Splendor and Misery: Semiotics and The End of Rhetoric: Don Paul Abbott

Don Paul Abbott
Splendor and Misery: Semiotics and the

End of Rhetoric
Abstract: Beginning with Roland Barthes’ “The Old Rhetoric: an

aide-mémoire” (1964–65), semioticians have shown a remarkable
interest in the history of rhetoric. Writers like Barthes, Tzevtan
Todorov, Gérard Genette, and Paul Ricoeur have offered accounts
of rhetoric’s past that invariably concluded with rhetoric’s demise
and its replacement with semiotics. These writers typically portray
rhetoric’s history as one of a brief rise followed by a very long
decline, a pattern, says Todorov, of “splendor and misery.” This
essay examines the semioticians’ predictions of rhetoric’s demise as
well as semiotics’ attempt to claim elements of rhetoric as its own.
The essay concludes by considering the present state of semiotics’
aspiration to supersede rhetoric as a theory of language and human
affairs.
n the Proceedings of the First Congress of the International

I Association for Semiotic Studies held in Milan in 1974,
Seymour Chatman asks if “there is a modern science or
group of sciences that deals with the subject matter of ancient rhetoric
. . . or has that matter become so fragmented over the centuries that
there is no virtue, other than a purely antiquarian one, in trying
to reunite its elements under some single rubric like ‘rhetoric’ or a
more modern sounding term” “In other words,” continues Chatman,
“shall we try to transform rhetoric as such into a science . . . or shall
we be content, in a merely historical way, to trace its breakdown and
absorption into a variety of fields . . . Does rhetoric have to be reassem-
bled, like Israel, or shall we let its descendants remain in diaspora”1
1
“Rhetoric and Semiotics,” in A Semiotic Landscape, ed., Seymour Chatman, Um-
berto Eco, and Jean-Marie Klinkenberg (The Hague: Mouton, 1979), 103–12 (p. 103).
Rhetorica, Vol. XXIV, Issue 3, pp. 303–323, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 1533-
8541. ©2006 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re-
served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article
content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website,
at www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.
303
304 RHETORICA
Chatman is asking “whether rhetoric should be a modern discipline”

or “will the very use of the name confuse modern discussions with
undesirable antique overtones?”2
Chatman himself argues that alterations and adaptations are
pointless, and thus the only productive course is to search for al-
ternatives. The alternatives to rhetoric, as it happens, are the many
varieties of semiotics. Chatman concludes that “the chief utility of
the study of rhetoric to the semiotician is historical, that there is little
current value in the models of the ancient discipline, but that some-
thing, perhaps a great deal, can be gained from considering the kinds
of problems with which it has struggled and some of the distinctions
it has uncovered, though almost all of these have to be reinterpreted
in modern ways.”3 Chatman is typical of many semioticians who
relegate rhetoric to little more than limited historical relevance. In-
deed, a remarkable number of semioticians preface their works with
a history of rhetoric. These surveys usually begin with the emergence
of rhetoric in ancient Greece and proceed into the nineteenth century
when rhetoric finally expires. Conveniently enough, the expiration
of rhetoric is followed by the discovery of semiotics in the early twen-
tieth century by Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce.
This is as it should be, because for many a semiotician, semiotics sim-
ply supersedes rhetoric, incorporating anything of value that was to
be found in the rhetorical estate and relegating the rest to footnotes.
As a discipline semiotics displays an interesting ambivalence to
history. It is self-consciously new, undiscovered before the nineteenth
century, and yet to demonstrate this newness semiotics must demon-
strate its superiority over older disciplines. Semiotics, as the science
of signs, is also broad in scope; it potentially encompasses all human
activity. Given this great breadth, it is natural that earlier thinkers,
including rhetoricians, would have inadvertently and unknowingly
touched upon semiotic concerns. Thus semiotics is a new discipline
with a long history, and rhetoric necessarily figures directly into this
history. The intent of this essay, therefore, is to examine the relation-
ship between semiotics and rhetoric, paying particular attention to
the semiotician’s historical accounts which detail rhetoric’s demise.
2
“Rhetoric and Semiotics,” 102–103.
3
“Rhetoric and Semiotics,” 112. Chatman’s skepticism, if not hostility, toward
rhetoric is remarkable considering that for many years he taught in the Rhetoric
Department at the University of California, Berkeley.
Splendor and Misery 305
The semiotician’s history of rhetoric
The majority of semioticians who proclaim rhetoric’s demise

are followers of Saussure rather than Pierce, writers, that is, in the
French rather than the Anglo-American tradition. Perhaps because
Pierce designated as a branch of his system of semeiosis what he
called “speculative rhetoric,” Peircians have been more reluctant to
dismiss rhetoric from the semiotic pantheon.4 Thus this essay is con-
cerned primarily with thinkers like Roland Barthes, Tzevtan Todorov,
Gérard Genette, Paul Ricoeur and Group Mu.5 All five offer historical
accounts which, in varying degrees of detail, recount rhetoric’s de-
cline and each declares, with varying degrees of certainty, rhetoric’s
final collapse.
Perhaps the earliest of the semiotic histories of rhetoric is pre-
sented by Roland Barthes in “The Old Rhetoric: an aide-mémoire.”
Barthes’ account was first presented in a seminar in 1964–65, then
published in Communication, and finally as the first chapter in L’aven-
ture sémiologique (1985).6 Barthes explains that when he wrote “The
Old Rhetoric” no such survey was available in France: “This is
the manual I should have liked to find ready-made when I be-
gan to inquire into the death of Rhetoric.”7 Barthes avoids refer-
ences and citations in part because he is writing from memory. Such
an effort is not especially difficult, says Barthes, because “it deals
with a common place learning: Rhetoric is inadequately known,
yet knowledge of it implies no task of erudition; hence anyone
4
For discussion of the place of rhetoric in Peirce’s work see John R. Lyne,
“Rhetoric and Semiotic in C. S. Peirce,” Quarterly Journal of Speech (1980): 155–168
and James Jakób Liszka, A General Introduction to the Semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), chap. 4, “Universal Rhetoric,” 78–108.
5
Other names might be added to this list. Certainly many writers discuss
rhetoric from what might be called a semiotic perspective. However, I am specifically
concerned with those writers who trace rhetoric’s demise historically and attribute
that demise at least in part to the figures of speech. Thus Paul de Man is absent
because in “Semiology and Rhetoric,” Diacritics (Fall 1973): 27–33, he does not offer
an extended historical analysis of rhetoric’s decline in the manner of those cited
above. However, de Man does share with other semioticians the view that rhetoric is
“the study of tropes and of figures” (28). Jacques Derrida, in “White Mythology,” also
deals with some of the issues addressed in this paper: “White Mythology: Metaphor
in the Text of Philosophy,” New Literary History 6 (1974): 5–76, especially “The Flowers
of Rhetoric: The Heliotrope,” 46–60.
6
R. Barthes, The Semiotic Challenge, trans. R. Howard (New York: Hill and Wang,
1988).
7
Semiotic Challenge, 11.
306 RHETORICA
can readily avail himself of the bibliographic references which are

