ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates the use and context of indirection with one ancient model, one ancient critic who comments on the use of indirection, followed by examples of indirection noted by critics working in Anglo American and English literature. Out of these more widely known illustrations of indirection, it explores figures of speech and elements of folklore that fit within the greater category of rhetorical indirection. In African American criticism, W. E. B. Du Bois coins "double-consciousness" in The Souls of Black Folk as a description of a feeling of "two-ness—an American, a Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings", and he ties the doubled cultural condition to doubled expression of "two thoughts". Du Bois's expression of a volatile subject with a folk-derived image of duality leads to later critical explorations of dualities in subaltern expression. Folkloric expression in language appears more frequently among those groups whose culture does not receive widespread acceptance in the dominant discourse of the larger society.
