Figures of Speech

Figures of Speech (Stylistic Devices)

In literature and writing, a figure of speech (also called stylistic device or rhetorical device) is the use of any of a variety of techniques to give an auxiliary meaning, idea, or feeling.Sometimes a word diverges from its normal meaning, or a phrase has a specialized meaning not based on the literal meaning of the words in it. Examples are metaphor, simile, or personification.
Stylistic devices often provide emphasis, freshness of expression, or clarity.

Here is a list of some of the most important figures of speech:

Adjunction:
Is a figure of speech in which a word, phrase or clause is placed at the beginning or the end of a sentence.

Examples:

Fades physical beauty with disease or age.

Either with disease or age.

Alliteration:
Is the repetition of initial sounds in neighboring words.Alliteration draws attention to the phrase and is often used for emphasis.The initial consonant sound is usually repeated in two neighboring words although sometimes the repetition occurs also in words that are not neighbors.

Examples:

sweet smell of success,a dime a dozen.

Allusion

The act of alluding is to make indirect reference. It is a literary device, a figure of speech that quickly stimulates different ideas and associations using only a couple of words.

Allusion relies on the reader being able to understand the allusion and being familiar with the meaning hidden behind the words.

Example:

Describing someone as a "Romeo" makes an allusion to the famous young lover in Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare.
In an allusion the reference may be to a place, event, literary work, myth, or work of art, either directly or by implication.

Examples of allusion:

David was being such a scrooge!. (Scrooge" is the allusion, and it refers to Charles Dicken's novel, A Christmas Carol. Scrooge was very greedy and unkind, which David was being compared to.)
The software included a Trojan Horse. (allusion on the Trojan horse from Greek mythology) to wash one’s hands of it. (allusion on Pontius Pilatus, who sentenced Jesus to death, but washed his hands afterwards to demonstrate that he was not to blame for it.)

There are many advantages when you use an allusion:

You don't need to explain or clarify a problem in a lengthy way.
You make the reader become active by reflecting on the analogy.
You make your message memorable.

Examples of Symbolism in Literature

Symbolism is a technique used in literature when some things are not to be taken literally. The symbolism can be an object, person, situation, events or actions that have a deeper meaning in context.
This technique can enhance writing and give insight to the reader.

Symbolism in Poems

In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”, the black bird stands for death and loss.

In William Blake’s “Ah Sunflower”, the sunflower represents people and the sun represents life:

Ah Sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun;
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveler’s journey is done;

In William Wordsworth’s “She Dwelt Amoung Untrodden Ways” innocence and beauty are shown with these phrases:

"A violet by a mossy stone" and "Fair as a star, when only one is shining in the sky."

In Sara Teasdale’s “Wild Asters”, ‘spring’ and ‘daisies’ are symbols of youth and ‘bitter autumn’ is a symbol of death:

In the spring, I asked the daisies
If his words were true,
And the clever, clear-eyed daisies
Always knew.
Now the fields are brown and barren,
Bitter autumn blows,
And of all the stupid asters
Not one knows.

In Samuel Taylor Coleridge's
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, the albatross can be seen as standing for a burden you must bear:

Ah ! well a-day ! what evil looks
Had I from old and young !
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.

Symbolism in Books, Plays & Screenplays

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the letter 'A' symbolized adultery.

In Shakespeare’s As you Like It, ‘stage’ symbolizes the world and ‘players’ symbolize men and women:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
they have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,

In Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, ‘Wuthering’ represents the wild nature of the inhabitants:

My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods.
Time will change it; I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees.
My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath a source of little visible delight, but necessary.

In Elie Wiesel’s novel Night, night is used throughout the book to represent death, darkness, and loss of faith.

In the movie The Wizard of Oz, the storm symbolizes high emotions and occurred when those emotions were present.

In the movie trilogy Star Wars, Luke was dressed in light colors and Darth Vader was dressed in black, showing good vs evilIn Lorraine Hansberry’s play
A Raisin in the Sun, a plant on the windowsill symbolizes needs and hope, like a plant needs the sun to grow, we have needs.

In Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, the Grinch steals the symbols of Christmas, like trees, presents and food, to find out in the end Christmas was more than those things.

In Hansel and Gretel, bread symbolizes comfort and bread crumbs symbolize the way home.

In Elizabeth Barret Browning’s Aurora Leigh, women’s work is symbolized as being undervalued:
The works of women are symbolical.

