• Inversion

e.g. Never she has been so charming...

• asyndeton

e.g. The Courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword; (Hamlet)

• polysyndeton

He has out-soared the shadow of our night;

Envy and calumny and hate and pain (Shelly’s Adonais)

• zeugma

e.g. Give thee thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss (Shakespeare - give); the same word is applied to two or more others in different senses

– imperfect variety = syllepsis

e.g. Kill the boys and the language (Shakespeare)

Miss Bolo went home in a flood of tears and a sedan chair. (Dickens)

• ellipsis

e.g. Though rare today, tigers can be seen in most zoos.

• various figures of repetition:

1) simple repetition = repetition without any variations

a) epizeuxis

e.g. the time is changed, my lute, the time is changed (Sir P. Sidney)

b) anaphora

And she forgot the stars, the moon, the sun,

And she forgot the blue above the trees (Keats’ Isabella)

3. epiphora

3. palilogy

He loved the sea, the sea that brought him happiness...

2) incremental repetition (parallelism) = repetition that undergoes slight but significant variations

a) tautology – 2 meanings

feeling of redundancy, e.g. They arrived one after the other in succession.

b) climax

e.g. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. (Francis Bacon)

c) anticlimax

e.g. I feasted like a king, like four kings, like a boy in the fourth form.

3) modifying repetition = the words (repetends) do not change but the meaning is modified

e.g. Macbeth‘s Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

+ refrain

A specific phenomenon = syntactic ambiguity

e.g. My uncle has a hearty appetite, and he is very fond of babies.

IV. Composition of the literary work

= arrangement of the individual smallest elements in the overall structure of the work

1. thematic composition

2. stylistic composition

a) vertical composition

b) horizontal composition

prose – attention to the vertical level

poetry - ------ // ------ horizontal level

Structure of an epic work (a story)

main components = action, characters, narrator/narration, time, subject matter

• action

- conflict = the ”problem” in the story which triggers the action;

5 types: person vs. person

person vs. society

person vs. himself/herself

person vs. nature

person vs. fate (god)

- action

- chronological

- retrospective

- combined

- plot

the plot line has 5 parts: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution

climax

r. a. f. a.

e xp. res.

• character

- protagonist  antagonist

- anti-hero

- major/minor characters

- round character  flat character (type) + stock character (stereotypical)

• narration

- the way the story is told, presented – several kinds:

1. third-person narration (er-form)

2. omniscient narrator

3. limited omniscience

4. editorial omniscience

5. camera eye technique

6. dramatic narration

7. first person narration (Ich-form)

8. second-person narration

9. innocent eye

10. epistolary form

11. stream of consciousness or inner monologue

- reliable vs. unreliable character

Speech of characters – direct speech  speech of narrator – indirect speech

+ free indirect speech

• time of the story

- chronological account of the story

- causal relationships: cause  effect

- juxtaposition of time sequences

- time inversions (flash-backs, flash-aheads)

time of the narration (time of the plot)  time of the action (time of the story)

• thematic composition

motifs

dynamic (epic, open), e.g. He cut her head off...

static (lyrical, descriptive), e.g. It is dark...

leitmotif

foreshadowing

free motifs

combinations of individual motifs

- cento

- collage

- montage

episode

episodes + motifs = plot/story

story  plot

subject matter  theme

tone or mode

• the composition of poetry

graphical appearance (lines, stanzas, books, cantos)

+ rhythm and rhyme

• metre (measure, foot)

four different prosodic systems:

1) Quantitative prosody

2) Accentual prosody

3) Syllabic prosody

4) Accentual-syllabic prosody

English verse forms

metrical foot - 4 main types of foot + one rare:

1) the iambic

e.g. Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock:

The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,

And wretches hang that jurymen may dine.

2) the trochaic

Tiger! tiger! burning bright

In the forest of the night,

3) the anapestic

e.g. William Cowper’s: With a turf on my breast, and a stone on my head

4) the dactylic

e.g. Lord Tennyson’s: Into the valley of death

Rode the six hundred

5) the spondee

Blank verse

Free verse

Rhyme

We distinguish between perfect rhyme (also rich or true rhyme) and special near rhymes (also partial or approximate rhymes):

1. spelling rhyme (eye or sight rhyme): love – move

2. imperfect rhyme: ring – striking, spot – parrot

3. unaccented rhyme: matter – lover

4. half-rhyme: cover – shovel, wilderness – building

5. assonant rhyme: bite – strike, eye – sight

6. consonant rhyme: gate – mat, one – stone, plan – unknown

Another division of rhymes is according to the length of the rhyming units:

1. one-syllable rhyme or masculine (male) rhyme: pain – rain, Ann – can

2. two-syllable rhyme or feminine (female) rhyme: weary – dreary

+ other varieties of feminine rhymes – multiple rhymes, e.g. three-syllable rhymes or four-syllable rhymes  rare

Internal rhyme (middle rhyme)

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary (Poe: “The Raven”)

I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores (Shelley: “The Cloud”)

The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother (Dylan Thomas)

COUPLET

Had we but world enough and time, (a)

This coyness, lady, were no crime (a)

We would sit down and think which way (b)

To talk, and pass our long love’s day. (b)

Heroic couplet

A little learning is a dangerous thing:

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.

There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,

and drinking largely sobers us again.

STANZA

Tiger! tiger! burning bright

In the forest of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry. (William Blake)

Enjambement

I have lived long enough. My way of life

Is fall’n into the sear, the yellow leaf. (Macbeth)

Caesura (//)

- masculine caesura

- feminine caesura

e.g. W.H. Auden’s ”Lullaby”: Lay your sleeping head // my love

Human // on my faithless arm.