The Signifying Monkey

Postmodern rhetoric encompassed many great and influential literary theorists and rhetoricians, three of which consist of I.A. Richards, Kenneth Burke, and Henry Louis Gates who have made lasting and revolutionary differences within the discourse of rhetoric. Each provided their own theories and ideas on how words come to have their individual meanings, whether through context, terministic screens, or as a cultural result. I.A. Richards outlined how words come to mean in his “Context Theorem of Meaning”, in which his primary argument is that in each individual consciously calls upon past events to create a context by which current events are then interpreted. (Western Thought 261) In other words, Effects from similar events in our individual
Taking Saussure’s terms sign, signifier, and signified which are synonymous with Richard’s reference, referent, and symbol, Gates discusses the differences between the standard english signifying and the black vernacular Signifyin(g) (Gates 45). He denounces the discriminatory idea of Ebonics as being incorrect and clarifies that it is simply a dialect formed through rebellion. He takes a similar notions of Richard’s emotive and referential language and applied them to the black vernacular in which words are capable of having a vast assortment of meanings within their contexts and referential language to standard english whose symbol and referent always constitute the same reference. Gates builds his essay on the rhetorical games played by African Americans of the dozens, insulting, naming, the trope of tropes, and the poems regarding the signifying monkey outwitting the feeble minded lion. Burke’s terministic screens apply to the ideas Gates presents because african american language and caucasian language is seen through a vastly different manner through each groups eyes, their histories and the context molds their perception of language in an entirely encompassing fashion. (Gates