Download Figures of Thought

FIGURES OF THOUGHT
TROPES
TROPE
Words or phrases used in ways that effect an obvious
change (or “turn”) in their standard meaning.
• One kind of trope depends on a comparison between
two very different objects, or else on a transference of
qualities associated with an object, experience, or
concept not literally connected with it.
• Simile, metaphor, personification, pathetic fallacy,
synecdoche, metonymy
• A second kind of trope depends on a contrast between
two levels of meaning, or a shift from one level of
meaning to another.
• Irony, paradox, oxymoron, understatement, litotes, hyperbole,
and periphrasis
TROPE #1
SIMILE, METAPHOR, PERSONIFICATION, PATHETIC
FALLACY, SYNECDOCHE, & METONYMY
SIMILE
• A figure of thought in which one kind of thing is
compared to a markedly different object, concept,
or experience; the comparison is made explicit by
the word “like” or “as”
EXAMPLE: Barbara’s room is as dirty as a pig sty.
“Death lies on her like an untimely frost / Upon the
sweetest flower of all the field” ~Romeo & Juliet
METAPHOR
• A word or phrase that in literal use designates one
kind of thing is applied to a conspicuously different
object, concept, or experience, without asserting
an explicit comparison.
EXAMPLE: Barbara’s room is a pig sty.
TENOR & VEHICLE
Tenor: the literal subject; the aspect that “holds” the
meaning
Vehicle: the analogy; the part that “conveys” the
comparison
tenor
vehicle
EXAMPLE: Barbara’s room is a pig sty.
MIXED METAPHOR
Occurs when two or more incongruous vehicles are
applied to the same tenor
• Instead of clarifying some aspect of the subject, the
figure confuses it by linking images that clash.
EXAMPLE: She felt a heavy burden of guilt, but she
would not let it engulf her resolve.”
• The word “burden” is already a vehicle for the tenor, her
guilt; it clashes with the second vehicle, “engulf.” The
image of being weighted down is confused by the
conflicting image of being surrounded and swallowed up,
drowned.
EXTENDED METAPHOR
A metaphor that is sustained through several lines.
I do know
When the blood burns, how prodigal the soul
Lends the tongue vows. These blazes, daughter,
Giving more light than heat, extinct in both
Even in their promise, as it is a-making,
You must not take for fire.
~Hamlet
PERSONIFICATION
An abstract concept, animal, or inanimate object is
treated as though it were alive or had human
attributes.
EXAMPLE:
“She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die; / And
Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips / Bidding adieu.”
~John Keats
PATHETIC FALLACY
A special type of personification in which inanimate
aspects of nature, such as the landscape or the weather,
are represented as having human qualities or feelings.
EXAMPLE: The bloody battle of Chancellorville in Stephen
Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage is set on a lovely
summer day. On the eve of the battle, the naïve young
private Henry Fleming sees nature as attuned to his need
for consolation:
“There was a caress in the soft winds; and the whole mood
of the darkness, he thought, was one of sympathy for
himself and his distress.”
SYNECDOCHE
A figure of thought in which the term for part of something
is used to represent the whole, or, less commonly, the term
for the whole is used to represent a part.
EXAMPLE:
A fleet of ships may be described as “forty sails”
Athletes have been nicknamed “muscles” and “the Toe”
Manual laborers called “blue collar” workers
The food needed for sustenance has been called “daily
bread”
“The crown” for an aristocratic ruling body
METONYMY
A trope which substitutes the name of an entity with
something else that is closely associated with it.
EXAMPLE:
“The throne” is a metonymic synonym for “the king”
“Shakespeare” for the works of the playwright
TROPE #2
IRONY, HYPERBOLE, UNDERSTATEMENT, PARADOX,
OXYMORON, LITOTES, PERIPHRASIS, & PUN
IRONY
Irony is an incongruity
between what we
expect to happen and
what actually
happens.
• It is the broadest class
of figures of thought
that depend on
presenting a
deliberate contrast
between two levels
of meaning.
Types of Irony:
• Verbal
• Structural
• Dramatic
• Tragic
• Cosmic
VERBAL IRONY
Verbal irony consists of implying a meaning different
from, and often the complete opposite of, the one
that is explicitly stated.
• Usually, the irony is signaled by clues in the context
of the situation or in the style of expression.
EXAMPLE: Jonathan Swift’s bitter satire “A Modest
Proposal” purports to present a happy solution to the
famine in the author’s native Ireland: using the infants
of the starving lower classes as a source of food. At
no point does the narrator abandon his pretense of
cool rationality or complacency: the reaction of
horror is left to the reader.
STRUCTURAL IRONY
Structural irony refers to an implication of alternate or
reversed meaning that pervades a work.
• A major technique for sustaining structural irony is the use of
a naïve protagonist or unreliable narrator who continually
interprets events and intentions in ways that the author’s
signals are mistaken.
EXAMPLES:
1. Voltaire’s Candide, despite several experiences of
horrendous suffering and corruption, persists in his
conviction that “everything is for the best in this best of all
possible worlds.”
2. The narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” is
paranoid and hallucinatory. He claims that his
preternaturally acute senses and clear motives for
murdering an old man are proofs that he is “not mad.” A
reader who accepts this self-defense at face value is
missing the story’s well-sustained structural irony.
