Abstract
Historically, both oratory and tropology have been major areas of concern for rhetoric. Public speaking still gets its share of attention. But why isn't figuration a major concern in speech today? Though no teacher or text of speech would undervalue the role of language in persuasion, we have neglected the vocabulary which affords us an indispensable looking-glass for scrutiny of language and its effects. This paper is my attempt to regain some of the original wide conception of the place of tropes in our speech pedagogy. Fearing that the loss of this once and future generative means has gone almost unnoticed, I will begin with a short, rather reductive, review of the positions that the study of figures has held and contrast this with the impoverishment some current texts indicate and the promise of a few others.
Journal Title
Iowa Journal of Speech Communication
Volume
24
Issue
1
First Page
30
Last Page
41
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Johnstone, Monica C.
(1992)
"Figures to Teach: Tropology and Public Speaking,"
Iowa Journal of Communication: Vol. 24:
No.
1, Article 7.
Available at:
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/ijc/vol24/iss1/7
Copyright
©1992 Iowa Communication Association
