Wednesday, May 3, 2017

What are some examples of allusion, imagery, mood, tone, similes, metaphors, personification, irony, satire, symbolism, and foreshadowing?

The literary devices you listed can be deployed in written literature, but also in the arts more generally (e.g. film, TV, opera). Examples of each could be drawn from the arts more broadly understood.

An example of an allusion would be when, for example, the commercial for a Motorola zoom tablet indirectly referenced the famous Apple ad that aired in 1984 and borrowed themes from George Orwell's novel, "1984". The Motorola ad used similar images and showed two young people rejecting mindless conformism, not unlike Apple heralded its product as a rejection of Orwellian conformity back in 1984.


Imagery in literature can be witnessed when an author uses detailed description (often eliciting or appealing to the five senses) to enable the reader to more easily imagine the story world. You might think of some of the rich descriptions of Hogwarts in a J.K. Rowling novel as an example of imagery. 


Mood has to do with the emotional disposition an author takes to a story, which can give the story a kind of atmosphere of feeling. The mood in many Edgar Allan Poe novels and short stories, for example, is dark and macabre.


Tone refers to the attitude an author -- or, again, a director, filmmaker, etc. -- adopts toward themes, characters or life in a particular narrative. The tone of John Steinbeck's novel "The Grapes of Wrath" is very critical, revealing the human suffering and inequalities during the Great Depression in the US, although there is also a slight sense of hope through resistance and perseverance conveyed throughout the novel, especially toward the end.


A simile is when an author refers to something as being like something else (when an author likens something to something different). A romantic poem might include lines like "Your eyes are like the ocean, and I can get lost in them." (The first part of that line is a simile, the second comes close to metaphor.)


A metaphor involves ascribing meaning of one subject to another. For example, when someone writes (or says) "He was a beast on the court," referring to how well someone played a game of basketball, the writer (or speaker) is using a metaphor ("a beast") to convey how well the person played the game.


Personification entails ascribing human traits or characteristics to non-human entities. If I write that "the wind treated me with cold indifference," I'm using personification because the word choice is something you would expect to be used in reference to how a person can treat another person.


Irony involves incorporating into a story, narrative or other piece of work something that one would not expect. In literature, it is usually seen when the literal meaning of a word or words stands in stark contrast to what is actually meant. One can see this in everyday culture; an example would be someone wearing a t-shirt showing a TV show or band, but it would be a TV show or a band that they don't actually like.


Satire encompasses a variety of comedic devices and rhetorical devices for social commentary. The most famous example of a satirical novel is Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal," an essay in which the author facetiously suggested the parents of impoverished children might sell their kids as food. The device served to highlight the social problem of poverty while criticizing actual proposals that were almost just as bad. More recently, you could say that TV shows that aired on Comedy Central, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, used satire to poke fun at the major media and politics.


Symbolism is in one a writer uses a symbol (something that can stand for and/or invoke the idea or meaning of something else) to signify something. An obvious example is the symbol of the heart used to signify love.


Foreshadowing occurs in a literary work (or in another work of art that can unfold over time) when hints are dropped as to what is going to happen later in the story. Edgar Allan Poe uses foreshadowing throughout his short story "The Cask of Amontillado," intimating through the dialogue between the two characters that one (Fortunato) would soon meet his death and be entombed by the other (Montresor) who takes revenge by sealing his former friend in the catacombs.

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