tropology

Noun

tropology (countable and uncountable, plural tropologies)

1. (rhetoric) The use of a trope (metaphor or figure of speech).
   • But she is not right to claim this is because "rhetoric" must necessarily be "in the Nietzschean sense that all language is founded in tropology."³⁷ Since when has tropology been in conflict with theology? Tropology and rhetoric thrive in the works of both Calvin and Calvino, and tropology is the...1998, Allen Mitchie, “Between Calvin and Calvino: Postmodernism and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress”, in Greg Clingham, editor, Questioning History: The Postmodern Turn to the Eighteenth Century, page 54
2. The interpretation of scripture or other work in order to educe moral or figurative meaning; a treatise of such interpretation.
   • Where the syntax of propositions is broken, we see a very general principle of tropology that grants a priori that things like texts are replacements of things like authors.1993, Miguel Tamen, Manners of Interpretation: The Ends of Argument in Literary Studies, page 58
   • He must distinguish the historical information from the allegory, divide the allegory from the tropology, and separate the tropology from the anagogy.2009, Geoffrey Grossus, The Life of Blessed Bernard of Tiron, page 58
3. A recurring motif or metaphor, a trope; an interplay of tropes.
   • These essays, in other words, endeavor to read the literary, cultural, and political implications of the tropologies of sexuality that are put into play once the field of sexuality becomes charged by the widespread availability of a "homosexual" identity, and they explore the determining relation...1994, Lee Edelman, preface, Homographesis, hardcover edition, page xiv
   • Finally, I differentiate Joyce's use of a feminine tropology from that of Derrida, Lacan, and the proponents of écriture féminine: in Joyce's work it serves to express his ambivalence and anxiety concerning a writing that would open up the play of the signifier and challenge the authority of the...1998, Elisabeth Sheffield, Joyce's Abandoned Female Costumes, Gratefully Received, page 10