高级英语第五课修辞手法分析

1. Irony(反讽) is the use of words that the opposite of what you really mean, often as a joke and with a tone of voice that shows this.
(1)I award this champion only after laborious research and incessant prayer. (L.1, Para.5)
(2)It is as if some titanic and aberrant genius, uncompromisingly inimical to man, had devoted
all the ingenuity of Hell to the making of them. (L.14, Para.5)
(3)It is incredible that mere ignorance should have achieved such masterpieces of horror.(L.11,
Para.6)
2. Sarcasm(讽刺) is a way of using words that are the opposite of what you mean in order to be unpleasant to somebody or to make fun of them.
(1) Obviously, if there were architects of any professional sense or dignity in the region, they would have perfected a chalet to hug the hillsides… (L.6, Para.3)
(2) They are incomparable in color, and they are incomparable in design. (L.13, Para.5)
3. Ridicule(嘲讽) refers to unkind comments that make fun of somebody/something or make them look silly.
(1) When it has taken on the patina of the mills it is the color of an egg long past all hope or caring. (L.2, Para.4)
(2) They made it perfect in their own sight by putting a completely impossible penthouse, painted
a staring yellow, on top of it. (L.15, Para.8)
4. Understatement(低调陈述) is the opposite of hyperbole. It achieves its effect of emphasizing a fact by deliberately understating it, impressing the listeners or the readers more by what is merely implied or left unsaid than by bare statement.
(1) The country itself is not uncomely, despite the grime of the endless mills. （L.1, Para.3）
5. Antonomasia(换称) is a figure of speech that involves the use of epithet or title in place of a name, and also the use of a proper name in place of a common noun.
(1) Safe in a Pullman, I have whirled through the gloomy, God-forsaken villages of Iowa and Kansas, and the malarious tidewater hamlets of Georgia. (L.7, Para5)
6. Antithetical Contrast(反衬对比) is a figure of speech combined by antithesis and contrast, and often has two sharply contrasting ideas balanced across a sentence (or neighboring sentences) (1) Here was the very heart of industrial America, the center of its most lucrative and characteristic activity, the boast and pride of the richest and grandest nation ever seen on earth—and here was a sense so dreadfully hideous, so intolerably bleak and forlorn that it reduced the whole aspiration of man to a macabre and depressing joke. (L.5, Para.1)
(2) Here was wealth beyond computation, almost beyond imagination—and here were habitations so abominable that they would have disgraced a race of alley cats. (L.10, Para1)
7. Hyperbole(夸张) is a way of speaking or writing that makes something should be better, more exciting, dangerous, etc. than it really is.
(1) What I allude to is the unbroken and agonizing ugliness, the sheer revolting monstrousness, of every house in sight. (L.2, Para.2)
(2) From East Liberty to Greensburg, a distance of twenty-five miles, there was not one in sight from the train that did not insult and lacerate the eye. (L.3, Para.2)
(3) But in Westmoreland they prefer that uremic yellow, and so they have the most loathsome towns and villages ever seen by mortal eye. (L.8, Para.4)
(4) I have seen, I believe, all of the most unlovely towns of the world; they are all to be found in the United States. (L.2, Para.5)
(5) It is as if some titanic and aberrant genius, uncompromisingly inimical to man, had devoted all the ingenuity of Hell to the making of them. (L.14, Para.5)
8. Metaphor(暗喻) is a figure of speech that describes something by referring to it as something else, in order to show that the two things have the same qualities and to make the description more powerful.
(1) Here was the very heart of industrial America… (L.5, Para.1)
(2)…on their low sides they bury themselves swinishly in the mud. ((L.17, Para. 3)
(3) And one and all they are streaked in grime, with dead and eczematous patches of paint peeping through the streaks. (L.20, Para.3)
(4) The effect is that of a fat woman with a black eye. It is that of a Presbyterian grinning. (L.17, Para.8)
(5) Out of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty as it hates truth. (L.3, Para.9)
9. Simile(明喻) is a figure of speech that often uses the words like or as, etc. to make a comparison between to unlike elements having at least one quality or characteristic in common.
(1) …one blinked before them as one blinks before a man with face shot away. (L.7, Para.2)
(2) …a crazy little church just west of Jeannette, set like a dormer window on the side of a bare leprous hill… (L.9, Para.2)
(3) …a steel stadium like a huge rat-trap somewhere further down the line. (L.12, Para.2)
10. Rhetorical Question(修辞疑问句) is a figure of speech in the form of a question posed for its persuasive effect without the expectation of a reply. Rhetorical question encourages the listener to think about what the answer (often obvious) to the question might be.
(1) But what have they done? (L.11, Para.3)
(2) Was it necessary to adopt that shocking color? (L.4, Para.4)
(3) Are they so frightful because the valley is full of foreigners—dull, intense brutes, with no love of beauty in them? (L.1, Para.6)
(4) Then why did not these foreigners set up similar abominations in the countries that they came from? (L.2, Para.6)。