Literary Devices

Figures of Speech and Other Literary Techniques

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• Allusion is a brief reference to a person, event, or place, real or ficticious, or to a work of art.

Casual reference to a famous historical or literary figure or event.

An allusion may be Classical, Topical, Biblical or Literary.

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• Antithesis: opposition, or contrast of ideas or words in a balanced or parallel construction.

e.g. Brutus: Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more. [Shakespeare, Julius Caesar]

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• An anti-climax is an abrupt declension (either deliberate or unintended) on the part of a speaker or writer from the dignity of idea which he appeared to be aiming at; as in the following well-known distich:--– "The great Dalhousie, he, the god of war,– Lieutenant-colonel to the earl of Mar."

• An anticlimax can be intentionally employed only for a jocular or satiric purpose. It frequently partakes of the nature of antithesis, as--– "Die and endow a college or a cat."

• It is often difficult to distinguish between "anticlimax" and "bathos"; but the former is more decidedly a relative term. A whole speech may never rise above the level of bathos; but a climax of greater or less elevation is the necessary antecedent of an anticlimax.

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• Aphorism is a brief saying embodying a moral, a concise statement of a principle or precept given in pointed words.

Hippocrates: Life is short, art is long, opportunity fleeting, experimenting dangerous, reasoning difficult.Pope: Some praise at morning what they blame at night.Emerson: Imitation is suicideFranklin: Lost Time is never Found again.

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• Apostrophe is when an absent person, an abstract concept, or an important object is directly addressed.

Example:With how sad steps, O moon, thou climbest the skies. Busy old fool, unruly sun.

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• Archetype is the usage of any object or situation as it was originally made - think of it as the biggest cliché ever, but one that never dies.

ex: The Odyssey is so full of archetypes that there is probably at least one of every kind. Odysseus is the archetypical hero, Hydra and Charybdis and the Cyclops are the archetypical monsters...

Related to Content• Circumlocution the use of a longer phrasing in place of a possible shorter form of

expression; a roundabout or indirect manner of writing or speaking. E.g. Polonius’s speech

• In literature periphrasis is sometimes used for comic effect. Adding in superfluous words to extend the message you are trying to give - "beating around the bush", so to speak.

• Example: I have observed that within the time I substituted for your class, the

class participated in behaviours that were most unruly and displeasing in general

vs. Your class misbehaved when I substituted for you.

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• Climax is a figure of speech, in which words, phrases, or clauses are arranged in order of increasing importance. It is sometimes used with anadiplosis, which uses the repetition of a word or phrase in successive clauses.

• E.g. "...Lost, vaded, broken, dead within an hour. William Shakespeare, The Passionate Pilgrim, XIII

• "...the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Martin Luther King, I Have a Dream

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• Connotation is an implied meaning of a word. Opposite of denotation.

Example:Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest (burial)

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• Denotation is the literal meaning of a word, the dictionary meaning. Opposite of connotation.

Example:Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest (sleep).

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• Euphemism is the substitution of an agreeable or less offensive expression in place of one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant to the listener.

E.g. He was taken to his father – in – law’s

house (prison)

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• Hypallage (pronounced /haɪˈpælədʒiː/) is a literary device that is the reversal of the syntactic relation of two words (as in "her beauty's face").

• One kind of hypallage, also known as a transferred epithet, is rhetorical device in which a modifier, usually an adjective, is applied to the "wrong" word in the sentence. The word whose modifier is thus displaced can either be actually present in the sentence, or it can be implied logically.

• "The plowman homeward plods his weary way, / And leaves the world to darkness and to me" (Thomas Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard") — Weary way is a hypallage: it is the plowman, not the way, that is weary.

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• Hyperbaton An inversion of normal word order. Word order reversal in "Cheese, I love it!"

• "Bloody thou art; bloody will be thy end" - William Shakespeare in Richard III, 4.4, 198.

• "Object there was none. Passion there was none." - Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart.

• "This is the sort of English up with which I will not put." - Attributed to Winston Churchill

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• Hyperbole is exaggeration or overstatement. Opposite of Understatement

• Example:I'm so hungry I could eat a horse.He's as big as a house.

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• Image is language that evokes one or all of the five senses:

seeing – visual

hearing – auditory

tasting – gustatory

smelling – olfactory

touching - tactile

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• Irony is an implied discrepancy between what is said and what is meant.Three kinds of irony:1. verbal irony is when an author says one thing and means something else.2. dramatic irony is when an audience perceives something that a character in the literature does not know.3. irony of situation is a discrepency between the expected result and actual results.

