Chiasmus

Despite its scalability to different “levels” of a text, chiasmus has most often been viewed as a rather limited rhetorical or literary curiosity, not relevant to more urgent questions about audience, context, and ethics that have concerned rhetorical theorists for centuries. However, I would like to recast chiasmus as more than a mere “figure of speech,” as it has most often been characterized. I would like to also imagine chiasmus as a more expansive rhetorical framework and generative topos that can guide our approach to composing and interpreting texts. This expansion and rewriting of chiasmus defines it as crossing rhetoric: rhetoric that is self-aware—perhaps even playful—about the ways it crosses/combines/inverts ideas, stances, languages, media, bodies, or other traditionally bounded systems.

In what follows, when I refer to chiasmus, I do not (only) mean the limited syntactic and organizational structures of the classical figure. My definition of chiasmus below is a definition of crossing rhetoric—that is, rhetoric that deliberately and self-consciously connects, mirrors, spatializes, highlights relationships, or leaves unresolved ambiguities. Crossing rhetoric is always attuned to the the gaps, the slippages and indeterminacies of meaning.

This webtext makes a case for this theory through its representation. It models a crossing rhetoric that invites interaction and in some cases ambiguity through the chiastic interweaving of media. In doing so, I hope that you dwell on not only the fragments but also in the space between fragments, where multiplicities of meanings might be created or discovered through interpretation.

In the remainder of this chapter, I present five fragments, each of which attempts to capture a facet of crossing rhetoric by drawing inspiration from the familiar rhetorical form of chiasmus.