RHETORICAL ANALYSIS 3 Analogy Personification Irony Verbal Irony

RHETORICAL ANALYSIS 3 Analogy Personification Irony Verbal Irony Situational irony Dramatic Irony

Rhetorical Analysis What the Author Does • Rhetorical devices are the tools the writer uses to produce the writing. • Rhetorical technique is the way that the author uses these tools or devices. What You Do • Rhetorical analysis is looking at HOW the author writes, rather than WHAT he actually wrote. To do this, you will analyze the devices and techniques the author uses to achieve his goal or purpose of writing his piece.

3 • Analogy is ANY comparison between two different items that an author may use to describe, define, explain, etc. , • Gary Soto’s A Summer Life. -- The asphalt softened, the lawns grew spidery brown, and the dogs crept like shadow. o The appearance of the lawns is compared to spiders, and the way dogs walk is compared to shadows • Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night. “. . . even the pale institutional green paint of the walls would be the same. Perhaps even the prison would not be so dissimilar. ” o The walls or the room were being compared to a prison.

4 • Personification is a specific kind of metaphor that gives human qualities and attitudes to an object, animal, or an idea. Human characteristics are assigned to non-human things. • With open arms, the cozy chair beckoned me. • Love is blind • Romeo and Juliet “Arise fair sun, and kill the envious moon/Who is already sick and pale with grief…” o Sun is compared to a hunter/killer, while the moon is compared to an envious person who is sickly and grieving. o Metaphor: Juliet is compared to the sun; Rosalind is compared to the moon.

5 • Irony: A contrast or discrepancy between expectation and reality—between what is said and what is really meant, between what is expected to happen and what really does happen or between what appears to be true and what is really true. o I posted a video on You. Tube about how boring and useless You. Tube is. o The name of Britain’s biggest dog was “Tiny”. o You laugh at a person who slipped stepping on a banana peel and the next thing you know, you slipped too.

• Verbal Irony: a writer or speaker says one thing but really means something completely different. • If you call a baseball player “the new Daryl Strawberry, ” you are using verbal irony. • The murderer in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” is using irony when he says to his unsuspecting victim, “Your health is precious”. • She is as polite as a shark. • Soft like a brick • I enjoyed the movie as much as getting a root canal.

6 • Situational irony: occurs when there is a contrast between what would seem appropriate and what really happens, or when what we expect to happen is in fact the opposite of what really does take place. • In the extract from Coming into the Country, John Mc. Phee reports that Leon Crane, who found himself the sole survivor of a plane crash in Alaska, had no wilderness experience except for a one-night camping trip with a Boy Scout troop. Given his inexperience in survival techniques, we’d expect that Crane would have perished, but instead, ironically, he walked out of the wilderness alive.

• Dramatic Irony: occurs when the audience or the reader knows something important that a character in a story or play does not know. • In Romeo and Juliet, for example, we know, but Romeo does not, that when he finds Juliet in the tomb, she is drugged and not really dead at all. o Thus we feel a terrible sense of dramatic irony as we watch Romeo kill himself upon discovering her body.

8 • 1. Looking at her son's messy room, Mom says, "Wow, you could win an award for cleanliness!" • 2. Maternally the great tree protected us, sighing and groaning, as she lowered her arms to shield us from the storm. • 3. A man who is a traffic cop gets his own drivers license suspended for unpaid parking tickets. • 4. In a scary movie, the character walks into a house and the audience knows the killer is in the house. • 5. “. . . worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum”. o Everybody’s Free (to Wear Sunscreen) by Baz Luhrmann

• 1. Looking at her son's messy room, Mom says, "Wow, you could win an award for cleanliness!“--Verbal Irony • 2. Maternally the great tree protected us, sighing and groaning, as she lowered her arms to shield us from the storm. Personification • 3. A man who is a traffic cop gets his license suspended for unpaid parking tickets. --Situational Irony • 4. In a scary movie, the character walks into a house and the audience knows the killer is in the house. --Dramatic Irony • 5. “. . . worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum”. -- Analogy

• 1. “It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo”. ---by P. G. Wodehouse • 2. Snow White is unaware that the luscious apple is, in fact, poisonous while the audience and the witch are aware. • 3. A woman has been saving painfully to buy a golden watch. Just hours after buying the watch, her daughter arrives home with the same watch as a gift for her! • 4. The grieving sky turned the little water to snow covered mountains. • 5. A student who goes to the restroom every day during class asks the teacher if he can go. Her response is "Sure, it's not like we do anything important in this class. "

• 1. “It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo”. ---Analogy • 2. Snow White is unaware that the luscious apple is, in fact, poisonous while the audience and the witch are aware. -Dramatic Irony • 3. A woman has been saving painfully to buy a golden watch. Just hours after buying the watch, her daughter arrives home with the same watch as a gift for her!--Situational Irony • 4. The grieving sky turned the little water to snow covered mountains. —Personification • 5. A student who goes to the restroom every day during class asks the teacher if he can go. Her response is "Sure, it's not like we do anything important in this class. “--Verbal Irony 12

12 • 1. In Beauty and the Beast, an animated Disney movie, Belle refuses to marry Gaston by saying "I just don't deserve you!" • 2. The flowers danced in the gentle breeze. • 3. “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet. So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called, ” Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare 4. If you're watching a movie about the Titanic and a character leaning on the balcony right before the ship hits the iceberg says, "It's so beautiful I could just die. “

12 • 5. For just about seven novels, the reader believes that Harry is the only one who can kill the evil Lord Voldemort. However, the reader is entirely thrown off guard when it is revealed near the finale of the series that Harry must, in fact, allow Lord Voldemort to kill him, in order to make Voldemortal once again. So Harry has to allow himself to be murdered in order to defeat Voldemort.

13 • 1. In Beauty and the Beast, an animated Disney movie, Belle refuses to marry Gaston by saying "I just don't deserve you!“--Verbal Irony • 2. The flowers danced in the gentle breeze. -Personification • 3. “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet. So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called, ” -Analogy 4. If you're watching a movie about the Titanic and a character leaning on the balcony right before the ship hits the iceberg says, "It's so beautiful I could just die. “-Dramatic irony

15 • 5. For just about seven novels, the reader believes that Harry is the only one who can kill the evil Lord Voldemort. However, the reader is entirely thrown off guard when it is revealed near the finale of the series that Harry must, in fact, allow Lord Voldemort to kill him, in order to make Voldemortal once again. So Harry has to allow himself to be murdered in order to defeat Voldemort. -Situational Irony •

14 • REVIEW • 1. “over a middle region where rocks lay like discolored monsters under the surface, and then he was in the real sea. . . ” “The Tunnel” • 2. It was not a mere man he was holding, but a giant; or a block of granite. The pull was unendurable---the pain unendurable. • 3"A man may break a word with you, sir, and words are but wind. " --William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors

• REVIEW • 1. “over a middle region where rocks lay like discolored monsters under the surface, and then he was in the real sea. . . ”--SIMILE • 2. It was not a mere man he was holding, but a giant; or a block of granite. The pull was unendurable--the pain unendurable. —HYPERBOLE • 3"A man may break a word with you, sir, and words are but wind. “--METAPHOR