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Litotes• rather than making a certain statement

directly, a speaker expresses it even more effectively, or achieves emphasis, by denying its opposite.

• E.g. rather than merely saying that a person is rather attractive (or even very attractive), one might say that he or she is "not unattractive".

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• Metaphor comparison of two unlike things using the verb "to be" and not using like or as as in a simile.

• A metaphor establishes a relationship at once; it leaves more to the imagination. It is a shortcut to the meaning; it sets two unlike things side by side and makes us see the likeness between them.

• E.g. The camel is the ship of the desert

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• Simile:

When Robert Burns wrote "My love is like a red, red rose" he used a simile. When Robert Herrick wrote "You are a tulip" he used a metaphor.

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• Metonymy is substituting a word for another word closely associated with it.

Example:bowing to the sceptred isle. (Great Britain)

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Oxymoron is putting two contradictory words together.

Examples:hot ice, cold fire, wise fool, sad joy, eloquent silence,

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Paradox reveals a kind of truth which at first seems contradictory. Two opposing ideas.

Example:Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage.

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• Pathetic Fallacy: The attribution of human traits to nature or inanimate

objects. e.g. One passage, after a pointless bout of cruelty by

Hannie, describes her black mood: `She felt rudderless and directionless, like the dead sheep the November rains had carried down the river. Day after day it had drifted up and down, up and down, moving swiftly away with the pull of the sea's ebbing tide, pushing back again as it rose. Bloated, a perch for the gulls. Until it snagged on some drowned tree and left off its journeying.'

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• Personification is giving human qualities to animals or objects.

• Example:a smiling moon, a jovial sun

• In "Mirror" by Sylvia Plath: I am silver and exact.

I have no preconceptions.Whatever I see I swallow immediatelyJust as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.I am not cruel, only truthful--

• In John Keats' "To Autumn," the fall season is personified as "sitting careless on a granary floor" (line 14) and "drowsed with the fume of poppies" (line 17.)

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• polysyndeton

The repetition of connectives

Example:

"the snow, the silence, the quick love, the astral call oh fly the friendly skies,..."

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PUNS • the usually humorous use of a word in such a

way as to suggest two or more of its meanings or the meaning of another word similar in sound.

• A pun can rely on the assumed equivalency of multiple similar words (homonymy), of different shades of meaning of one word (polysemy), or of a literal meaning with a metaphor.

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• satire: a literary tone used to ridicule or make fun of human vice or weakness, often with the intent of correcting, or changing, the subject of the satiric attack.

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• Simile is the comparison of two unlike things using like or as. Related to metaphor

• Example:He eats like a pig.

Vines are like golden prisons.

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• Syllepsis When a single word that governs or modifies two or more others must be understood differently with respect to each of those words.

e.g. Alexander Pope was a master of the literary

figure. Take this couplet from The Rape of the Lock:

Here thou, great ANNA! whom three realms obey,Dost sometimes counsel take - and sometimes tea.

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• Symbol is using an object or action that means something more than its literal meaning.

• Example:the bird of night (owl is a symbol of death)

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• Synecdoche is when one uses a part to represent the whole.

Example:lend me your ears (give me your attention).

Related to Content• Synesthesia is the conflation of the senses.

e. g “ruby grape of Proserpine”

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• Syntax

1 a : the way in which linguistic elements (as words) are put together to form constituents (as phrases or clauses)

b : the part of grammar dealing with this2 : a connected or orderly system : harmonious arrangement of parts or elements

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• Theme is the general idea or insight about life that a writer wishes to express, the most common ones being, death and love.

Example:

– "After reading (this book, poem, essay), I think the author wants me to understand......."

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• Tone is the attitude a writer takes towards a subject or character: serious, humorous, sarcastic, ironic, satirical, tongue-in-cheek, solemn, objective.

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• Understatement

This device is used to understate the obvious. On a day of extreme weather, like it is really really hot, one might say, "Is it warm enough for you?"

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• Verisimilitude

1. The appearance of truth; the quality of seeming to be true.

2. Something that has the appearance of being true or real.

Acknowledgements

• Google Search

• http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/lit_terms/

• All my teachers of this miraculous bane, the computer, starting from my Father.

• Ms Deepa Das, my constant support

• Our students who will take the IB exams in 2009 and 2010, who, I believe, will bring only 6s and 7s