questions and positions in the study of style—are also carefully crafted, dynamic, and enveloping. (270)

Butler’s genius in the [fifth] chapter lies in his conceptualization of causes: why compositionists do not speak for writing or get heard in public. (272)

Paul Butler’s Out of Style does not endorse conventional wisdom. Instead, Butler offers us the more interesting claim that “style is not the product-based residue of current-traditional rhetoric that many say it is [. . .], but rather is a dynamic feature of the very process movement the field considers crucial to its disciplinary identity” (269).

--College English

OUT OF STYLE

Reanimating Stylistic Study in Composition and RhetoricBy PAUL BUTLER

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2008 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-679-0

Contents

Acknowledgments......................................................................................ix1 Introduction: Reanimating Style in Composition and Rhetoric........................................12 Historical Developments: Relevant Stylistic History and Theory.....................................253 Out of Style: Reclaiming an "Inventional" Style in Composition.....................................564 Style in the Diaspora of Composition Studies.......................................................865 Style and the Public Intellectual: Rethinking Composition in the Public Sphere.....................1146 Back in Style: Style and the Future of Composition Studies.........................................142Notes................................................................................................160References...........................................................................................163Index................................................................................................176

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION Reanimating Style in Composition and Rhetoric

OVERVIEW: STYLE AND LANGUAGE

As a student in the French School at Middlebury College, I wrote a stylistic analysis of nineteenth-century French poet Jos-Mara de Heredia's sonnet (1978, 117), "Les Conqurants" ("The Conquistadores"), completely unaware at the time that the study of style is part of a rhetorical tradition that began more than 2,500 years ago. Examining the poem from several perspectives-phonological (sound and rhythm), syntactic, lexical, semantic, and rhetorical-I looked at such features as the poet's use of explosive consonants and stops (including enjambment) as devices to convey the harshness of the conqueror's "brutal" departure; the later contrast with certain liquid and nasal consonants and the repetition of assonant vowel sounds to signal a shift in mood after the discovery of an exotic new land; the poet's reversal of syntax, first to speed up and then to slow down the rhythm of the poem; the sonnet's changing lexical field, with an opposition between nouns with masculine and feminine genders that parallels the poem's increasingly ameliorative movement from conquest to hopeful acceptance; and the contrastive use of rhyme to reflect the imprisonment of the conquerors who, literally and figuratively, break away from their native country to an alluring new world. While analyzing the poem's stylistic features and patterns, I was able to demonstrate how Heredia deployed various elements of form to help achieve his overall effect. I now know that my analysis of the sonnet falls under the rubric of stylistics-or the study of style-whose history in literature complements its ancient counterpart in the history of rhetoric and its equally dynamic history in the field of composition.

In composition studies, the salient features of style-which Richard Ohmann defines as "a way of writing" (1967, 135)-are often different from those in literature, and the texts examined are generally non-literary prose rather than poetry or fiction. Like literary stylistics, however, composition's approach to style has clearly been influenced by linguistics, the study and description of language phenomena in units up to and including the sentence, and by rhetoric, the study and use of language in context to inform, persuade, and produce knowledge. Some of the linguistic and rhetorical features I examined in Heredia's sonnet include sound and rhythm, vocabulary, diction, register, syntax, and semantics, as well as figures of speech like tropes (e.g., metaphor) and schemes (e.g., parallelism). Although various other elements (e.g., phonetics and graphics) are also relevant to style, I argue that stylistic features are part of descriptive and interpretive frameworks-from classical rhetoric, discourse analysis, linguistics, and literary theory, history, and criticism, for example-that link their objects of study to the ways one goes about studying them.

Depending on what aspect of a stylistic relationship is being emphasized, one of several definitions of style might be used, each one representing a different theoretical approach to the topic. Indeed, it is fair to say that any definition of style involves one of several long-standing debates that have informed the study of the canon throughout history. Thus, for example, when Ohmann defines style as "a way of writing," he is taking the position that style is a choice (of words, syntax, etc.) a writer makes among alternative forms. His broader argument is that style (or form) is separate from content (or meaning), and for him this "dualistic" theory underpins a central question: "If style does not have to do with ways of saying something ... is there anything at all which is worth naming 'style?'" (Ohmann 1959, 2). While this perennial form-content issue is discussed in detail below, its brief mention here is intended to indicate the complexity surrounding the question of what constitutes "style." The counterpart to Ohmann's dualistic view of style is an "organic" position, often attributed to Aristotle, asserting that form and content are inseparable. Another definition of style-the unique expression of an individual's personality ("style is the man")-raises the question of whether style is an unconscious process or a matter of conscious control among writers (Milic 1971, 77). Defining style as a unique or idiosyncratic-sometimes, an extraordinary-use of language implies an opposing norm or a standard, ordinary use that raises theoretical debates about whether to identify style with social groups or with characteristics of an individual's personality. Still another question focuses on whether style is measured subjectively, by so-called impressionistic techniques, or objectively, through the application of quantitative measurements, especially computers.

Because these multiple-and often competing-definitions of style are sometimes confusing, I define style as the deployment of rhetorical resources, in written discourse, to create and express meaning. According to this definition, style involves the use of written language features as habitual patterns, rhetorical options, and conscious choices at the sentence and word level (see Connors 1997, 257), even though the effects of these features extend to broader areas of discourse and beyond. The term "rhetorical," while informed by a rich history in oral discourse, refers specifically to written language as it is used to inform, persuade, and generate knowledge for different purposes, occasions, and audiences. This definition not only accommodates several perspectives on language, but also accounts for ways in which language theories can aid the deployment of style in various contexts. While I am adopting a rhetorical definition of style that includes qualities like tone, emphasis, and irony, certain linguistic concepts are also relevant. For example, some of the phenomena I used to analyze Heredia's poem (e.g., diction and syntax) are linguistic as well as rhetorical. However, as Sharon Crowley argues in "Linguistics and Composition" (1989), the use of linguistics in the study of style is problematic in that "American linguistics habitually privileged the spoken over the written word" (492) and thereby avoided the more complex structures used, for instance, by...