DRAMATIC IRONY
Dramatic irony occurs when the audience is privy to
knowledge that one or more of the characters lacks.
This technique may be used for a comic or tragic
effect.
EXAMPLE
In Twelfth Night Shakespeare lets us in from the first
scene on the secret that Viola is disguised as a boy
and that she is smitten with the duke whom she is
serving as page. We can therefore enjoy the
humorous dramatic ironies that result when the
Countess Olivia, the object of the duke’s courtship,
falls in love with the charming messenger.
TRAGIC IRONY
When dramatic irony occurs in tragedies, it is called
tragic irony.
EXAMPLE
In Oedipus Rex, Oedipus seeks to cleanse his
kingdom by finding the murderer of King Laius, only to
discover that the culprit is himself, and that the king
was his father and the widowed queen, whom he
has married, his own mother.
COSMIC IRONY
Cosmic irony refers to an implied worldview in which
characters are led to embrace false hopes of aid or
success, only to be defeated by some larger force,
such as God or fate.
EXAMPLE
1. Macbeth believes that he is protected by the
weird sisters’ prophecies, but he is betrayed by
their fiendish duplicity.
2. Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman kills himself to secure his
family the insurance payment that his suicide will,
in fact, make invalid.
HYPERBOLE
The trope in which a point is stated in a way that is greatly
exaggerated.
• The effect of hyperbole is often to imply the intensity of a
speaker’s feelings or convictions by putting them in
uncompromising or absolute terms.
• It may be comic or serious.
EXAMPLE
Othello, greeting his new wife after surviving a perilous
storm, says:
O my soul’s joy!
If after every tempest comes such calms,
May the winds blow till they have wakened death!
UNDERSTATEMENT
A form of irony in which a point is deliberately
expressed as less, in magnitude, value or importance,
than it actually is.
EXAMPLE
In Romeo & Juliet, Mercutio dismisses the fatal wound
he has just received as “a scratch.” He elaborates
on the figure with a second understatement: “Marry,
‘tis enough.” The effect is to create a sort of double
take, with the force of the implied meaning—here,
that Mercutio is well aware that he has suffered a
death blow—intensified by the restraint with which it is
expressed.
PARADOX
A trope in which a statement that appears on the surface to
be contradictory or impossible turns out to express an often
striking truth.
EXAMPLE
1. “Less is more” suggests that spareness and selectivity are
more important in achieving aesthetic beauty than
expansiveness and inclusiveness.
2. John Donne’s sonnet “Batter my heart, three-personed
God” expresses the speaker’s yearning to be forced
violently into the pious faith that he feels incapable of
attaining on his own. The poem ends with a startling vision
of God as a masterful seducer, to whom the speaker
pleads: “Take me to you, imprison me, for I / Except You
enthrall me, never shall be free, / Nor ever chaste, except
You ravish me.” In other words, the paradox implies, only in
total servitude to the power of the deity can the worshipper
achieve genuine autonomy.
OXYMORON
An oxymoron is a compressed paradox that closely links two
seemingly contrary elements in a way that, on further
consideration, turns out to make good sense. As with
paradox, the effect is to suggest a subtle truth.
• Often in literature an oxymoron is a sign of a speaker’s
conflicted feelings.
EXAMPLE
When Juliet discovers that her new husband has just slain her
cousin Tybalt, she exclaims: “O serpent heart, hid with a
flowering face!... / Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!” Juliet is
outraged at the seeming rift between Romeo’s physical
beauty and the moral corruption that she thinks is revealed
by the violent act.
LITOTES
Litotes is a figure of thought in which a point is
affirmed by negating its opposite. It is a special form
of understatement, where the surface denial serves,
through ironic contrast, to reinforce the underlying
assertion.
EXAMPLE
“He’s no fool” implies “He is wise”
“Not uncommon” means “frequent”
PERIPHRASIS
Periphrasis is a figure of thought in which a point is
stated by deliberate circumlocution, rather than
directly.
• One prominent use of periphrasis is in euphemisms,
such as “passed away” for “died” and “in his cups”
for “drunk.” There the aim is to cushion the painful
or embarrassing effect of the explicit term.
• It can also signal a deliberate attempt to avoid
unpleasant truths, a frequent device of politicians,
as in such terms as “ethnic cleansing” for
“genocide.”
PUN
A pun is a figure of thought that plays on words that have the same
sound (homonyms), or closely similar sounds, but have sharply
contrasting meanings. The usual affect is a witty or humorous double
meaning.
EXAMPLE
A more serious example occurs in Hamlet, when the prince answers
his despised uncle’s public inquiry about his continued melancholy—
”How is it that the clouds still hang on you?” with a pun: “Not so, my
lord. I am too much in the sun.” The retort is a reminder to the
listening court and to Claudius, who has succeeded Hamlet’s father
on the throne, that the prince both dislikes this light of royal favor
being shone on him (“sun”) and that he feels too strongly his father’s
loss (as his “son”) to celebrate Claudius’s ascension. The pun is both
ingenious and ominous. It announces the prince’s instinctive loathing
for the man who he will soon discover has murdered his father, and it
suggests the roundabout, intellectual nature of Hamlet’s weapon of
choice, “words, words, words.”
RESOURCES
Hamilton, Sharon. Essential Literary Terms. New York:
People’s Education, 2007.