Review of T. R. Johnson's Rhetoric of Pleasure

Maybe it's America's puritan roots, maybe it's students' experiences with writing in school, but "pleasure" and "rhetoric" seem odd bedfellows. This was not always so. In fact, the ancient Greeks were incredibly attuned to the potential of words to act as "bearers of pleasure and banishers of pain" and to make an enraptured audience file away from a speech feeling  "as if ravished by the force of the mighty" (Gorgias). In T. R. Johnson's slim but ambitious book, he argues that introducing our students to the word-magic of the old masters can both improve their writing and change how they approach it--from a dreadful chore to a delightful craft.

Johnson's book is primarily addressed to composition instructors at the university level, and much of it is devoted to laying the theoretical justifications in favor of the "renegade" pleasure-based rhetoric he espouses. So one of Johnson's aims is to heal a longstanding rift in the world of writing instruction between expressivists like Peter Elbow and social constructionists like Joseph Harris. His other objective, also therapeutic but focused on alleviating students' pain in the writing process, will speak  directly to writing teachers whose concerns are more particular--how to help students recast sentences in ways that have been proven to be powerful.

This latter audience will find the book's appendix extraordinarily helpful since it lays out exactly how Johnson goes about "teaching this stuff." It is like a toolkit of ancient rhetorical devices and a detailed instruction manual on how students can use them. In many cases, students will recognize these figures and flourishes of speech but be shocked at their diversity, flexibility, and utility. Everywhere the focus is on using these tools in writing. Johnson doesn't care if a kid knows how to pronounce or spell epixeuxis or asyndeton, metonymy or synecdoche. To paraphrase a memorable use of chiasmus, Johnson wants us to Ask not what our students can do for us, but what we (and the ancient Greeks) can do for our students.