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Dulness Unbound: Rhetoric and Pope's Dunciad

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Fredric V. Bogel
Fredric V. Bogel*
Affiliation:
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
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Abstract

It has long been recognized that the American formalists' rehabilitation of Alexander Pope depended on a renewed interest in rhetoric. In fact, there is a remarkable structural congruence between the formalists image of Pope's poetry and their conception of rhetoric, for both are item-centered, combinatory, and ultimately unifying. A single model of unified diversity, then, governs not only the formalist image of Pope's couplet rhetoric and theodicean scheme but formalist conceptions of rhetoric and “organic form” as well. An alternative (and complementary) model of rhetoric, however, insisting on creation as an act of structuring through differentiation rather than through unification, can help us to a fuller understanding of The Dunciad, and especially of the place of Dulness in that poem. Such a model can also generate a poetics capable of granting to satire and mock forms an appropriately primary status. (FVB)

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 97 , Issue 5 , October 1982 , pp. 844 - 855
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1952

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