Trophic and Tropic Dynamics: An Ecological Perspective of Tropes

Abstract

Keeling, a rhetorical scholar, and Prairie, a marine ecologist, investigate the entanglement of two foundational concepts of their requisite fields that share etymological features: trope (τροπη), to turn, and trophe (τροφη), to nourish. They discuss the ways that trophic dynamics in ecology, including symbiotic relationships, demonstrate troping’s interactive and polymorphic qualities. They engage troping as a social, biological, and physical activity that composes ecosystems with and without humans. This project historicizes the interdisciplinary emergence of rhetoric and ecology—and trope and trophe—in the mythopoeic tradition of archaic Greece, while also encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration to address problematic distillations of tropes in academic research and public decision making. An ecological perspective of rhetoric contends that tropes are dynamic and polymorphic modes of environmental expression.