lacking here.”8
Barthes’ point of departure is “to confront the new semiotics of
writing with the classical practice of literary language, which for
centuries was known as rhetoric.”9 The word “old” “does not mean
there is a new rhetoric today; rather old rhetoric is set in opposition
to that new which may not yet have come into being; the world is
incredibly full of old rhetoric.”10 Rhetoric, says Barthes, is a “metalan-
guage” which was “prevalent in the West from the fifth century bc to
the nineteenth century ad.” This “metalanguage” was “a veritable
empire, greater and more tenacious than any political empire in its
dimensions and duration . . . Rhetoric prevailed in the West for two
and a half millennia, from Gorgias to Napoleon III . . . it has taken
three centuries to die; and it is not dead for sure even now.”11 Rhetoric
was particularly influential in education and its history can be seen in
the rise and fall of rhetoric in the curriculum: “Rhetoric is triumphant:
it rules over instruction. Rhetoric is moribund: limited to this sector,
it falls gradually into intellectual discredit.”12 The reason for this dis-
credit is the “promotion of a new value, evidence (of facts, of ideas,
of sentiments), which is self-sufficient and does without language
(or imagines it does so).”13 Barthes says that “this ‘evidence’ takes,
from the sixteenth century on, three directions: a personal evidence
(in Protestantism), a rational evidence (in Cartesianism), a sensory
evidence (in Empiricism).”14 Thus rhetoric died, but “to say in a cate-
gorical way that Rhetoric is dead would mean we could specify what
replaced it.”15
Like Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov also presents a semiotician’s sur-
vey of rhetoric in Theories of the Symbol.16 Todorov, too, classifies the
entire history of rhetoric into two periods which he calls “Splendor
and Misery.” The period of “splendor” extends from rhetoric’s be-
ginnings in ancient Greece to Cicero, whom Todorov calls the “last of
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
T. Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, trans. C. Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1982); French original, Théories du symbole (Paris 1977).
the ancients and first of the moderns.”17 Todorov then sees a period of
“misery” emerging from the crisis of the Roman Republic. After the
collapse of the Republic rhetoric passes from instrumental to orna-
mental, from functional to beautiful.18 This second period is rather
long, to say the least, extending from Quintilian in the first century
to Pierre Fontanier in the nineteenth. Rhetoric, says Todorov, “is a
discipline in which such shortcuts are possible and even legitimate,
so slow is its evolution.”19 This second period is not a happy one for
rhetoric: “Between Quintilian and Fontanier, fortune does not smile
on one single rhetorician—and this longest period in the history of
rhetoric—lasting nearly 1800 years—turns out to be . . . a period of
slow decadence and degradation, suffocation and bad conscience.”20
Of course, says Todorov, “history indeed does not stop with Fontanier
. . . only the history of rhetoric stops there.”21 Rhetoric, says Todorov,
did not survive the nineteenth century, “but, before it disappeared, it
produced—through a final effort more powerful than any that had
gone before it, as if to try to stave off imminent extinction—a body of
reflections whose quality is unmatched.”22
This “swan song” of rhetoric began early in the eighteenth
century, with Des Tropes (1730) of César Chesneau Dumarsais and
ended, a century or so later, with the work of Pierre Fontanier,
whom Todorov regards as “the last rhetorician.”23 While Fontanier
might not have been, in Todorov’s estimation, the one to kill off
rhetoric, his work represents the culmination of rhetoric’s degen-
eration. Fontanier’s predecessor, Dumarsais, created a catalogue of
tropes that proved to be a popular, influential, and enduring work.24
17
Theories of the Symbol, 65.
18
Todorov is here repeating the common claim that rhetoric suffered a decline
after the collapse of the Roman Republic. For an alternative view see Jeffrey Walker,
Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), especially
part II, “‘Rhetoric’ in Later Antiquity: A Short Revisionist History,” 45–135. Walker
argues that “although there certainly were changes in the sociopolitical conditions
and rhetorical practices, there was no ‘decline of rhetoric’ in any meaningful sense
either in the Hellenistic or the Roman period” (ix).
19
20
21
22
23
Des Tropes ou des différents sens. Figure et vingt autres articles de l’Encyclopedie, suivis
de L’Abrégé des Tropes de l’abbé Ducros, ed. Françoise Douay-Soublin (Paris: Flammarion,
1988).
24
For editions and abridgements of Des Tropes, see “Oeuvres de Dumarsais” in
Des Tropes, ed. Douay-Soublin, 413–14. An assessment of Dumarsais’ place in early
308 RHETORICA
Barthes says that “for the eighteenth century, the most famous treatise
(and moreover the most intelligent) is that of Dumarsais.”25 Fontanier,
as Dumarsais’ successor, used the latter’s Tropes as a point of depar-
ture for his own works. Thus Fontanier’s first work was Les Tropes
de Dumarsais, avec un commentaire raisonné (1818) followed by Manuel
classique pour l’etude des tropes (1821) and Traité general des figures du
discours autres que les tropes (1827).26 The latter work, like Dumarsais’
Tropes, became a standard textbook on rhetoric in France.
Todorov, who earlier praised the efforts of Dumarsais, Fontanier,
and others as “reflections of unmatched quality,”27 concludes his re-
view of their work by asserting that every page, taken by itself, reeks
of mediocrity. We are dealing with an elderly gentleman (rhetoric): he
never dares to stray very far from the ideal of his youth (exemplified
by Cicero and Quintilian—although they were elderly gentlemen
themselves, in their way); he does not notice the transformations
of the world around him (Fontanier came after Romanticism, in its
German manifestation at least). And yet there is something splendid
about this old age; the old man has forgotten nothing of the two-
thousand-year history of his life. Better still, in a debate animated
by many voices, notions, definitions, and relations are refined and
crystallized as never before. Here then is the paradox: this sequence
of lusterless pages, when taken as a whole, produces a dazzling
impression indeed.28
The eighteenth century witnessed the culmination of rhetoric’s
second crisis in which, “at a single stroke” rhetoric was “acquitted,
liberated, and put to death.”29 So rhetoric has died again, a bit earlier
than in Barthes’ account, and for a different reason. For Todorov the
cause of rhetoric’s ultimate death is romanticism: romanticism “sup-
eighteenth-century European rhetoric is offered by Jean-Paul Sermain, “Le code du

