A Rhetoric of Style by Professor Barry Brummett PhD

by Barry Brummett

Brand New. Will be shipped from US.

Mass Market Paperback

First published July 7, 2008

Reviews

[Vytautas Malesh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well-constructed, at times meticulously so, but a rather thick quote salad throughout most of its length. Totally comes alive in the last chapter when Mr. Brummett actually performs a read of American gun culture using a rhetoric of style as a critical lens. There are many places in which Brummett clearly wants to be having more fun with this text than he is, and I wish he would because once he gets going, he goes - unfortunately (and I think here I am making a larger indictment of the tropes and conventions of American academic writing), he works for so hard and for so long to ground his case that it's asking quite a bit for a reader to hold on until the end. Again, this is as much a criticism of academic writing generally than anything the author has done willfully because I'd underline that the last chapter proves Mr. Brummett can be a cunning wordsmith when he gives himself permission.

I admit that I cherry-picked "A Rhetoric of Style" because my own academic interests lie along these lines, and I imagine I will be using the author's understanding of the topic as brick in the foundation of my own work. This may have been a site of difficulty for me as I was already completely on-board with the concept of style as rhetoric before I picked up the book.

Chapter 4, "A Rhetoric of Style for the 21st Century" is the most directly stated and actionable (Chapter 5 is the rather more exciting rhetorical analysis). If you've read de Certeau, Butler, Barnard, and Baudrillard, I'd say you could skip ahead to 4 to get to Brummett's contribution to moving this rhetoric forward. However, if you are not well-versed in rhetorical or critical scholarship, please know that Brummett does very little to explain, introduce, or justify the scholarship he is citing in-text, and so reading through the first three chapters may have you scrambling to cross-reference.

Final verdict: if you're studying material or visual rhetoric, you're going to appreciate what Brummett's done here, not only the spelling out of a functional rhetoric of style, but also the extensive list of references that appear throughout the text. At times this text reads like a disjointed stack of quotes bound together with duct tape, but it all builds up to a thoroughly enjoyable rhetorical analysis in the final chapter.

[Valerie]

my graduate advisor... brilliant scholar, excellent writer