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Literary devices and their effects
Literary devices examinable
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Untraditional Techniques in I Stand Here Ironing
In "I Stand Here Ironing", Tillie Olsen uses a very untraditional plot to achieve a lasting impression with her readers. Her technique reaches out and grabs you as you read. She accomplishes this by speaking in first person, second person, and third person and by using flashbacks in non-chronological order. These techniques draw you into the plot and make you pay closer attention to what is going on.
One specific way that Olsen achieves this is by talking in first person and in third person. The story begins by saying, "I stand her ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron"(169). Here, it is thought that the entire story would be about her. But as the story progresses, the reader is faced with several flashbacks where she tells of many things and speaks in third person. She says, "She was a beautiful baby"(169). She continues to tell of this girl as the story continues, "She would call for me"(171).
Tillie Olsen also addresses someone in the story in second person. She...
First, the author uses many literary devices such as personification to get a point across to the reader. Jeannette states “then the flames leaped up, reaching my
In Flannery O’Connor’s fascinating essay “On Her Own Work,” she claims that what makes a story work is “probably some action, some gesture of a character that is unlike any other in the story, one which indicates where the real heart of the story lies. That would be the gesture which was both totally right and unexpected... a gesture that somehow made contact with mystery.”
Appealing to the reader’s emotions through stories is a commonly used technique, and Scelfo uses it beautifully. She starts the article out by introducing the reader to a young girl named Kathryn Dewitt. Whether they mean to or not, the reader develops some kind of emotional connection to this young girl. They feel as if they are a part of the story, for when
“To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” by Rober Herrick and Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” have many similarities and differences. The tone of the speakers, the audience each poem is directed to, and the theme make up some of the literary elements that help fit this description.
With each class comes a certain level in financial standing, the lower class having the lowest income and the upper class having the highest income. According to Mantsios’ “Class in America” the wealthiest one percent of the American population hold thirty-four percent of the total national wealth and while this is going on nearly thirty-seven million Americans across the nation live in unrelenting poverty (Mantsios 284-6). There is a clear difference in the way that these two groups of people live, one is extreme poverty and the other extremely
The narrator in the story “Miss Brill” by Katherine Mansfield, is telling us this story in the third person singular perspective. Our narrator is a non-participant and we learn no details about this person, from a physical sense. Nothing to tell us whether it is a friend of Miss Brill, a relative, or just someone watching. Katherine Mansfield’s Miss Brill comes alive from the descriptions we get from this anonymous person. The narrator uses limited omniscience while telling us about this beautiful Sunday afternoon. By this I mean the narrator has a great insight into Miss Brill’s perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and into her world as a whole, but no real insight into any of the other characters in this story. By using this point of view, we see the world through the eyes of Miss Brill, and feel her emotions, even though this third party is telling us the story. This beautiful fall afternoon in France unfolds before our eyes because of the pain-staking details given to us by the narrator. We aren’t told many things straight out, but the details are such that we can feel the chill coming into the air and see the leaves of fall drifting to the earth. The figurative language that is used is superb from beginning to end. The imagination and detail made me see what was happening and hear the band play. The characters in the park are observed through the eyes of Miss Brill, and we learn bits of information of those who catch her eye. The detail of the observations that Miss Brill ma...
It is safe to say that the box next to the “boring, monotone, never-ending lecture” has been checked off more than once. Without the use of rhetorical strategies, the world would be left with nothing but boring, uniform literature. This would leave readers feeling the same way one does after a bad lecture. Rhetorical devices not only open one’s imagination but also allows a reader to dig deep into a piece and come out with a better understanding of the author’s intentions. Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Wife’s Story” is about a family that is going through a tough spot. However, though diction, imagery, pathos, and foreshadowing Guin reveals a deep truth about this family that the reader does not see coming.
Morgan is a rugged fisherman who spent his life doing various seafaring activities. The long days under the sun on deck has given him a dark skin tone. His appearance describes visually the tough violent world in which he thrives. His looks are almost a uniform for the criminal underground scene where he lives his life. The author uses his wife watching him leave their home as a vehicle to describe in detail his physical appearance. “ She watched him go out if the house, tall, wide shouldered, flat-backed, his hips narrow, moving, still, she thought, like some kind of animal, easy and swift and not old yet, he moves so light and smooth-like, she thought, and when he got in the car she
There is a similar theme running through both of the poems, in which both mistresses are refusing to partake in sexual intercourse with both of the poets. The way in which both poets present their argument is quite different as Marvell is writing from a perspective from which he is depicting his mistress as being 'coy', and essentially, mean, in refusing him sex, and Donne is comparing the blood lost by a flea bite to the blood that would be united during sex. Marvell immediately makes clear his thoughts in the poem when he says, "Had we but world enough, and time/ This coyness, Lady were no crime", he is conveying the 'carpe diem' idea that there is not enough time for her to be 'coy' and refuse him sexual intercourse and he justifies this thought when he suggests when she is dead, in ?thy marble vault?, and ?worms shall try that long preserved virginity?. He is using the idea of worms crawling all over and in her corpse as a way of saying that the worms are going to take her virginity if she waits until death. Donne justifies his bid for her virginity in a much longer and more methodical way, he uses the idea of the flea taking her blood and mixing it with his, ?It suck?d me first, and now sucks thee?, and then...
Throughout his life... was a man self-haunted, unable to escape from his own drama, unable to find any window that would not give him back the image of himself. Even the mistress of his most passionate love-verses, who must (one supposes) have been a real person, remains for him a mere abstraction of sex: a thing given. He does not see her --does not apparently want to see her; for it is not of her that he writes, but of his relation to her; not of love, but of himself loving.
At the start, the first stanza of the poem is full of flattery. This is the appeal to pathos. The speaker is using the mistress's emotions and vanity to gain her attention. By complimenting her on her beauty and the kind of love she deserves, he's getting her attention. In this first stanza, the speaker claims to agree with the mistress - he says he knows waiting for love provides the best relationships. It feels quasi-Rogerian, as the man is giving credit to the woman's claim, he's trying to see her point of view, he's seemingly compliant. He appears to know what she wants and how she should be loved. This is the appeal to ethos. The speaker seems to understand how relationships work, how much time they can take, and the effort that should be put forth. The woman, if only reading stanza one, would think her and the speaker are in total agreement.
One of the main aspects of a story that truly keeps our attention is character. A person is more likely to enjoy, maintain interest in, or be more intimately engaged with a story if they can relate to or are intrigued by a character or characters. In order for this to happen an author must demonstrate good characterization, the art and technique of representing fictional personages. Characterization relies heavily on narration and point of view. In John Cheever's "Goodbye, My Brother" and Tobias Wolff's "Powder," the point of view of the narration is limited to one person. Known as first-person narration, the story is told from the "I" perspective and the reader only can understand the story from the narrator's point of view.
Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” is another attempting at seducing an unwilling woman. “Had we but world enough and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime” (Marvell 1-2). Its emphases by Dr. Michael William that in the first two lines of the first stanza Marvell played a game with irony and specified
In the poem “To His Coy Mistress”, the speaker is trying to seduce his wife. In the assumption the mistress is his wife; she is being bashful towards losing her virginity. The speaker, which is the mistress’s husband, develops a carefully constructed argument where the speaker seeks to persuade his lady to surrender her virginity to him.
Although told in an aloof and anonymous third-person, the narrativeis always shifting, almost imperceptibly, from an objective stance to less neutral observations which, because of their perspective or particular choice of words, appear to be those of Mrs. Kearney. (Miller,...