bon gout (1725–1750),” in Marc Fumaroli, ed., Histoire de la rhétorique dans l’Europe
moderne 1450–1950 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), 879–943, esp. 926–
36.
25
The Semiotic Challenge, 45.
26
For a modern edition of Fontanier’s works see Les figures du discours, ed. Gérard
Genette (Paris: Flammarion, 1968). Genette’s introduction contains a useful discussion
of Fontanier’s treatise. See also Arlette Michel, “Romantisme, literature et rhétorique,”
in Fumaroli, Histoire de la rhétorique, 1042–44. A comprehensive survey of rhetoric in
nineteenth-century France is presented by Françoise Douay-Soublin, “La rhétorique
en France au XIXe siècle à travers ses pratiques et ses institutions: restauration,
renaissance, remise en cause,” in Fumaroli, Histoire de la rhétorique, 1071–1214.
27
28
29
pressed the necessity for regimenting discourse, since now anyone,

by drawing upon personal inspiration, without technique or rules,
can produce admirable works of art. Thought is no longer divorced—
or even distinguished—from expression; there is no longer, in a word,
any need for rhetoric.”30 Todorov asks the question posed by many
of rhetoric’s critics: why did rhetoric, an untenable system, some-
how survive for nearly two millennia? His answer is that rhetoric
was the product of a repressive society which regimented discourse.
Todorov finds rhetoric’s persistence so inexplicable that he dismisses
it as something akin to a cultural “mental illness.”31
For Todorov, then, the history of rhetoric is one of “splendor and
misery” much as Barthes before him characterized the same history
as “triumphant and moribund.” Other semioticians share much of
Barthes’ and Todorov’s view of the history of rhetoric and typically
differ from the histories just recounted only in the level of detail. Thus
in his Figures of Literary Discourse Gérard Genette offers what he calls a
“cavalier account” of rhetoric’s history, which he admits would need
to supplemented by an “immense historical investigation” along the
lines of the one already sketched by Barthes.32 Like Todorov and
Barthes before him, Genette appears to believe that little of use
survived the “great shipwreck of rhetoric.”33 Genette, too, features
Dumarsais and Fontanier as the key figures in the “later stages”
of rhetoric’s decline. Genette acknowledges Fontanier’s “taxonomic
intelligence” and calls him “the Linnaeus of rhetoric.”34 For Genette,
rhetoric’s career has been a “historical course of a discipline that has
witnessed, over the centuries, the gradual contraction of its field of
competence . . . from Corax to our own day, the history of rhetoric has
been that of a generalized restriction.”35 For Genette, this “generalized
restriction” is a movement from rhetoric, classically conceived, to a
theory of figures, to a theory of tropes, to a final “valorization” of
metaphor as the surviving heir of the rhetorical tradition.
Like Barthes, Todorov, and especially Genette, Paul Ricoeur sees
rhetoric as having followed a course of gradual decline from its clas-
sical origins to its present moribund state. In The Rule of Metaphor,
30
31
32
Figures of Literary Discourse, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1982), 104.
33
Figures of Literary Discourse, 114.
34
Gérard Genette, “Introduction: La rhétorique des figures,” in Fontanier, Les
figures du discourse, cited in n. 26 above, p. 13.
35
Figures of Literary Discourse, 103–104.
310 RHETORICA
Ricoeur offers an account of rhetoric’s career that concludes with its

“dying days.”36 One cause of rhetoric’s death was its reduction to
“parts,” that is, the figures. Ricoeur decries the taxonomic tendency
of rhetoric, as exemplified by the lists of figures, largely because
these taxonomies are, in his view, “static.” The more crucial prob-
lem is that the taxonomies contributed to rhetoric’s “severing” itself
from argument. Ricoeur recognizes that Greek rhetoric was “broader,
more dramatic, than a theory of figures.”37 After all, says Ricoeur, be-
fore taxonomy there was Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and, moreover, “before
rhetoric was futile, it was dangerous.”38
Rhetoric’s decline from dangerous to merely futile is in large
part attributed, yet again, to Fontanier.39 When he turns to Fontanier,
however, Ricoeur modifies his view that a chief cause of rhetoric’s
decline is its reduction to the figures. Ricoeur dedicates the chapter on
rhetoric’s decline to Gérard Genette because Genette argues that “the
progressive reduction of the domain of rhetoric” was its undoing.40
Ricoeur agrees with Genette that “since the Greeks, rhetoric dimin-
ished bit by bit to a theory of style by cutting itself off from the two
parts that generated it, the theories of argumentation and of compo-
sition. Then, in turn, the theory of style shrank to a classification
of figures of speech, and this to a theory of tropes.”41 Although he
agrees with this analysis, Ricoeur does not regard the reduction to
tropology as the “decisive factor” in rhetoric’s demise. The emphasis
on the reduction of rhetoric is not useful because “the problem is not
to restore the original domain of rhetoric—in any case this may be
beyond doing, for ineluctable cultural reasons—rather, it is to under-
stand in a new way the very workings of tropes.”42 For Ricoeur, then,
rhetoric’s alleged reduction to a theory of tropes was less debilitating
than rhetoric’s inability to develop a theory of tropes that proved
useful.
Barthes, Todorov, Genette, and Ricoeur all offer accounts of
rhetoric’s history that culminate in rhetoric’s demise sometime in
the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. While these crit-
ics differ on the precise cause of death, all (with the exception of
36
P. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, trans. R. Czerny (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1977), 28.
37
Rule of Metaphor, 12.
38
Rule of Metaphor, 10–11.
39
Rule of Metaphor, 48–51.
40
41
42
Todorov) regard the reduction of rhetoric to the figures and tropes

as an important contributing cause. This consensus is one of the most
obvious features of all these histories: they all decry the tropologi-
cal impulse and yet all are fascinated by the figures. They present
histories in which the figures play a prominent role and, despite
rhetoric’s demise, they agree that the figures have survived. This, in
turn, presents one of the incongruities of these histories: how can
rhetoric have died, if the greatest portion of its “body” has continued
to live While they often decry the concentration on the figures, all
appear to want the figures to be prominent in the discipline that
succeeds rhetoric.
Group Mu
Despite the pronouncements of Barthes, Todorov, Genette, and

