Hummingbird Hill Studio
Dynamic Design
with the five classical canons of rhetoric
Linda Digby McFarland, M.A.
Dynamic Design with the five classical canons of rhetoric Linda Digby McFarland, M.A.
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Writing Design Analysis Study these five written examples of the five classical canons of rhetorical design: INVENTION This physician’s invention of “The Knife” is both personal and compassionate: There is a hush in the room. Speech stops. . . . Only the voice of the patient’s respiration remains. . . . Then you speak. . . . “The stomach is okay. . . . No sign of ulcer. . . . duodenum fine. Now comes the gall-bladder. No stones. Right kidney, left, all right. Liver . . . uh-oh.” Your speech lowers to a whisper . . . “Three big hard ones in the left lobe, one on the right. Metastatic deposits. Bad, bad. Where’s the primary? Got to be coming from somewhere.” . . . “Here it is.” . . . “Tumor in the sigmoid colon, wrapped all around it, pretty tight. We’ll take out a sleeve of the bowel. No colostomy. Not that, anyway. . . . there’s a lot of it down there.” . . . One holds the knife back as much as advances it to purpose. . . . It is a slick slide home. . . . [T]he blood chases the knife wherever it is withdrawn. . . . At last a little thread is passed into the wound and tied. . . . The operation is over. On the table, the knife lies spent. . . . (Richard Selzer: The Art of the Personal Essay, 709-14). Author Richard Selzer “can fully appreciate that which he witnesses in his life as a doctor. His ruminations . . . suggest that all doctors, perhaps, can deepen their commitment to medicine, to their patients . . . by strengthening their capacity to behold their patients and to grasp their predicaments” (Rita Charon online). His practice of medicine as a surgeon lends authenticity to Selzer’s invention, making his writing one-hundred percent realistic to his readers. His invention includes not only his personal experience, but also his thoughts and conversation during his performance of serious surgery.ARRANGEMENT The arrangement of Phillip Lopate’s “Introduction” to his anthology, The Art of the Personal Essay, is appropriately essayistic: This volume is divided into five sections, which attempt to uncover the tradition of the personal essay. . . . Montaigne writes about Seneca and Plutarch, Cowley and Hazlitt about Montaigne, Stevenson and Woolf about Hazlitt. . . . It is as though a like-minded tribe of writers sought each other out over the centuries. . . . As part of this conversation with their ancestors, the new practitioners made their own attempts at themes favored in the personal essay tradition: friendship, solitude, attachment to the past, childhood; talk, social, manners, and the folly of fashion; city versus country life, walking, idleness, travel, hobbies; collecting, public spectacles, and entertainments; books, the vocation of writing, food, appetites, interior décor; illness, mortality. . . . The customary way to view the personal essay tradition holds that its main spine extends from Montaigne to the English essayists, with continental and American extensions. True enough. But I have wanted to expand the picture by showing how this literary impulse might pop up anywhere on the globe, and what permutations it might take in different cultures (Lopate: The Art of the Personal Essay, xlv-xlvi). In his “Introduction,” Lopate, who is especially well-reputed for his expertise in expositional commentary regarding movies and film, literally lays onto a background of deeply foundational definitions, the dramatic enactment of essays and their authors throughout history, from pre-Montaigne Europe and Asia through the Medieval Era and England, as well as other cultures and continents, to those writers and their essays recently emerged from a contemporary America, with a curtain call climax of the justifications of his personal “principles of selection” (Lopate li-liv) for the classic masterpieces he has included between the covers of this exceptional anthology. (Lopate treats essayistic history with a genealogical arrangement). Lopate’s saga of the personal essay unfolds episodically and easily, as if he tells this tale every day of his life (Linda McFarland: “A Classical Rhetorical Literary Analysis of Phillip Lopate’s ‘Introduction’ to The Art of the Personal Essay," 1-2). STYLE “A Chapter on Ears” overflows with style: I have no ear. Mistake me not, reader—nor imagine that I am by nature destitute of those exterior twin appendages, hanging ornaments, and (architecturally speaking) handsome volutes to the human capital. Better my mother had never borne me.—I am, I think, rather delicately than copiously provided with those conduits; and I feel no disposition to envy the mule for his plenty, or the mole for her exactness, in those ingenious labyrinthine inlets—those indispensable side-intelligencers. . . . When therefore I say that I have no ear, you will understand me to mean—for music (Lamb: The Art of the Personal Essay, 165-66). Phillip Lopate writes that Charles Lamb “loved archaic, mildewed vocabulary . . . puns, exaggerated metaphors” (Lopate: The Art of the Personal Essay, 159), and, indeed, ‘tis true, for Lamb’s “no ear” segment of “A Chapter on Ears” simply drips with old mould! Lopate continues: “The mock-solemnity with which this slender idea is elaborated, the piling-up of mules and architecture, inlets and punitive instruments and ‘side-intelligencers,’ always makes me smile” (Lopate: The Art of the Personal Essay, xxxix-xl). Lamb’s essay is humorously and quaintly stylized by old English diction and syntax. Reading his writing makes me smile, too, as I contemplate how much pleasure he received from engaging with his words and sentences! I, personally, savor his style. MEMORY “Once More to the Lake” is framed in memory: But when I got back there, with my boy, and we settled into a camp near a farmhouse and into the kind of summertime I had known . . . I began to sustain the illusion that he was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father. This sensation persisted . . . I seemed to be living a dual existence. . . . [S]uddenly it would be not I but my father who was saying the words . . . The years were a mirage . . . I looked at the boy . . . and it was my hands that held his rod . . . I felt dizzy and didn’t know which rod I was at the end of. . . . There had been no years (White 534). So, what in this invention is not about memory? The feelings E.B. White shares in his “Lake” piece defy and define the relationship between time and generations—essential aspects of universal human experience and, thus, of memory.DELIVERY The “targeted” audience trio—the eight clergymen who signed a public statement, the entire world, but, most of all, all Americans—of “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” is vital to the letter’s comprehensive, dynamic delivery: . . . "[O]ur destiny is tied up with America’s destiny" (King: Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, 313). Martin Luther King perfectly packages his argument for, and defense of, his personal principles for delivery to his targeted audiences! *Reprinted from my article "Teaching the Tools of the Five Classical Canons of Rhetoric to Composition Students through the Quiltmaking Design Process"--and copyrighted 2006. ~~~~~~~ To use, in your writing and quilting, what you have learned on this page, now read Quilt Design .
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