Figurative Language 1
This can be verbal, dramatic, or situational
What is Irony?
A figure of speech in which human characteristics and sensibilities are attributed to animals, plants, inanimate objects, natural forces, or abstract ideas.
What is personification?
This is a conclusion based on insufficient or biased evidence. In other words, you are rushing to a conclusion before you have all the relevant facts. Example:
“Even though it's only the first day, I can tell this is going to be a boring course.”
What is a hasty generalization?
A question that is not intended to be answered, but is used to prove a point.
What is a rhetorical question?
In America, it dominated the literary scene from around 1820 to the end of the Civil War.
- Poe, Hawthorne, Melville
What is American Romanticism?
A figure of speech that substitutes the name of a related object, person, or idea for the subject at hand.
What is metonymy?
An implied analogy, in which one thing is imaginatively compared to or identified with another, dissimilar thing.
What is a metaphor?
This is a diversionary tactic that avoids the key issues, often by avoiding opposing arguments rather than addressing them. Example:
“The level of mercury in seafood may be unsafe, but what will fishers do to support their families?”
What is a Red Herring?
A comparison of similar things, often for the purpose of using something familiar to explain something unfamiliar.
What is an analogy?
Arising out of the rebellious mood at the beginning of the twentieth century, this literary period was a radical approach that yearned to revitalize the way modern civilization viewed life, art, politics, and science.
- Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner
What is Modernism?
A comparison using "like" or "as"
What is a simile?
A figure of speech in which two contradictory words or phrases are combined in a single expression, giving the effect of a condensed paradox. Example: "wise fool," "living death," "cruel kindness."
What is an oxymoron?
This is an attack on the character of a person rather than his or her opinions or arguments. Example:
“Green Peace's strategies aren't effective because they are all dirty, lazy hippies.”
What is Ad Hominem?
A form of antithesis in which the second half of the statement inverts the word order for the first half.
i.e. - "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country"
- JFK
What is chiasmus?
A type of literature that attempts to apply scientific principles of objectivity and detachment to its study of human beings.
- Emerson, Thoreau
What is Naturalism/Transcendentalism?
Obvious, extravagant exaggeration or overstatement not intended to be taken literally, but used figuratively to create humor or emphasis.
What is hyperbole?
A type of understatement used for ironic effect. It gives the idea that something is less important or smaller than it really is.
"That was a pretty good movie."
What is meiosis?
This is a conclusion that assumes that if 'A' occurred after 'B' then 'B' must have caused 'A.' Example:
“ I drank bottled water and now I am sick, so the water must have made me sick.”
What is Post Hoc?
The use of a word referring back to a word used earlier in a text or conversation, to avoid repetition. For example, the pronouns he, she, it, and they and the verb do in I like it and so do they.
What is anaphora?
This movement began as a reaction to and a rejection of Romanticism, with its emphasis on emotion, imagination, and the individual. The movement began as early as the 1830's but reached prominence and held sway from the end of the Civil War to around the end of the nineteenth century.
What is Realism?
A statement that, while apparently self contradictory, is nonetheless essentially true.
What is a paradox?
A figure of speech in which a part of something stands for the whole thing. In the expression "I've got wheels," 'wheels' stands for the whole vehicle.
What is synecdoche?
This is an appeal that presents what most people, or a group of people think, in order to persuade one to think the same way. Getting on the bandwagon is one such instance of an ad populum appeal. Example:
“If you were a true American you would support the rights of people to choose whatever vehicle they want.”
What is Ad Populum/Bandwagon Appeal?
A figure of speech in which opposing or contrasting ideas are balanced against each other in grammatically parallel syntax, as in the following:
"There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his."
What is antithesis?
This period stems from a recognition that reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather, is constructed as the mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality.
- Delillo, Pynchon, Vonnegut, Morrison, Oates
What is post-modern?