Ricoeur that rhetoric is dead, these semioticians do not seem quite
certain that it is buried. As Barthes notes, for rhetoric to be truly
dead, there must be something to replace it. The obvious choice to
replace rhetoric is, of course, semiotics. But neither Barthes nor the
others offer a clear vision of just how, or in what ways, semiotics will
replace rhetoric.
The task of integrating rhetoric into semiotics was undertaken
most fully by six scholars at the University of Liege calling themselves
Group Mu.43 Their work, Rhétorique générale (1970), remains probably
the most ambitious attempt to fashion a rhetoric in accord with
semiotic principles. Despite the title, the work is not, as many have
noted, “a general rhetoric”; rather it is a work primarily about the
figures. As Group Mu’s translators explain: “the book is mostly a
study of rhetorical tropes and figures, what classical rhetoric called
elocutio. It attempts to set forth the basic principles by which all figures
of language and thought are derived and can be explained.” The
translators conclude that “this study represents the first time that the
complex variety of figures has been systematically and coherently
derived; moreover, the method adopted here brings elocutio into
the range of modern linguistics.”44 Thus unlike Barthes, Todorov,
43
The six authors explain that “we have chosen as our symbol the first letter of
the Greek word designating the most prestigious of metaboles.” Group Mu (J. Dubois,
F. Edeline, J.-M. Klinkenberg, P. Minguet, F. Pire, H. Trinon), A General Rhetoric, trans.
P. Burell and E. Slotkin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), xix.
44
A General Rhetoric, “Translators’ Preface,” xiv.
312 RHETORICA
and the others, Group Mu does not simply proclaim the end of
rhetoric, they propose a specific replacement for the “old” rhetoric.
An examination, therefore, of their attempt to bring “elocutio into
the range of modern linguistics” provides a singular test of the
significance of the “semiotic challenge” to rhetoric.
Despite the translators’ claims for the novelty of Group Mu’s
project, A General Rhetoric’s figurative and taxonomic emphasis in-
vites comparisons with the elocutio of classical rhetoric. Perhaps
mindful of their apparent similarity with the rhetorical tradition,
Group Mu, like Barthes and Todorov, emphasize the historical dis-
continuity between their approach and that of traditional rhetori-
cians. At least in France, says Group Mu, “rhetoric was dead in
thought if not in practice.”45 So dead was rhetoric that a dozen or so
years before the publication of A General Rhetoric “anyone claiming
that rhetoric would again become a major discipline would have
been laughed at.”46 This is because rhetoric was “never a very coher-
ent discipline”; historically it degenerated into a “sclerotic tradition”
which eventually “gave up the ghost.”47 But Group Mu believes that
rhetoric, despite its unfortunate decline, deserves resuscitation by
semioticians. After all, as the translators note, rhetoric was once “an
important and respected discipline.”48 At the time Group Mu began
to conceive of A General Rhetoric, the discipline of rhetoric was show-
ing at least some signs of its former vitality. “Today,” says Group
Mu, “rhetoric appears not only as a science of the future but also a
timely science within the scope of structuralism, new criticism, and
semiology.”49
Group Mu credits the revival of rhetoric to Barthes and Todorov,
as well as Roman Jacobson and Chaim Perelman. But despite the re-
emergence of rhetoric within a structuralist and semiotic context,
Group Mu makes it clear that they would not restore all of the
rhetorical tradition: “no one thinks seriously of bringing her back
with all the old debris. We must avoid the bric-a-brac.” Group Mu
agrees with Genette’s claim that “classical rhetoricians had ‘a mania
for naming.”’ In Group Mu’s view the “endless nomenclatures” of
the figures, while perhaps not “the underlying cause,” has been “the
evident sign of rhetoric’s demise.”50 Group Mu concedes that despite
45
A General Rhetoric, 1.
46
47
A General Rhetoric, 4, 5.
48
A General Rhetoric, “Translator’s Preface,” xiii.
49
50
its demise many of its old duties survived and were co-opted by the
field of “stylistics.” Stylistics, unlike the old rhetoric, is not concerned
with learning to write or crafting a persuasive message, but rather
is intent upon discovering “how and why a text is a text.”51 Thus the
study of rhetoric becomes an effort to discover literary meaning. For
Group Mu “literature is first of all a singular use of language. It is, in
fact, the theory of this usage that will constitute the first objective
of general, and perhaps generalizable, rhetoric.”52 Thus rhetoric is,
not surprisingly, rooted in language. More specifically, rhetoric is “a
set of operations made on language necessarily dependent on certain
characteristics of language. We shall see that all rhetorical operations
rest on a fundamental property of linear discourse—that discourse
can be decomposed into smaller and smaller units.”53
In Group Mu’s analysis these figures are, for the most part, the fa-
miliar ones of classical rhetoric. The figures, or “metaboles” as Group
Mu calls them, are classified into four different “fields”: metaplasm,
metataxis, metaseme, and metalogism. Metaplasms are figures that
act on sounds or graphic aspects of language. Metataxes are fig-
ures that act on the structure of the sentence. Metasemes are figures
that replace one seme, or unit of meaning, with another. And, fi-
nally, metalogisms are figures of thought that modify the logical
value of sentences. Each “metabole,” or figure, is also categorized
into one of four different linguistic operations: suppression, addi-
tion, suppression-addition, and permutation. The various traditional
figures are classified within the intersections of these four fields and
four operations. For example, metaplasm includes aphaeresis and
apocope; metataxis includes zeugma and parataxis; metaseme in-
cludes synecdoche and antonomasia; metalogism includes litotes and
hyperbole.
Up to this point in the analysis Group Mu has been content
to say that figures “act upon” or “modify” language in some way.
But if they are to meet their goal of rigorous linguistic analysis,
they recognize that they must go beyond such vague terms and
explain just how figures function. To do so, Group Mu offers several
“operating concepts” including the crucial concept of “deviation.”
Group Mu defines figures as “significant alterations,” or deviations,
from a linguistic norm: “the first stage of rhetoric consists in an
author’s creating deviations, the second stage consists in a reader’s
51
52
53
314 RHETORICA
deciphering them.”54 Thus figures deviate from a norm, but not so

