Literary Terms #2, Irony and Tone
Paradox
"Fair is foul and foul is fair" Shakespeare
Paradox
"For when I am weak, then I am strong" St. Paul
Litotes
"He is not unfriendly."
Paradox
"My only love sprung from my only hate!" Shakespeare
Paradox
"The child is the father of the man" Wordsworth
Oxymoron
"bitter sweet"
Oxymoron
"jumbo shrimp"
Oxymoron
"loving hate"
Oxymoron
"pleasing pains"
Oxymoron
"wise fool"
Litotes
A form of understatement in which a statement is affirmed by negating its opposite.
Satire
A kind of literature that ridicules human folly or vice with the purpose of bringing about reform or of keeping others from falling into similar folly or vice.
Oxymoron
A self-contradictory combination of words or smaller verbal units; usually noun-noun, adjective-adjective, adverb-adverb, or adverb-verb.
Irony
A situation or a use of language involving some kind of incongruity or discrepancy.
Paradox
A statement which seems on its face to be self-contradictory or absurd, yet turns out to make good sense.
Horatian Satire
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World,
Horatian Satire
Alexander Pope's verse satires; "The Rape of the Lock"
Ambiguity
Allows for two or more simultaneous interpretations of a word, phrase, action, or situation, all of which can be supported by the context of a work.
Juvenalian Satire
Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange
Horatian Satire
C.S.Lewis's Screwtape Letters
Juvenalian Satire
Formal satire in which the speaker attacks vice and error with contempt and indignation; harsh and realistic.
Oxymoron
From the Greek meaning "sharp-dull"
Hyperbole (Overstatement)
Frost's "The Road Not Taken" "I shall be telling this with a sigh/ Somewhere ages and ages hence"
Juvenalian Satire
George Orwell's 1984
Horatian Satire
George Orwell's Animal Farm,
Ambiguity
Ghost in Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights"
Ambiguity
Ghost in Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw."
Ambiguity
Ghosts or other supernatural creatures in literary fiction... is the character hallucinating or is that supernatural being really there?
Litotes
He is not the cleverest person I have ever met.
Sarcasm
If a student says, "I don't understand," and the teacher replies, with a tone of heavy disgust in his voice, "Well, I wouldn't expect you to."
Irony
If, after you have done particularly well on an exam, and your teacher hands out your test saying, "Here's some bad news for you: you all got A's and B's!"
Understatement
If, upon sitting down to a loaded dinner plate, you say, "This looks like a nice snack,"
Situational Irony
In "The Most Dangerous Game," it is ironic that Rainsford, "the celebrated hunter," should become the hunted, this is a reversal of his expected and appropriate role.
Horatian Satire
Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels,
Juvenalian Satire
Jonathan Swift's uncompromisingly disgusted tone; "A Modest Proposal"
Juvenalian Satire
Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451
Juvenalian Satire
Samuel Johnson's "London,"
Juvenalian Satire
Samuel Johnson's poems London (1738) and The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749)
Horatian Satire
Satire in which the voice is indulgent, tolerant, amused, and witty. The speaker holds up to gentle ridicule the absurdities and follies of human beings, aiming at producing in the reader a wry smile.
Litotes
She is not unlike her mother.
Hyperbole (Overstatement)
Tennyson's "The Eagle" "Close to the sun in lonely lands,"
Dramatic Irony
The author lets the audience or reader in on a character's situation while the character himself remains in the dark.
Situational Irony
The discrepancy is between appearance and reality, or between expectation and fulfillment, or between what is and what would seem appropriate.
Cosmic Irony
The perception of fate of the universe as malicious or indifferent to human suffering, which creates a painful contrast between our purposeful activity and its ultimate meaninglessness.
Verbal Irony
The use of a statement that, by its context, implies the opposite.
Litotes
They do not seem the happiest couple around.
Ambiguity
Used unintentionally, it obscures meaning and can confuse readers.
Juvenalian Satire
William Golding's Lord of the Flies
Litotes
Your apartment is not unclean.
Sarcasm
a particularly blunt form of verbal irony.
Sarcasm
bitter or cutting speech intended to wound the feelings (it comes from a Greek word meaning to tear the flesh).
Hyperbole (Overstatement)
exaggeration, but exaggeration in the service of truth. It may be humorous, grave, fanciful or restrained, convincing or unconvincing.
Understatement
from Artemus Ward... but if you say that a man who holds his hand for half an hour in a lighted fire will experience "a sensation of excessive and disagreeable warmth."
Verbal Irony
in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Antony repeats, "Brutus is an honorable man," while clearly implying that Brutus is dishonorable.
Dramatic Irony
in Sophocle's Oedipus Rex, when Oedipus vows to discover his father's murderer, not knowing, as the audience does, that he himself is the murderer.
Irony
is neither cruel or kind: it is simply a device, like a surgeon's scalpel, for performing an operation more skillfully.
Understatement
saying less than one means, may exist in what one says or merely in how one says it.
Paradox
teases the mind and tests the limits of language; it can be a potent device.
Dramatic Irony
the character's words or actions carry a significance that the character is not aware of.
Dramatic Irony
the contrast is between what a character says or thinks and what the reader knows to be true.
Irony
tool used in sarcasm and satire
Paradox
useful in poetry because it arrests a reader's attention by its seemingly stubborn refusal to make sense.