Literary Devices By Jonathan Westerberg Mira Costa High

Literary Devices By Jonathan Westerberg Mira Costa High School English 1 -2 CP

SIMILE an explicit comparison between two things using 'like' or 'as'. o *Reason is to faith as the eye to the telescope. - D. Hume [? ] o *Let us go then, you and I, While the evening is spread out against the sky, Like a patient etherized upon a table. . . -T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock o Your love is like bad medicine -Jon Bon Jovi

Metaphor implied comparison wherein the author says something is something else; not used in the literal sense; used to show similarities between two different things and to shed new light on the object of the metaphor *Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage. -Shakespeare, Macbeth *. . . while he learned the language (that meager and fragile thread. . . by which the little surface corners and edges of men's secret and solitary lives may be joined for an instant now and then before sinking back into the darkness. . . ) - Faulkner, Absalom! *From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. -W. Churchill

PERSONIFICATION Giving human characteristics to non-human things or abstract ideas. *England expects every man to do his duty. -Lord Nelson * jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

OXYMORON apparent paradox achieved by the juxtaposition of words which seem to contradict one another. *jumbo shrimp *I must be cruel only to be kind. -Shakespeare, Hamlet

HYPERBOLE exaggeration for emphasis or humor *My vegetable love should grow Vaster than empires, and more slow; An hundred years should go to praise Thine eyes and on thine forehead gaze; Two hundred to adore each breast, But thirty thousand to the rest. -Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress" *I was stuck in traffic forever!

DRAMATIC IRONY when the audience possesses an awareness greater than that of one or more characters on stage *Madam, if you could find out but a man To bear the poison, I would temper it; -Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

IMAGERY the use of vivid detail and concrete, sensory description to create imagery in the mind of the reader *Although there was evening brightness showing through the windows of the bunk house, inside it was dusk. -Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

Pun a play on words; using the dual meaning or sound of a word to create alternate meanings in its use. In the office she was frantically looking for her false nails only to find that she had filed them away.

FORESHADOWING when the author drops subtle hints about events that will happen later in the story

Alliteration The repetition of certain sounds to create a poetic flow. o “During the whole of a dull, dark day” - “The Fall of the House of Usher”- Poe