much that the reader is prevented from engaging in the interpretation
or “autocorrection” of the alteration.
The centrality of deviation in the figurative process requires that
Group Mu define the norm from which the figures deviate. That
norm, says Group Mu, is “degree zero.” Group Mu defines degree
zero, not as a “colorless” or “neutral” language, in the manner of
Barthes,55 but rather in terms of semes, the smallest possible units
of meaning. Thus “absolute degree zero . . . would be a discourse re-
duced to its essential semes . . . that is, to the semes that we could
not suppress without at the same time depriving our discourse of
all signification.”56 Such discourse is “univocal,” that is, it lacks the
redundancy typical of most language. But absolute degree zero re-
mains an ideal, whereas the norm from which rhetoric would de-
viate is “practical degree zero”: “utterance containing all the es-
sential semes along with a number of contiguous semes reduced
to a minimum as functions of the possibilities of the vocabulary.”57
Degree zero is, admits Group Mu, “an often ungraspable norm”
which they themselves have difficulty defining. Degree zero is at
least partially defined by the reader’s expectations as determined by
the interplay of language, culture, and context. Figures, by deviating
from this norm in often unpredictable ways invites interpretation
(“autocorrection”) on the part of the reader and it is this deviation
and interpretation that is at the heart of the figurative experience.
Group Mu, however, does not regard all deviation as rhetorical:
“in the rhetorical sense we shall understand deviation as the de-
tected alteration of degree zero.” Or, to put it another way, “we shall
agree to call rhetorical only those operations trying for poetic effect
. . . and found especially in poetry, jokes, slang, and so on.”58 Thus
rhetorical deviation requires intent, although figures can also occur
in the absence of intent. Rhetoric, then, as Group Mu defines it, is
54
55
R. Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. A. Lavers and C. Smith (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1968). Despite the title of this work, Barthes discusses “degree zero” only
on pp. 4–5 and 76–78. For Barthes, in contrast to Group Mu, degree zero is not a
linguistic norm but rather a deliberate technique: an “attempt towards disengaging
literary language” which results in “a style of absence which is almost an ideal
absence of style” (76–77).
56
57
58
“based on the double movement of the creation and reduction of

deviations.”59
How successful was Group Mu at creating a new rhetoric in har-
mony with semiotics? Even semioticians like Ricoeur appear unsure.
Writing about Group Mu’s work Ricoeur says that “the new rhetoric
at first glance is nothing but a repetition of classical rhetoric, at least
that of tropes, only at a higher level of technicity. But this is just a
first impression. The new rhetoric is far from being a reformulation
of the theory of tropes in more formal terms; it proposes instead to
restore the entire breadth of the theory of figures.”60 And perhaps
Ricoeur is correct, if one accepts his contention that rhetoric was ulti-
mately reduced to the tropes, and thus largely ignored the figures
until these were revived by Group Mu. Yet Group Mu’s identifica-
tion of deviation as the foundation of the figures cannot but make the
link between Group Mu and classical rhetoric very clear. As Ricoeur
himself admits, “every one agrees in saying that figurative language
exists only if one can contrast it with another language that is not
figurative.”61
Indeed, the agreement that figurative language is only meaning-
ful when contrasted with the non-figurative spans the centuries. In
the Institutio oratoria Quintilian says a commonly accepted meaning
of the term figure is “that which is poetically or rhetorically altered
from the simple and obvious method of expression. It will then be
true to distinguish between the style which is devoid of figures . . .
and that which is adorned with figures.”62 Later rhetoricians would
follow Quintilian’s definition of a figure as a “change in meaning
or language from the ordinary and simple form.”63 Thus in the Re-
naissance George Puttenham says: “Figurative Speech is a nouelty
of language euidently (and yet not absurdly) estranged from the or-
dinarie habit and manner of our dayly talke and writing and figure it
selfe is a certain lively or good grace set upon words, speeches and
sentences to some purpose and not in vain, giving them ornament
or efficacy by many manner of alterations in shape, in sounde, and
also in sense.”64 Some two centuries later the ubiquitous Hugh Blair
maintains that figures of speech “always imply some departure from
59
60
Rule of Metaphor, cited above n. 36, p. 136.
61
62
Institutio oratoria, 9.1.14 (trans. H. E. Butler).
63
Institutio oratoria, 9.1.11.
64
George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (Menston, England: Scolar Press,
1968), 132–33.
316 RHETORICA
simplicity of expression.”65 Blair adds that “though Figures imply

a deviation from what may be reckoned the most simple form of
Speech, we are not thence to conclude, that they imply anything un-
common or unnatural. This is so far from being the case, that, on
many occasions, they are both the most natural, and the most com-
mon method of uttering our sentiments. It is impossible to compose
any discourse without using them often; nay, there are few Sentences
of any length, in which some expression or other, that may be termed
a figure, does not occur.”66 By explaining the figures in terms of de-
viation Group Mu follows a view well established in the long history
of rhetoric, according to which the figures are defined as departures,
alterations, and deviations from a norm.
Classification of the figures
Just as Group Mu accepts deviation as the operating principle

of the figures, it also organizes those figures in a manner that is
reminiscent of classical rhetoric. A consistent criticism of semioti-
cians is that traditional rhetoric had been excessively concerned with
classification in general and with the organization of the figures in
particular. (This may seem a curious criticism in light of Peirce’s
proposed 59,049 classes of signs).67 Barthes contends that ancient
rhetorical texts, “especially the post-Aristotelian ones, show an ob-
session with classification (the very term of partitio in oratory is an
example): rhetoric openly offers itself as a classification (of materials,
of rules, of parts, of genres, of styles).”68 Todorov puts it succinctly:
“The rhetoricians never cease to classify, but they classify badly.”69
In response to these complaints Group Mu might have been
expected either to avoid classification altogether or to establish a
taxonomic system at odds with the classical notions. Yet here, too,
Group Mu’s approach reveals classical precedent. Winfried Nöth,
noting Group Mu’s four categories of fields and operations, observes
65
Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. Harold F. Harding (Car-
bondale: Southern Illinois University Press), vol. 1, 272–73.
66
Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 273–74. Perhaps anticipating Genette,
Todorov, and others, Blair recommends Dumarsais as “one of the most sensible and
instructive writers” on figurative language (pp. 272–73, note).
67
Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs, augmented ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2001), 23.
68
Semiotic Challenge, cited above n. 6, p. 47.
69
Theories of the Symbol, cited above n. 16, p. 107.
that “Quintilian also set up four general categories of deviation (mu-

