As a form of art, literature has its own artistic techniques based on the possibilities of language and speech. They are collectively referred to as the term “visual media in literature”. The task of these tools is to expressively describe the depicted reality and convey the meaning, artistic idea of the work, as well as create a certain mood.
Trails and figures
The expressive and visual means of the language are various pathways and figures of speech. The word "trope" in Greek means "turnover", that is, it is some kind of expression or word used in a figurative meaning. The trope as a figurative and expressive tool in literature is used by the author for greater imagery. Epithets, metaphors, avatars, hyperbolas and other artistic techniques relate to trails. Speech figures are verbal revolutions that enhance the emotional tone of a work. Antithesis, epiphora, inversion, and many others are figurative means in the literature related to stylistic reception under the general name of "figure of speech." Now consider them in more detail.
Epithets
The most common literary device is the use of epithets, that is, figurative, often metaphorical, words that picturesquely characterize the described object. We will meet epithets in folklore (“a feast is honored,” “the treasury is countless gold” in the epic “Sadko”) and in works of authorship (the “cautious and deaf” sound of a fallen fruit in Mandelstam’s poem). The more expressive the epithet, the more emotional and brighter the image created by the artist of the word.
Metaphors
The term "metaphor" came to us from the Greek language, as well as the designation of most paths. It literally means "figurative meaning." If the author likens a drop of dew to a grain of a diamond, and a crimson bunch of mountain ash to a fire, then this is a metaphor.
Metonymy
A very interesting pictorial means of language is metonymy. Translated from Greek - renaming. In this case, the name of one object is transferred to another, and a new image is born. The great dream come true of Peter the Great about all the flags that will be “on a visit to us” from the Pushkin's “Bronze Horseman” is an example of metonymy. The word "flags" replaces in this case the concept of "country, state." Metonymy is readily used in the media and in colloquial speech: “The White House,” for example, is called not the building, but its inhabitants. When we say “teeth have gone”, we mean that the toothache has disappeared.
Sinekdoha translated - the ratio. This is also a transfer of meaning, but only by a quantitative sign: “the German went on the attack” (meaning the German regiments), “the bird does not fly here, the beast does not come here” (of course, we are talking about many animals and birds).
Oxymoron
An expressive means in the literature is also an oxymoron. A stylistic figure, which may turn out to be a stylistic mistake, is the unification of the incompatible, in the literal translation this Greek word sounds like “witty-stupid”. Examples of oxymoron are the names of the famous books Hot Snow, Virgin Soil Upturned, or Living Corpse.
Concurrency and Parcellation
Often, parallelism (the deliberate use of similar syntactic constructions in adjacent lines and sentences) and parceling (dividing a phrase into separate words) are often used as an expressive device. We will find an example of the first in the book of Solomon: "Time to complain, and time to dance." An example of the second:
- “I'm coming. And you go. We are with you along the way.
I will find. You will not find. If you follow after. ”
Inversion
What visual means in artistic speech can still be found? Inversion. The term comes from the Latin word and translates as "rearrangement, inversion". In the literature, inversion is the rearrangement of words or parts of a sentence from the usual to the reverse order. This is done in order to make the statement look more significant, gritty or colorful: "Our long-suffering people!", "The age is crazy, crazy."
Hyperbola. Litotes. Irony
Expressive visual aids in the literature are also hyperbole, litota, and irony. The first and second belong to the category of exaggeration-understatement. Hyperbola can be called a description of the hero Mikula Selyaninovich who, with one hand, "pulled" out of the land a plow, which the whole "good-natured squad" of Volga Svyatoslavovich could not budge. Litota, on the contrary, makes the image ridiculously small when they say about a miniature dog that she is "no more than a thimble." The irony, which literally sounds like “pretense” in translation, is called upon to call the subject not what it seems. This is a subtle mockery in which the literal meaning is hidden under the opposite statement. For example, here is an ironic appeal to a tongue-tied man: “What can you, Cicero, have two words to connect?” The ironic meaning of the appeal lies in the fact that Cicero was a brilliant orator.
Impersonation and Comparison
Picturesque trails are comparison and personification. These literary means in the literature create a special poetics that appeals to the reader’s cultural erudition. Comparison is the most commonly used technique, when a swirling whirlwind of snowflakes near a window pane is compared, for example, with a swarm of midges flying into the light (B. Pasternak). Or, as in Joseph Brodsky, a hawk in the sky roars "like a square root." In personifying, inanimate objects acquire “living” properties by the will of the artist. This is the “breath of the pan,” from which “the skin becomes warm,” for Yevtushenko, or the little “little maple” for Yesenin, who “sucks” the “green udder” of the adult tree near which he grew up. And remember the Pasternak blizzard, which “sculpts” “circles and arrows” on the window pane!
Pun. Graduation. Antithesis
Among the stylistic figures, we can also mention a pun, gradation, antithesis.
A pun, a French term in origin, involves witty playing out the different meanings of a word. For example, in a joke: "I pulled onions and went to a masquerade in the costume of Cipollino."
Graduation is the setting of homogeneous members to enhance or weaken their emotional intensity: he entered, saw, and took possession of.
The antithesis is a sharp stunning contrast, like Pushkin’s in The Little Tragedies, when he describes the table at which people recently feasted, and now there is a coffin on it. Reception of antithesis strengthens the gloomy metaphorical meaning of the narrative.
Here are the main visual means that the master uses to give his readers a spectacular, embossed and colorful world of words.