2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-01-09 12:01
As one of the art forms, literature has its own artistic techniques based on the possibilities of language and speech. They are collectively called the term "pictorial means in literature". The task of these means is to describe the depicted reality as expressively as possible and convey the meaning, the artistic idea of the work, as well as create a certain mood.
Trails and figures
The expressive and visual means of language are various tropes and figures of speech. The word "trope" in Greek means "revolution", that is, it is some kind of expression or word used in a figurative sense. The author uses the trope as a figurative and expressive means in literature for greater figurativeness. Epithets, metaphors, personifications, hyperbole and other artistic devices are related to tropes. Figures of speech are speech turns that enhance the emotional tone of the work. Antithesis, epiphora, inversion and many others are figurative means in literature related to a stylistic device under the general name of “figures of speech”. Now let's take a closer look at them.
Epithets
The most common literary device is the use of epithets, that is, figurative, often metaphorical, words that pictorially characterize the described object. We will meet epithets in folklore (“an honorable feast”, “countless gold treasury” in the epic “Sadko”) and in author’s works (“cautious and deaf” sound of a fallen fruit in Mandelstam’s poem). The more expressive the epithet, the more emotional and brighter the image created by the artist of the word.
Metaphors
The term "metaphor" came to us from the Greek language, as well as the designation of most tropes. It literally means "portable meaning". If the author likens a drop of dew to a grain of diamond, and a crimson cluster of mountain ash to a bonfire, then we are talking about a metaphor.
Metonymy
A very interesting figurative means of language is metonymy. Translated from Greek - renaming. In this case, the name of one object is transferred to another, and a new image is born. The great dream come true of Peter the Great about all the flags that will "visit us" from Pushkin's "The Bronze Horseman" is an example of metonymy. The word "flags" in this case replaces the concept of "countries, states". Metonymy is readily used in the media and in colloquial speech: “The White House”, for example, is not called the building, but its inhabitants. When we say "gone teeth", we mean that the toothache has disappeared.
Synecdoche means ratio. This is also a transfer of meaning, but only on a quantitative basis: “the German went on the attack” (meaning the German regiments), “the bird does not fly here, the beast does not come here” (of course, we are talking about many animals and birds).
Oxymoron
Descriptive and expressive means in literature is also an oxymoron. A stylistic figure, which may also turn out to be a stylistic mistake - the union of the incompatible, in a literal translation, this Greek word sounds like "witty-stupid". Examples of an oxymoron are the names of famous books "Hot Snow", "Virgin Soil Upturned" or "Living Corpse".
Parallelism and parcelling
Parallelism (intentional use of similar syntactic constructions in adjacent lines and sentences) and parceling (dividing a phrase into separate words) are often used as an expressive technique. An example of the first is found in the book of Solomon: "A time to mourn, and a time to dance." Second example:
Invert
What figurative means in artistic speech can still be found? Inversion. The term comes from the Latin word and translates as "permutation, reversal." In the literature, inversion refers to the rearrangement of words or parts of a sentence from the usual to the reverse order. This is done in order to make the statement look more significant, biting or colorful: “Our people are long-suffering!”, “The age is crazy, crazy.”
Hyperbole. Litotes. Irony
Expressive pictorial means in literature are also hyperbole, litotes, irony. The first and second belong to the category of exaggeration-understatement. Hyperbole can be called the description of the hero Mikula Selyaninovich, who with one hand “pulled out” a plow from the ground, which the whole “good squad” of Volga Svyatoslavovich could not budge. Litota, on the other hand, makes the image ridiculously small when a miniature dog is said to be "nothing more than a thimble." Irony, which literally sounds like “pretense” in translation, is designed to call the subject not what it seems. This is a subtle mockery in which the literal meaning is hidden under the opposite statement. For example, here is an ironic appeal to a tongue-tied person: “Why, Cicero, can’t you connect two words?” The ironic meaning of the address lies in the fact that Cicero was a brilliant orator.
Implementation and comparison
Scenic tropes are comparison and personification. These figurative means in literature create a special poetics, appealing to the cultural erudition of the reader. Comparison is the most commonly used technique when a swirling whirlwind of snowflakes near a window pane is compared, for example, with a swarm of midges flying into the light (B. Pasternak). Or, like Joseph Brodsky,the hawk flies in the sky "like a square root." When impersonated, inanimate objects acquire "living" properties by the will of the artist. This is the “breath of the pan”, from which “the leather jacket becomes warm”, in Yevtushenko or the little “maple tree” in Yesenin, who “sucks” the “green udder” of an adult tree, near which he grew up. And let's remember the Pasternak snowstorm, which "sculpts" "mugs and arrows" on the window glass!
Pun. gradation. Antithesis
Among the stylistic figures one can also mention pun, gradation, antithesis.
Pun, a French term, implies a witty play on different meanings of the word. For example, in a joke: “I pulled a bow and went to a masquerade dressed as Cipollino.”
Gradation is the setting of homogeneous members to strengthen or weaken their emotional intensity: entered, saw, took possession.
Antithesis is a sharp, stunning contrast, like in Pushkin's "Little Tragedies", when he describes a table that was recently feasted on, and now there is a coffin on it. The reception of antithesis enhances the gloomy metaphorical meaning of the story.
Here are the main visual tools that the master uses to give his readers a spectacular, embossed and colorful world of words.
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