Key Literary Terms, Rhetorical Devices, and Classic Examples
Foundational Literary and Rhetorical Knowledge
Part 1: Basic Dramatic and Narrative Terms
Foil: A character who contrasts and parallels the main character in a play or story (like Sancho Panza and Doctor Watson).
Stichomythia: Line-by-line conversation, usually an exchange of “one-liners” between two characters in a play.
Enjambment: The running on of the sense of one verse line to the next, without a pause.
Denouement: After the climax, the falling action is a part in which events and conflicts are brought to their final resolution.
Scenery: Term used to describe everything on stage (excluding props) used to represent the place.
Suspension of disbelief.
Comic relief: The use of a comic scene to interrupt a succession of intensely tragic dramatic moments.
Part 2: Essential Rhetorical Devices
- Metaphor: A term used in a semantically unusual context, implying a relationship of similarity between what this term denotes and what the context demands.
- Simile: An explicit comparison where both concepts are named in an explicit relationship of similarity.
- Allegory: An extended metaphor, mapping one constellation onto another similar constellation.
- Conceit: An umbrella of metaphors.
- Paradox: Aporia: A kind of paradox for which it is impossible to grasp a solution and is impossible to answer.
- Metonymy: The literal term for one thing is applied to another with which it has become closely associated due to a recurrent relationship in common experience (spatial, temporal, or causal relationships of contiguity).
- Synecdoche: Arguably a special case of metonymy, where a part of something is used to signify the whole (pars pro toto), or the whole is used to signify a part (totum pro parte).
- Alliteration: Repetition of the same sound at the beginning of several words in a sequence.
- Assonance: The repetition of similar vowel sounds in a sentence or a line of poetry or prose.
- Consonance: The repetition of a consonant or a consonant pattern.
- Anadiplosis: Repetition of the last word of a preceding clause (at the end of one clause and then at the beginning of the next).
- Anaphora: Repetition of the same word at the beginning of successive clauses or verses.
- Epistrophe: A figure of speech in which one or more words repeat at the end of successive phrases, clauses, or sentences.
- Epizeuxis: Repetition of words for emphatic effect.
- Epiphora: Repetition of a closing word or words at the end of several (usually successive) clauses, sentences, or verses.
- Polysyndeton: More conjunctions than necessary between words, phrases, or clauses.
- Antithesis: The juxtaposition of contrasting ideas, often in parallel structure.
- Antonym: Opposing concepts mentioned in proximity to each other.
- Oxymoron: A figure of speech that combines incongruous and apparently contradictory words and meanings for special effect.
- Asyndeton: The omission of conjunctions between words, phrases, or clauses.
- Parallelism: Phrases of approximately equal length and corresponding structure.
- Rhetorical question: A question that already implies (or does not lead us to expect) an answer.
- Hyperbaton: An inversion of normal word order. It is sometimes synonymous with anastrophe (this term is used more specifically when only one word changes place).
- Meiosis: When the speaker says less than what they mean; the opposite of an exaggeration.
- Chiasmus: A reversal of grammatical structures in successive phrases or clauses.
- Caesura: A marked pause in a line of verse.
- Polyptoton: The rhetorical repetition within the same sentence of a word in a different case, inflection, or voice, or of etymologically related words in different parts of speech (e.g., “blood” and “bleed”).
- Epanalepsis: A figure of emphasis in which the same word or words both begin and end a phrase, clause, or sentence; beginning and ending a phrase or clause with the same word or words (e.g., ‘To be or not to be,’ ‘The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body.’).
- Hypotaxis: The arrangement of a sentence in which the main clause is built upon by phrases or subordinate clauses.
Illustrative Examples from Classic Literature
- Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘Canticus Troili’ from Troilus and Criseyde: The selected fragment belongs to Troilus and Criseyde, an epic poem set during the Trojan War that narrates the tragic love story of the Trojan prince Troilus, who ends up being murdered by the hero Achilles, and Criseyde, who was sent to the Greeks as a hostage. The very famous Italian writer Boccaccio (1313–1375) had told their story in Il Filostrato, and it is from here that Chaucer adapted their story also into English. As part of this adaptation, Chaucer also included his free translation of one of Petrarch’s (1303–1364) most well-known sonnets dedicated to his Laura, ‘S’amor non è’ (Sonnet 132), which is the fragment included here. Apart from changing the form of Petrarch’s poem, from a sonnet to rime royal, Petrarch’s oxymoronic definition of love is here much clearer and, at the same time, more confusing—a paradox in itself that equates with the antithetical definition of love provided by both Petrarch and Chaucer.
- Sir Thomas Wyatt: ‘Whoso List to Hunt’ – an adaptation of Petrarch’s sonnet ‘Una candida cerva sopra l’erba’.
- Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey: ‘The Soote Season’ – an adaptation of Petrarch’s Sonnet ‘Zefiro torna’.
- William Shakespeare:
- Sonnet 3: ‘Look in thy glass’
- Sonnet 18: ‘Shall I compare thee’
- Sonnet 129: ‘Th’ expense of spirit’
- Sonnet 130: ‘My mistress’ eyes’