Descriptive Techniques: Objective vs. Subjective Styles
Types of Description
Objective description is primarily factual, omitting any attention to the writer, especially with regards to the writer’s feelings. Imagine that a robotic camera is observing the subject; such a camera has absolutely no attachment or reaction to what is being observed. For example: The kitchen table is rectangular, seventy-two inches long and thirty inches wide.
Subjective description, on the other hand, includes attention to both the subject described and the writer’s reactions (internal, personal) to that subject. For example: The sky is beautiful.
Main Classes of Description
- Topographies: Represent a place, a house, a mountain, etc., displaying a spatial relation among objects themselves with hierarchies established. It must be remembered, however, that they can also be metaphors for the mood or the characters.
- Chronologies: Consist of the fictional or physical aspects of a person.
- Etopeias: The representation of the moral qualities of a fictional or real character.
- Portraits: Combine the components of prosographies and etopeias.
Anaphora and Cataphora
Anaphora: The use of a linguistic unit, such as a pronoun, to refer back to another unit, as the use of ‘her’ to refer to Anne in the sentence ‘Anne asked Edward to pass her the salt.’
Anaphora represents the relation between a “proform” (called an “anaphor”) and another term (called an “antecedent”), when the interpretation of the anaphor is in a certain way determined by the interpretation of the antecedent.
Cataphora: The use of a linguistic unit, such as a pronoun, to refer ahead to another unit, for example, the use of ‘him’ to refer to John in the sentence ‘Near him, John saw a snake.’ Cataphora is the coreference of one expression with another expression which follows it. The following expression provides the information necessary for interpretation of the preceding one.
Descriptive Techniques: Stylistics of Deviation and Figures of Speech
Personification: A figure of speech in which inanimate objects or abstractions are provided with human qualities or are represented as possessing human forms. In other words: giving something a human-like quality or ability to something that is not human. For example: The sun smiles upon the Earth.
Dehumanization: If in prosopopeia non-human beings are perceived as possessing a [+human] attribute, in the case of dehumanization, human beings are perceived as deprived of their [+human] attribute. For example: a heap of rubbish
Reification: Consists in the presentation of a quality not as an accident but as a substance. For example, if, instead of speaking of the white swords we talk about the whiteness of the swords.
Hyperboles: A figure of speech in which exceptional exaggeration is deliberately used for emphasis rather than deception. For example: I could sleep for a year or This book weighs a ton.
Onomatopoeia: The use of words that seem to imitate the sounds they refer to (whack, fizz, crackle, hiss); or any combination of words in which the sound gives the impression of echoing the sense. This figure of speech is often found in poetry, sometimes in prose. It relies more on conventional associations between verbal and non‐verbal sounds than on the direct duplication of one by the other. For example: buzz buzz
Oxymoron: A figure of speech that combines two usually contradictory terms in a compressed paradox, as in the word bittersweet or the phrase living death. Oxymoronic phrases, like Milton’s ‘darkness visible’, were especially cultivated in 16th‐ and 17th‐century poetry.
Comparison: The two members that are being compared are present; in a partial comparison, although it is an explicit comparison, only one member is present. She is as beautiful as a flower.
Similes: A figure of speech in which two essentially unlike things are compared, often in a phrase introduced by like or as, as in “How like the winter hath my absence been” or “So are you to my thoughts as food to life”
Metaphors: Figure of speech in which a word or phrase denoting one kind of object or action is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them (as in the ship plows the seas or a volley of oaths). A metaphor is an implied comparison (as in a marble brow), in contrast to the explicit comparison of the simile (a brow white as marble). Metaphor is common at all levels of language and is fundamental in poetry, in which its varied functions range from merely noting a likeness to serving as a central concept and controlling image. For example: “a sea of troubles”
Metonyms: A figure of speech in which one word or phrase is substituted for another with which it is closely associated, as in the use of Washington for the United States government or of the sword for military power.
Synecdoches: A figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole (as hand for sailor), the whole for a part (as the law for police officer), the specific for the general (as cutthroat for assassin), the general for the specific (as thief for pickpocket), or the material for the thing made from it (as steel for sword).
Social comedy: Is an amusing description, always in a sympathetic or tolerant tone, of human stupidity or foolishness, where laughter and amusement are the goals to be achieved, whereas in satire laughter and smile are the means to reach the final end, which is, as we have said before, condemnation, social destruction or personal obliteration.
Satire: Is a critical representation and is a genre of literature, and sometimes graphic and performing arts, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement. Although satire is usually meant to be funny, its greater purpose is often constructive social criticism, using wit as a weapon.
Parody: Is an alleged representation that closely mimics another work’s style and manner for the purpose of ridicule; a spoof or take-off. The word is ancient Greek: par-odia, a song on the side, as perhaps performed by a clown. For example: Fielding’s Tom Jones.