Finding Rhetorical Devices in Antigone



Finding Rhetorical Devices in Antigone

Alliteration: The repetition of consonant sounds at the beginnings of words. I saw six sailors swimming in the stream.

Allusion: When a writer or speaker refers to something from history or literature and expects her audience to understand to what she is referring, she is alluding or making an allusion.

I felt like Custer at Little Big Horn when all of the freshmen were attacking me with questions about their lockers and combinations. (The speaker is alluding to the massacre of General George Armstrong Custer Little Big Horn.)

How long has it been raining? It seems as if it has been forty days and forty nights. (The speaker likens the weather to Noah's flood which lasted forty days and forty nights.)

Do not confuse allusion with the word illusion.

Apostrophe interrupts the discussion or discourse and addresses directly a person or personified thing, either present or absent. Its most common purpose in prose is to give vent to or display intense emotion, which can no longer be held back:

*O value of wisdom that fadeth not away with time, virtue ever flourishing, that cleanseth its possessor from all venom! O heavenly gift of the divine bounty, descending from the Father of lights, that thou mayest exalt the rational soul to the very heavens! Thou art the celestial nourishment of the intellect . . . . --Richard de Bury

*O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, just as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not have it! --Luke 13:34 (NASB)

Aphorism is a comprehensive maxim or principle expressed in a few words; a sharply defined sentence relating to abstract truth rather than to practical matters.

*Life is short, and the art is long. --Hippocrates

*The early bird gets the worm --unknown

*Rome was not built in one day --John Heywood

Analogy compares two things, which are alike in several respects, for the purpose of explaining or clarifying some unfamiliar or difficult idea or object by showing how the idea or object is similar to some familiar one. While simile and analogy often overlap, the simile is generally a more artistic likening, done briefly for effect and emphasis, while analogy serves the more practical end of explaining a thought process or a line of reasoning or the abstract in terms of the concrete, and may therefore be more extended.

*You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables. --Samuel Johnson

*He that voluntarily continues ignorance is guilty of all the crimes which ignorance produces, as to him that should extinguish the tapers of a lighthouse might justly be imputed the calamities of shipwrecks. --Samuel Johnson

*. . ..For answers successfully arrived at are solutions to difficulties previously discussed, and one cannot untie a knot if he is ignorant of it. --Aristotle

Notice in these examples that the analogy is used to establish the pattern of reasoning by using a familiar or less abstract argument which the reader can understand easily and probably agree with.

Some analogies simply offer an explanation for clarification rather than a substitute argument:

*Knowledge always desires increase: it is like fire, which must first be kindled by some external agent, but which will afterwards propagate itself. --Samuel Johnson

Foil: A foil is a character whose personality and attitude is opposite the personality and attitude of another character. Because these characters contrast, each makes the personality of the other stand out. In The Lion King, Scar is the foil of Simba, because Scar is evil and immoral whereas Simba is innocent and naive. Their conflict makes each character’s traits stand out in contrast with the other.

Irony - Essentially the term irony is the expectation of one event and another, completely different event happens and still makes sense. There has to be sense to it. Verbal irony: Someone uses verbal irony when she says one thing, means the opposite, and everyone understands she means the opposite. Isn't language remarkable? After working non-stop, eighteen hours a day for a solid year, the publisher and his staff saw their magazine finally turn a profit. At a celebratory party, the publisher told his staff how they really ought to be working harder and they laughed.

Metaphor: The metaphor is a figure of speech in which one object is compared with another very different kind of object. With the metaphor the qualities that the two objects share are so important and similar that they seem to be the same thing. One is the other.

The ship plowed through the waves. (The ship and the plow go through things so similarly that one is the other in this sentence.

You can count on Pete. The guy is a rock. (The solidness of the two objects, Pete and the rock, make it seem as if they are one type of thing.

Simile: The simile is a figure of speech which states that one object is similar to or like another object.

The ship went through the ocean like a plow.

Pete will stick by us. He's like a rock.

Note that a simile will state that one object is like another where the metaphor , a more direct comparison and thus a stronger one, states that one object is the other.

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