loveisafallacy英语修辞与写作

Writing Style
Max Shulman has a good style. The story goes forward at a fast pace with racy dialogues full of American colloquialism and slang. He employs a whole variety of writing techniques to make his story vivid. He use ultra learned terms to reveal the conceit of the narrator and clipped vulgar forms to illustrate Polly Espy’s limited intellectual capability. He also use figurative language profusely and iBaidu Nhomakorabeaversion for emphasis. The speed of the narration is maintained by the use of short sentences, elliptical sentences and dashes throughout the story. The combination of all these help to make the story realistic, as one would expect a freshman to talk like that.
Love Is a Fallacy
By Max Shulman
About the author
Max Shulman(1919-1988): one of America’s best-known humorists. Max is a writer of many talents---he has written novels, stories, Broadway plays, movie scenarios, and television scripts. The present text is taken from The Many Loves of Dobie Gills(1951). Dobie Gills, the narrator , is a typical American teen who frequently suffers from romantic angst. The character appeared on a popular televion sitcom during the 1950s and was in a feature film in 1953.
3. Rhetorical question (What’s Polly to me, or me to Polly?)
4. Simile (My brain was as powerful as a dynamo, as precise as a chemist’s scale, as penetrating as scalpel.)
Rhetorical devices in the story
1. Inversion (Cool was I and logical. // Beautiful she was. Gracious she was. Intelligent she was not. )
2. Metaphor (My brain, that precision instrument, slipped into high gear.)
5. Hyperbole (It is not often that one so young has such a giant intellect.)
6. Ellipsis (Same age, same background, but dumb as an ox.)
Rhetorical devices in the story
7. Metonymy (She was, to be sure, a girl who excited the emotions. But I was not one to let my heart rule my head.)
About the story
The narrator of the story is Dobie Gills, a freshman in a law school who is proud of his logic reasoning and general intellectual capability. Dobie Gills grapples with Petey Bellows, whose girlfriend he hopes that he can persuade to give up and Polly Espy, Petey’s girlfriend he intends to marry after he has improves her. He is quite sure of his final success because he is smarter and it is only logical that the girl will choose him. However, the result is a great surprise to him because the girl turns down his proposal and choose Petey Burch, all because of what Dobie Gills regards as a “silly reason”, thus proving that “Love is a fallacy”.