Out of style: reanimating stylistic study in composition and rhetoric

Paul Butler. Out of Style: Reanimating Stylistic Study in Composition and Rhetoric. Logan: Utah State UP, 2008. 181 pages. Paul Butler introduces Out of Style by announcing multiple, interrelated goals. As Butler surveys research and pedagogies of style from approximately the last half century of composition theory and practice, he offers a credible revisionist history of the current state of stylistic study in rhetoric and composition with the particular goal of refraining style as an integral part of the process movement. His revised history suggests that style is "ubiquitous, having diffused into other areas of the discipline under different names and ideas" (22). Butler then pulls his revisionist history of style into a more urgent arena, public intellectualism. Butler addresses the need for composition to begin public discussions of writing and style as social in nature. Doing so would help change the public's perception of writing as primarily an issue of grammar and correctness and introduce the tenets of rhetoric and composition theory to the public's working knowledge of writing and writing pedagogy. Before he begins his exploration of style in modern composition theory, Butler delves into classical rhetoric in his opening chapter to "analyze how rhetors conceived of style through history and deployed its resources according to fundamental differences in beliefs about the appropriate function of language in culture" (26). The reworking of Plato, The Sophists, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Erasmus, and Ramus slowly merges Butler's history of cultural change into modern composition's study of style. Emerging are the "long standing debates" still omnipresent today. Respectively, they are a debate over the separation of form and content, a debate over style as either conscious or unconscious choice, and a debate about style as representative of the individual only. The critique of these limiting lenses, repeated throughout rhetorical history, culminates in two major points that build Butler's definition of style. One, most theories wish to connect style specifically to one rhetorical canon and therefore restrict the study of style. Two, Butler's definition is best understood as embedded in Todorov's own definition of style, which suggests that "style is relevant when related to a larger element in the text" (49), such as thematic motif, so that both thematics and stylistics are signifier and signified of each other. Butler suggests early on a new definition of style as "the deployment of rhetorical resources, in written discourse, to create and express meaning. . . . Style involves the use of written language features as habitual patterns, rhetorical positions, and conscious choices at the sentence and word level, even though the effects of these features extend to broader areas of discourse and beyond" (3). In Butler's definition we see both the strength and weakness of his book. Although Butler often alludes to effects of style, he offers little commentary on reading or audience reception, and his research does not include any of the variety of fields - from reader response to cognitive linguistics to qualitative and quantitative studies of textual effect - that would move his investigation of style beyond writer/speaker or text. This is not a criticism of Butler's bookper se, but merely a note on the conversation in which Out of Style participates. Readers seeking connections, even theoretical, between style and theories of mind will find Out of Style adding little to research conversations about rhetorical effect. Butler focuses on "the productive and inventive uses of style" (21) and accounts for discourse analysis and literary criticism to medium degree, but the concepts and theorists from other disciplines are those that are well known and often used in rhetoric and composition. Butler offers little new interdisciplinary work or integration of current advances in other language-interested disciplines. …