tatio) which reappear with modification in modern semiotic systems
of rhetorical figures.”70 In Book 1 of the Institutio oratoria Quintilian
identifies four classes of solecisms: addition, omission, transposi-
tion, and substitution. As Nöth suggests, these four classes conform
closely to Group Mu’s four “operations” of deviation: addition, sup-
pression, permutation, and suppression-addition. Three of the four
categories of Quintilian and Group Mu share either similar or identi-
cal labels. Even Group Mu’s “suppression-addition,” which at first
glance seems not to correspond to one of Quintilian’s four categories,
is similar to his category “substitution.” In “suppression-addition,”
Group Mu explains, “an element of one class is substituted for an-
other class.”71 These two four-part classifications are similar, but not
identical. Quintilian is discussing “solecisms” or errors in language,
which, he says, writers typically have dealt with in a fourfold divi-
sion. Although solecisms are errors of language, Quintilian makes it
clear that many figures closely resemble solecisms.72 While Quin-
tilian is primarily talking about errors of language, Group Mu’s
“operations” are employed to explain the deviations which produce
virtually all the figures.73
While the fourfold divisions of Group Mu and Quintilian dif-
fer significantly in scope, the categories nevertheless remain sim-
ilar. For Quintilian and Group Mu, and countless rhetoricians in
between, have faced the need to organize the figures into categories
70
Winfried Nöth, Handbook of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1990), 341. See Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 1.5.37–42.
71
A General Rhetoric, cited above n. 43, p. 75. This statement refers to the operation
of suppression-addition within the “field” of “metataxes.”
72
Institutio oratoria, 1.5.40–41.
73
In the twentieth century Roman Jakobson derived a system of tropes from
language “disturbance” aphasia. Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language
(The Hague: Mouton, 1956), 76, claim that the varieties of aphasia “oscillate” between
two polar types: metaphor and metonymy. According to Jacobson and Halle “the
development of a discourse may take place along two different semantic lines: one
topic may lead to another either through their similarity or through their contiguity.”
That is, discourse develops either metaphorically of metonymically. Their reduction
of tropes to two archetypal forms was widely influential. The reduction of the tropes
to a few prototypical forms had been proposed at various times by rhetoricians. In
the early eighteenth century Giambatista Vico advocated four fundamental tropes:
metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. See Michael Mooney, Vico in the Tradition
of Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 79–80. In 1945 Kenneth
Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 503–
17, proposed “Four Master Tropes.” These were once again metaphor, metonymy,
synecdoche, and irony (although Burke makes no mention of Vico).
318 RHETORICA
that render them more useful and understandable. If semioticians

have found these classificatory efforts frustratingly elusive, so, too,
have rhetoricians. Quintilian notes that in his own time there was
considerable disagreement among rhetoricians about the names of
the figures and the ways to classify them. After discussing tropes in
Book 8 of the Institutio he turns in Book 9 to the figures, and begins
by noting the similarity of these two concepts. “Many authors,” he
says, “have considered figures identical with tropes, because whether
it be that the latter derive their name from having a certain form
or from the fact that they effect alterations in language . . . it must
be admitted that both these features are found in figures as well.”74
Quintilian says further that tropes and figures have “a general re-
semblance” because “both involve a departure from the simple and
straightforward method of expression coupled with a certain rhetor-
ical excellence.”75 Although Quintilian synthesizes the classifications
offered by his predecessors, perhaps anticipating the semioticians, he
too reveals some impatience with the “quibbling” about the distinc-
tion between tropes and figures. In discussing irony Quintilian notes
that some regard it as a trope and others as a figure and, he says, “I
am aware of the complicated and minute discussions to which it has
given rise,” but “these artifices will produce exactly the same effect,
whether they are styled tropes or figures, since their values lie not in
their names, but in their effect.” He concludes that it is best “to adopt
the generally accepted terms and to understand the actual thing, by
whatever name it is called.”76
The historical record
All of the histories reviewed here share a common interpretation

of the history of rhetoric. Barthes, Todorov, Genette, Ricoeur, Group
Mu, all portray the history of rhetoric as a long period of decline
which culminates in rhetoric’s “death.” And yet all seem to suspect
that they have exaggerated that death. The semioticians’ own ex-
tensive accounts of rhetoric testify that rhetoric, in some form, did
indeed survive into the twentieth century. The argument that rhetoric
was displaced from its historically favored position in European edu-
cation is quite credible. But the claims go well beyond rhetoric’s edu-
74
9.1.2–3.
75
9.1.3–4.
76
9.1.7–10.
cational displacement. The claim is that rhetoric is actually dead—or

