Rhetorical devices in “The Importance of Being Earnest”
**Alliteration is the recurrence of initial consonant sounds. The repetition can be juxtaposed (and then it is usually limited to two words):
* Ah, what a delicious day!
anaphora (rhetoric)
A rhetorical term for the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses.
Etymology:
From the Greek, "carrying back"
Antonomania
Substitution of a title, epithet, or descriptive phrase for a proper name (or of a personal name for a common name) to designate a member of a group or class.
Etymology:
From the Greek, "instead of" plus "name"
**Assonance: similar vowel sounds repeated in successive or proximate words containing different consonants:
* A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. --Matthew 5:14
**Epigrams: Turning clichés (a proverb, a common saying) upside down and inside out:
Algernon – “Divorces are made in heaven” (instead of “Marriages are made in heaven”
Or Algernon – “The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one’s clean linen in public”. (usually “dirty linen” = letting other people see your personal / family / relationship problems.
**Hyperbole, the counterpart of understatement, deliberately exaggerates conditions for emphasis or effect.
* There are a thousand reasons why more research is needed on solar energy.
Metaphor is a comparison which imaginatively identifies one thing with another, dissimilar thing, and transfers or ascribes to the first thing (the tenor or idea) some of the qualities of the second (the vehicle, or image). Unlike a simile or analogy, metaphor asserts that one thing is another thing, not just that one is like another. Very frequently a metaphor is invoked by the to be verb:
Affliction then is ours; / We are the trees whom shaking fastens more. --George Herbert
Personification metaphorically represents an animal or inanimate object as having human attributes--attributes of form, character, feelings, behavior, and so on. Ideas and abstractions can also be personified.
* The ship began to creak and protest as it struggled against the rising sea.
**A pun: a wordplay (a play on words) often involving different meanings of a word in different contexts.
Example: When Algy is being very “scientific” in questioning Jack about his explanations concerning Cecily, Jack protests -- “It’s very vulgar to talk like a dentist when one isn’t a dentist, it gives a false impression.” To which Algernon replies—“Well, that is exactly what dentists always do.” (Dentists make impressions of a person’s teeth in order to make “false teeth” for them, but Algernon implies that these impressions are poorly made).
Simile is a direct, expressed comparison between two things essentially unlike, but resembling each other in at least one aspect. In formal prose the simile is a device both of art and explanation, comparing the unfamiliar thing to be explained to some familiar thing (an object, event, process, etc.) known to the reader. There is no simile in the comparison, "My car is like your car," because the two objects are not "essentially unlike" each other.
When you compare a noun to a noun, the simile is usually introduced by like:
· I see men, but they look like trees, walking. --Mark 8:24
**Understatement intentionally represents something as less than it is, either for ironic emphasis or for politeness and tact. When the writer's audience can be expected to know the true nature of a fact which might be rather difficult to describe adequately in a brief space, the writer may choose to understate the fact as a means of employing the reader's own powers of description. For example, instead of endeavoring to describe in a few words the horrors and destruction of the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, a writer might state:
* The 1906 San Francisco earthquake interrupted business somewhat in the downtown area.