We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight,Producing what?
A pair of slippers, sir,
To put on when you're weary.

In the Lone Ranger, silver bullets represent justice by law:
A symbol which means justice by law.
I want to become known to all who see the silver bullets that I live and fight to see the eventual defeat and proper punishment by law of every criminal in the West.

Anaphora:

Anaphora is a literary and rhetorical device in which a word or group of words is repeated at the beginning of two or more successive clauses or sentences. This technique adds emphasis and unity to the clauses.
Anaphora, possibly the oldest literary device, has its roots in Biblical Psalms used to emphasize certain words or phrases. Gradually, Elizabethan and Romantic writers brought this device into practice.

example:

“Every day, every night, in every way, I am getting better and better”.

Postmodern/Postmodernity

-Suspicion and rejection of Master Narratives; local narratives, ironic deconstruction of master narratives: counter-myths of origin.

-Rejection of totalizing theories; pursuit of localizing and contingent theories.

-Social and cultural pluralism, disunity, unclear bases for social/national/ethnic unity.

-Skepticism of progress, anti-technology reactions, neo-Luddism; new age religions

-Sense of fragmentation and decentered self;
multiple, conflicting identities

-Alternative family units, alternatives to middle-class marriage model, multiple identities for couplings and childraising.

-Subverted order, loss of centralized control, fragmentation.

-Trust and investment in micropolitics, identity politics, local politics, institutional power struggles.

-Rhizome/surface tropes.
Attention to play of surfaces, images, signifiers without concern for "Depth"

-Hyper-reality, image saturation, simulacra seem more powerful than the "real"; images and texts with no prior "original".
"As seen on TV" and "as seen on MTV" are more powerful than unmediated experience.

-Disruption of the dominance of high culture by popular culture;
mixing of popular and high cultures, new valuation of pop culture, hybrid cultural forms cancel "high"/"low" categories

-Demassified culture; niche products and marketing, smaller group identities

-Art as process, performance, production, intertextuality.
Art as recycling of culture authenticated by audience and validated in subcultures sharing identity with the artist.

-Navigation, information management, just-in-time knowledge.
The Web

-Interactive, client-server, distributed, many-
to-many media (the Net and Web)

-Dispersal, dissemination,
networked, distributed knowledge

-Indeterminancy, contingency

-Play, irony, challenge to official seriousness, subversion of earnestness

-Hybridity, promiscuous genres, recombinant culture, intertextuality, pastiche

-Design and architecture of LA and Las Vegas

-cyborgian mixing of organic and inorganic, human and machine and electronic

-androgyny, queer sexual identities, polymorphous sexuality, mass marketing of pornography

-hypermedia as transcendence of physical limits of print media;
the Web or Net as information system

Modernism/Modernity

-Master Narratives and Metanarratives of history, culture and national identity; myths of cultural and ethnic orgin.

-Faith in "Grand Theory" (totalizing explantions in history, science and culture) to represent all knowledge and explain everything.

-Faith in, and myths of, social and cultural unity, hierarchies of social-class and ethnic/national values, seemingly clear bases for unity.

-Master narrative of progress through science and technology.

-Sense of unified, centered self;
"individualism," unified identity

-Idea of "the family" as central unit of social order: model of the middle-class, nuclear family

-Hierarchy, order, centralized control.

-Faith and personal investment in big politics (Nation-State, party)

-Root/Depth tropes.
Faith in "Depth" (meaning, value, content, the signified) over "Surface" (appearances, the superficial, the signifier)

-Faith in the "real" beyond media and representations; authenticity of "originals"

-Dichotomy of high and low culture (official vs. popular culture);
imposed consensus that high or official culture is normative and authoritative

-Mass culture, mass consumption, mass marketing

-Art as unique object and finished work authenticated by artist and validated by agreed upon standards.

-Knowledge mastery, attempts to embrace a totality.
The encyclopedia

-Broadcast media, centralized one-
to-many communications.

-Centering/centeredness,
centralized knowledge.

-Determinancy

-Seriousness of intention and purpose, middle-class earnestness.

-Sense of clear generic boundaries and wholeness (art, music, and literature)

-Design and architecture of New York and Boston.

-Clear dichotomy between organic and inorganic, human and machine

-Phallic ordering of sexual difference, unified sexualities, exclusion/bracketing of pornography

-the book as sufficient bearer of the word;
the library as system for printed knowledge