at least terminally ill. All, too, share a general agreement about the
cause of rhetoric’s death: the reduction of rhetoric to the figures.
But, here too, there is uncertainty. The figures, the cause of rhetoric’s
demise, emerge as the most useful survivor of rhetoric’s demise. In-
deed, it seems reasonable to say that the semioticians are as obsessed
with the figures as are the rhetoricians whose works they dismiss.
Group Mu’s work, a self-proclaimed attempt to integrate rhetoric
with contemporary linguistics is, after all, a work of elocutio.77
The semioticians’ fascination with the figures may perhaps be
partially explained by the fact that their histories are derived from
the particularities of the rhetorical tradition in France. Todorov, for
example, admits that his own analysis looks exclusively at the “last
centuries of rhetorical activity in France.”78 Thus the prominence
of Dumarsais and Fontanier in French education may be expected to
have caused the semioticians to privilege the figures in their accounts.
Yet the course of rhetoric in France may not be entirely generalizable
to the history of rhetoric in general.
George Kennedy maintains that the work of Dumarsais “culmi-
nated the tendency toward regarding rhetoric as the study of literary
devices of style, begun in France with Ramus.” Kennedy contin-
ues that “although Dumarsais’ work was translated into English,
rhetoricians in Britain in the later eighteenth century, where oratory
had a significant role in public life, viewed rhetoric in something
closer to the classical sense, with a secondary application to literary
composition. The result has been a division between the European
understanding of rhetoric as primarily a matter of the use of tropes
and figures, taken up by teachers of English in Britain and Amer-
ica, and an American tradition among teachers of speech viewing
rhetoric as civic discourse, derived from classical sources and other
eighteenth-century British rhetoricians.”79
While national experiences may help explain semioticians’ points
of view, the French tradition may not be as excessively figura-
tive as these histories maintain. Indeed, Todorov concedes that
there is another tradition in France represented by Etienne Bonnet
de Condillac: “A rhetoric such as Condillac’s grants an important
77
It is interesting to note that Group Mu’s more recent work has focused on visual
rhetoric and is far less dependent on classical rhetoric than is A General Rhetoric. See
Groupe Mu. Traité du signe visuel: Pour une rhétorique de l’image (Paris: Seuil, 1992).
78
Theories of the Symbol, cited above n. 16, p. 108.
79
G. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient
to Modern Times, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 276.
320 RHETORICA
place to the figures (or ‘turns’), but does not eliminate all the rest
(that is, considerations regarding the construction of discourse in
general).”80 Similarly, Genette notes that his claim that rhetoric in
France is “above all a rhetoric of elocutio” has been challenged by
Ánton Kibédi Varga’s Rhétorique et litérature. Varga’s entire book, says
Genette, demonstrates “the interest shown by certain seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century rhetoricians in the techniques of argument
and composition.”81 Genette attributes the difference in interpreta-
tion to “relative emphasis and proportion” given to various rhetori-
cians. However, says Genette, that part of French rhetoric devoted
to elocutio, “even when it was not the largest, was already at that time
the most vivid, the most original in relation to ancient models and
therefore the most productive.”82
Genette recognizes, as do others discussed here, that classical
rhetoric encompassed much more than the figures. But virtually all
argue, nevertheless, that the figures represent “the most productive”
part of the rhetorical tradition. Ricoeur acknowledges that Greek
rhetoric was “broader, more dramatic, than a theory of figures.”83
Barthes, in particular, shows great familiarity with the breadth of
classical rhetoric, describing in considerable detail what he calls “the
network,” “the rhetorical machine,” that is, the apparatus of the
ancient art.84 Barthes knows that elocutio is more than tropes: “The
arguments found and broadly distributed in the parts of discourse
remain to be ‘put into words’: this is the function of this third part
of the techne rhetorike known as lexis or elocutio, to which we are
accustomed to pejoratively reducing rhetoric because of the interest
the Moderns have taken in the figures of rhetoric, a part (but only
a part) of Elocutio.”85 And yet when Group Mu offers an alternative to
80
Theories of the Symbol, 107. It should be noted that Todorov does claim that
Condillac is the sole representative of this tradition of “discourse in general” al-
though “he is linked to certain manifestations of rhetorical thought at the end of the
seventeenth century, most notably in the Logique ou l’art de penser, by Antoine Arnauld
and Pierre Nicole, and in the Rhétorique ou l’art de parler by Bernard Lamy.”
81
Figures of Literary Discourse, cited above n. 32, p. 104, n. 7. See Ánton Kibédi
Varga, Rhétorique et litérature. Études de structures classiques (Paris: Didier, 1970).
82
Figures of Literary Discourse, 104.
83
Rule of Metaphor, cited above n. 36, p. 12.
84
Semiotic Challenge, cited above n. 6, pp. 51, 47.
85
Semiotic Challenge, 83. It should be noted that not all semioticians analyze
classical rhetoric exclusively from a figurative perspective. An alternative analysis
is presented by Giovanni Manetti, Theories of the Sign in Classical Antiquity, trans. C.
Richardson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). Manetti maintains that
“the consideration of signs rests at the heart of inventio, that is, when proofs must
the obsolete classical rhetoric, that alternative looks remarkably like

classical rhetoric. A General Rhetoric is a work that fits readily into
the figurative tradition. The figures themselves are given the familiar
names of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and the rest. Group
Mu departs from conventional terms with its “fields” of figures:
metaplasm, metataxis, metaseme, and metalogism. (But even the
names of these fields have comfortingly familiar Greek roots). Indeed,
so similar is Group Mu’s effort to traditional approaches that Barthes
calls it a “revalidation” of the old rhetoric.86
Sufficient time has passed since Barthes first issued the “semi-
otic challenge” to permit an assessment of the semioticians’ claims
for the fall of rhetoric and the rise of semiotics. Jonathan Culler, in
a new preface to The Pursuit of Signs, offers such an assessment of
the relationship between semiotics and literature. Culler observes
that when he wrote The Pursuit of Signs in 1981 “it seemed possible
that the idea of a general science of signs, a semiology or semiotics,
might revitalize the humanities and social sciences in general, not
just literary and cultural studies.”87 He concludes that “the ambi-
tious program of a science of signs did not succeed.” He attributes
this failure to “the excessive ambition of semiotics: the attempt to
take all knowledge as its province may have been doomed from
the start, but it certainly made it harder for semiotics to succeed
in any particular area of endeavor. Wherever it ventured, it could
not help but seem an imperialistic interloper seeking to claim this
area for its vast putative empire.”88 Culler notes that in A Theory of
Semiotics Umberto Eco “offered a list of concerns of the field that
is almost comical in its range and disorder: ‘Zoosemiotics, olfac-
tory signs, Tactile communication, Codes of taste, Paralinguistics,
Medical semiotics, Kinesics and proxemics, Musical codes, Formal-
ized languages, Written languages, Unknown languages and se-
cret codes, Natural languages, Visual communication, Systems of
objects, Plot structure, Text theory, Cultural codes, Aesthetic texts,
Mass communication, Rhetoric.”’89 Eco himself admits that such an
be ‘found’ to convince the court of the guilt or innocence of the accused” (140). Thus
Mannetti concentrates his analysis of both Greek and Roman rhetoric on invention
and says very little about the figures. Although semiotics is usually defined as “the
science of signs,” Manetti is one of the few semioticians explicitly to examine signs in
the context of classical rhetoric.
86
The Semiotic Challenge, 46.
87
Pursuit of Signs, cited above n. 67, p. x.
88
Pursuit of Signs, ix.
89
Pursuit of Signs, ix.
322 RHETORICA
agenda “may give the impress of arrogant ‘imperialism’ on the part

