tropology

noun

1. (countable, rhetoric, uncountable)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 very lifeblood of The Pilgrim's Progress.”

2. (countable, uncountable)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.”

   “He must distinguish the historical information from the allegory, divide the allegory from the tropology, and separate the tropology from the anagogy.”

   “A similar story can be told for White's tropology. Tropology also is something that “the mind brings” to (past) reality and that is not part of the past itself.”

3. (countable, uncountable)A recurring motif or metaphor, a trope; an interplay of tropes.

   “1994, Lee Edelman, preface, Homographesis, hardcover edition, page xiv, 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 between "homosexuality" and "identity" as both have been constructed in modern Euro-American societies.”

   “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 unified self.”

   “In lieu of this opposition, the lecture speaks of a “substantive tropology” of love, where tropology means more than a decorative interplay of tropes; it signifies the ability “simultaneously to capture the real analogy of sentiments and the power of eros to signify and express agape."”