Rhetoric and Ordeals of Language

by Ellen B. Basso

Linguistic operations at the disorderly zones of human life are associated with our human deceptive and imaginative abilities, our abilities to produce alternatives. Rhetorics of emotion coupled with semiotic hegemonies result in “ordeals of language” when we permit our own voices to be powerfully affected by the language of the dominant. Discomfort with the limits of our own cultures arising from sensitivities to the contexts of these “ordeals” motivate tropological experiments.. which transform socioemotional reality, having a critical and often unwitting impact on social life. Some Japanese, Kalapalo, and “modernist” narratives of these ordeals are discussed.

 

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