of semioticians.”90
This arrogance, combined with a grandiose design for subsuming
an immense array of disparate disciplines, probably made the semi-
oticians’ program futile from the outset. Culler observes that “peo-
ple affiliated with semiotics wrote interesting articles” on the topics
suggested by Eco, “but semiotics never became a sufficiently pow-
erful presence in any one of these areas to make much headway.”91
With regard to literary studies Culler concludes that “today it would
be pointless to champion poetics as a central enterprise of semi-
otics (since semiotics scarcely figures in the theoretical landscape
anymore).”92 Culler’s conclusion about semiotics and poetics could
readily be applied to semiotics and rhetoric. In the last three decades
of the twentieth century the study of rhetoric defied the predictions
of the semioticians and continued the revival begun in the middle
of the century.93 Rhetoric, of course, has a very long history of surviv-
ing attacks from formidable opponents. The uneasy relationship of
rhetoric and philosophy provides the most compelling example of
rhetoric’s survival skills. Ricoeur observes that while “rhetoric is phi-
losophy’s oldest enemy and its oldest ally . . . philosophy was never
in a position to destroy rhetoric or to absorb it.”94 Like philosophy
90
U. Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 6.
91
Pursuit of Signs, x.
92
Pursuit of Signs, xiv. Of course, not everyone would agree with Culler’s as-
sessment. In the Encyclopedia of Semiotics, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), ix,
editor Paul Bouissac declares that “semiotics remains a credible blueprint for bridg-
ing the gaps between disciplines and across cultures, most likely because of its own
intellectual diversity and pluridisciplinary history, as well as its remarkable capacity
for critical reflexivity.” Although this encyclopedia includes an entry for the “Rhetoric
of the Image,” it does not include traditional rhetoric within the realm of semiotics. In
contrast, an earlier encyclopedic work, Nöth’s Handbook of Semiotics, cited above n.
70, classifies rhetoric as a subdiscipline of “text semiotics,” itself a major branch of the
field of semiotics.
93
Despite the resurgence of interest in rhetoric in the late twentieth century re-
ports of its death continue to appear. A relatively recent example is John Bender and
David Wellbery, eds., The Ends of Rhetoric (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).
In the preface the editors present “The End of Rhetoric: A Historical Sketch” in which
they conclude that the classical rhetorical tradition “effectively ceased” (6). However,
they contend that rhetoric has returned as something called “rhetoricality,” a “gen-
eralized rhetoric that penetrates to the deepest levels of human experience” (25). This
rhetoricality is apparent in many modern disciplines including “Rhetoric and Modern
Linguistics” (29–31). Their examples of rhetoricality in linguistics includes Group Mu,
in whose work “the inherited taxonomies of rhetorical theory are respected in their
specificity,” but “the displacement of tradition is nonetheless perceptible” (30).
94
Rule of Metaphor, cited above n. 36, pp. 10–11.
before it, semiotics has made little progress in either destroying or

absorbing rhetoric.95
While rhetoric can certainly take some solace in its resiliency, it
cannot afford complacency. Its critics are too many, too varied, and
too persistent to be ignored. Semiotics may have seen its theoretical
cachet diminished, but the critiques of Barthes, Todorov, Genette,
Ricoeur, and others retain their power. These writers were too eager
in their anticipation of rhetoric’s demise and too obsessive about the
figures of speech. Nevertheless, their criticisms are often discomfort-
ingly close to the mark. In particular, the frequently repeated claim
that rhetoric’s reduction to the figures led to its decline warrants
consideration. It seems likely that a truncated rhetoric, deprived of
either elocutio or inventio, is vulnerable to its opponents’ predations.
Even semioticians recognize much of value in a complete theory of
rhetoric. Barthes admits to “the conviction that many of the features
of our literature, our instruction, of our institutions of language . . .
would be illuminated or understood differently if we knew thor-
oughly . . . the rhetorical code which has given its language to our
culture.” But, he concludes, “neither a technique, nor an esthetic,
nor an ethic of Rhetoric are now possible.”96 For rhetoricians, then,
the “semiotic challenge” is to prevent reducing “rhetoric to the rank
of a merely historical object”97 by continuing to validate rhetoric’s
remarkable ability to illuminate the institutions of language.
95
Brian Vickers has charted many of the conflicts between rhetoric and philos-
ophy in In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), esp. “Territorial
Disputes: Philosophy versus Rhetoric,” 148–213. Vickers does not include semiotics
among the territorial disputants but he does take to task both Roman Jakobson and
Paul de Man for what he regards as their serious misunderstandings of the tropes
(pp. 442–69).
96
Semiotic Challenge, cited above n. 6, p. 92.
97

Splendor and Misery: Semiotics and The End of Rhetoric: Don Paul Abbott

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Splendor and Misery: Semiotics and The End of Rhetoric: Don Paul Abbott

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Don Paul Abbott

Splendor and Misery: Semiotics and the

Abstract: Beginning with Roland Barthes’ “The Old Rhetoric: an

n the Proceedings of the First Congress of the International

Chatman is asking “whether rhetoric should be a modern discipline”

The semiotician’s history of rhetoric

The majority of semioticians who proclaim rhetoric’s demise

can readily avail himself of the bibliographic references which are

eighteenth-century European rhetoric is offered by Jean-Paul Sermain, “Le code du

pressed the necessity for regimenting discourse, since now anyone,

Ricoeur offers an account of rhetoric’s career that concludes with its

Todorov) regard the reduction of rhetoric to the figures and tropes

Despite the pronouncements of Barthes, Todorov, Genette, and

deciphering them.”54 Thus figures deviate from a norm, but not so

“based on the double movement of the creation and reduction of

simplicity of expression.”65 Blair adds that “though Figures imply

Classification of the figures

Just as Group Mu accepts deviation as the operating principle

that “Quintilian also set up four general categories of deviation (mu-

that render them more useful and understandable. If semioticians

The historical record

All of the histories reviewed here share a common interpretation

cational displacement. The claim is that rhetoric is actually dead—or

the obsolete classical rhetoric, that alternative looks remarkably like

agenda “may give the impress of arrogant ‘imperialism’ on the part

before it, semiotics has made little progress in either destroying or

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