高级英语修辞手法

Unit 10: Antithesis(对偶句)

[2012-3-12 23:19:30]

Antithesis(对偶句)

Figure of balance in which two contrasting ideas are intentionally juxtaposed, usually through parallel structure; a contrasting of opposing ideas in adjacent phrases, clauses, or sentences.

1） "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose" -- Jim Elliot

2） Lloyd Braun: "Serenity now; insanity later." -- from Seinfeld episode "The Serenity Now"

3） "It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues." —Abraham Lincoln

4） "It can't be wrong if it feels so right" —Debbie Boone 5）"One small step for a man, one giant leap for all mankind." 6）"Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing." (Goethe)

7） "Hillary has soldiered on, damned if she does, damned if she doesn't, like most powerful women, expected to be tough as nails and warm as toast at the same time." (Anna Quindlen, "Say Goodbye to the Virago."

8）"I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dryrot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days

in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time." (Jack London)

9) "Everybody doesn't like something, but nobody doesn't like Sara Lee." (advertising slogan)

10) "We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools." (Martin Luther King, Jr., speech at St. Louis, 1964)

11) "You're easy on the eyes. Hard on the heart." (Terri Clark)

12) "The more acute the experience, the less articulate its expression." (Harold Pinter)

Unit 10: Transferred Epithet and Oxymoron

[2012-3-12 23:18:43]

Transferred Epithet:修饰语移位

A transferred epithet, is the trope or rhetorical device in which a modifier, usually an adjective, is applied to the "wrong" word in the sentence. The word whose modifier is thus displaced can either be actually present in the sentence, or it can be implied logically. The effect often stresses the emotions or feelings of the individual by expanding them on to the environment.

For example:

1) "On the idle hill of summer/Sleepy with the flow of streams/Far I hear..." (A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad) — idle hill... sleepy is a hypallage: it is the narrator, not the hill, who exhibits these features.

2) "The plowman homeward plods his weary way, / And leaves the world to darkness and to me" (Thomas Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard") — Weary way is a hypallage: it is the plowman, not the way, that is weary.

3) "Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time" -Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum est

4) "restless night" — The night was not restless, but the person who was awake through it was.