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Kenneth Burke begins his essay "Four Master Tropes' by identifying four figures of speech—metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony—as figures of thought, observing: "My primary concern with them here will be not with their purely figurative usage, but with their role in the discovery and description of "the truth."" He then characterizes metaphor as "a device for seeing something in terms of something else. It brings out the thisness of a that, or the thatness of a this. The trope of metonymy elaborates the correlation by making reductions possible: "the reduction of some higher or more complex realm of being to the terms of a lower or less complex level of being." Metonymy is useful for problem solving, up to a point, but then synecdoche offers a broader set of strategies of representation: "part for whole, whole for part, container for the contained, sign for the thing signified, … cause for effect, effect for cause, genus for species, species for genus, etc. All such conversions imply an integral relationship, a relationship of convertibility, between the two terms." And of irony, he writes, "Irony arises when one tries, by the interaction of terms upon one another, to produce a development that uses all the terms." It is a dialectic, which, like all good philosophical dialectic and all good political deliberation, leads beyond itself (Burke 1969).

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-98231-1_6

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