(34.) Consider Robert Yelle's comments on the importance of rhetorical
chiasmus. Yelle, Semiotics of Religion, pp.
The reversal of sounds in a
chiasmus is attractive, memorable, and sometimes fascinating.
Having now examined the conceptual logics behind structuralist sign description, and thus also of Jakobson's zero analysis, and presented the structural-functional paradigm model as a tool for describing sign opposition, it is now time to look at some problems in Jakobson's gender analysis and the zeros of his
chiasmus.
Catullus was not the only writer to employ
chiasmus in this fashion, nor was it only used in poetry.
And yet the parataxis accounts for the ways in which the text beckons us to "pass on." That is, Cather's twinning of
chiasmus and parataxis offers a rhetorical basis to the interpretive and ethical ideal of the "light touch." If the chiastic echoes solicit a certain interpretive pressure upon the reader--to re-emphasize those key moments, images, and ideas--then the parataxis petitions that the reader keep reading and resist dwelling on anything for too long because each grammatical element possesses the same hermeneutic weight.
The development towards this complex and multi-leveled concept is carried forward through the analysis of the three chiasms which Weinman sees as central to Woolf's representation of the crisis of the subject, insofar as they point "to the impossibility of stable subjectivity" (23) The dynamics originating from the model of the
chiasmus, with its relations of "mutual interdependence" (14), further clarifies the author's talent for investigations which attempt to go beyond given dichotomies and definitions to propose more integrated views of central issues such as the formation of individuality and its relation to body and language.
A
chiasmus found in the text highlights such reversal ' Jorge so was I.
A final challenge was to use Ciceronian word order leading to rhetorical devices such as
chiasmus, anaphora, alliteration and emphatic positioning, while still keeping the meaning clear.
To co-opt a
chiasmus of Kant: moral arguments without moral passions are empty; but moral passions without moral arguments are blind.