Email this article 
Hide
Show all
The Literary Essay as Encomium in Virginia Woolf’s “The Enchanted Organ”
Abstract
This article proposes a rhetorical analysis of “The Enchanted Organ”, a short essay by Virginia Woolf that reviews Anne Thackeray’s collection of letters that was published after her death. In this review, Woolf portrays Anne Thackeray’s character starting from extracts from the diary and letters that she wrote as part of her literary production. The argumentative nature of this essay can be studied by means of a rhetorical analysis that examines the operations of inventio, dispositio and elocutio. The account of arguments and rhetorical figures that appears after the analysis of these operations results in an interpretation of presence that draws Anne Thackeray as a gentle figure that was content with simple things and that “was dancing to the music” of her writing. As a result, “The Enchanted Organ” can be read as an encomium that praises Thackeray’s cheerful personality rather than her literary merits.
Keywords
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Albadalejo, T. (1989). Retórica. Madrid: Editorial Síntesis.
Arenas-Cruz, M. E. (1997). Hacia una teoría general del ensayo. Construcción del texto ensayístico. Cuenca: Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha.
Aristotle. (1909). The Rhetoric of Aristotle, trans. Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Barthes, R. (1982). Investigaciones retóricas I. La antigua retórica, trans. Beatriz Dorriots. Barcelona: Ediciones Buenos Aires.
Brosnan, L. (1997). Reading Virginia Woolf’s Essays and Journalism. Breaking the Surface of Silence. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
[Cicero]. (1981). Rhetorica ad Herennium, trans. Henry Caplan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Crosswhite, J. (2011). Awakening the Topoi: Sources of Invention in The New Rhetoric’s Argument Model. In J.T. Cage (Ed.), The Promise of Reason. Studies in The New Rhetoric (pp. 185-205). Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press.
Cuddy-Keane, M. (1997). Virginia Woolf and the Varieties of Historicist Experience. In B. C. Rosenberg and J. Dubino (Eds.), Virginia Woolf and the Essay (pp. 59-67). London: Macmillan.
Dusinberre, J. (1997). Virginia Woolf’s Renaissance: Woman Reader or Common Reader? IA: IA University Press.
Fahnestock, J. (1999). Rhetorical Figures in Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
-----. (2005). Rhetorical Stylistics. Language and Literature, 14 (3), 215-230.
Fleischauer, J. F. (1975). James Baldwin’s Style: A Prospectus for the Classroom. College Composition and Communication, 26 (2), 141-148.
Graff, R. and Winn, W. (2011). Kenneth Burke’s ‘Identification’ and Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s ‘Communion’: A Case of Convergent Evolution? In J.T. Cage (Ed.), The Promise of Reason. Studies in The New Rhetoric (pp. 103-133). Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press.
Gross, A. G. and Dearin, R. D. (2003). Chaïm Perelman. Albany: SUNY Press.
Gualtieri, E. (2000a). The Impossible Art: Virginia Woolf on Modern Biography. The Cambridge Quarterly, 29 (4), 349-61.
-----. (2000b). Virginia Woolf’s Essays: Sketching the Past. London: Macmillan.
Keskinen, K. (1966). ‘Shooting an Elephant’ – An Essay to Teach. The English Journal, 55(6), 669-675.
Lanham, R. A. (1991). A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. 2nd edition. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Lojo-Rodríguez, M. L. (2001). ‘A New Tradition’: Virginia Woolf and the Personal Essay. Atlantis, 23, 75–90.
Marcus, J. (1980). Enchanted Organs, Magic Bells: Night and Day as Comic Opera. In R. Freedman, (Ed.) Virginia Woolf. Revaluation and Continuity. A Collection of Essays (pp. 97-122). Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Perelman, Ch. and Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1969). The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. Trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
Quintilian. (1920). Institutio Oratoria, vols I-IV, trans. HE Butler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rygiel, D. (1984). On the Neglect of Twentieth-Century Nonfiction: A Writing Teacher’s View. College English, 46 (4), 392-400.
Saloman, R. (2012). Virginia Woolf’s Essayism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Sánchez Cuervo, M. E. (2004). La argumentación retórica en los ensayos de Virginia Woolf. Tesis doctoral. Granada: Servicio de publicaciones de la Universidad de Granada.
-----. (2010). ‘Ah, but what is herself? I mean, what is a woman?’: Rhetorical Analysis of Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Essays. ES. Revista de Filología Inglesa, 31, 263-286.
Woolf, V. (1947). The Moment and Other Essays. London: The Hogarth Press.
-----. (1984). The Common Reader. First Series. Andrew McNeillie (Ed.) NY: Harcourt Brace.
-----. (1992). A Woman’s Essays. Selected Essays. Volume One. Rachel Bowlby (Ed.) Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Woolridge, P. (2012). Activist Essayism. Opticon1826, 3, 1-6.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.3n.5p.39
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
2012-2023 (CC-BY) Australian International Academic Centre PTY.LTD.
International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature
To make sure that you can receive messages from us, please add the journal emails into your e-mail 'safe list'. If you do not receive e-mail in your 'inbox', check your 'bulk mail' or 'junk mail' folders.