Aspects of Form and Style

(back to syllabus)

1. Ovid's Metamorphoses

• Graphic description (visual, physical detail, active verbs)
• balance and repetition
• Rhetorical devices: rhetorical speech, hyperbole (exaggeration, overstatement), teasing of reader: "what follows is too horrible "
• Humor: fun with authority ("Who would believe it ?"); grim joking
• Mixture of opposites: sentiment and violence
• Irony

2. Gilgamesh

• Repetition
• Parallelism

3. The Jew of Malta and The Merchant of Venice

• Rhyme and meter (see also the literary devices below)
• stanzaic form (I include this because a lot of poems are in stanza form; our plays, however, were not; they were in a form called blank verse [that is, unrhymed iambic pentameter])

4. Prose: the novels

• Plain prose style: relatively simple sentence structure and vocabulary; relatively few literary devices such as alliteration, similes, metaphors, and allusions)
• Fancy prose style: elaborate sentence structure, Latinate vocabulary, lots of literary devices

5. Common literary devices (add to all the others above such as repetition, parallelism, irony, rhetorical devices, graphic description, etc.)

• Alliteration (the repetition of consonant sounds: fair , foul; sweet sorrow; wild wilderness)
• Simile and metaphor (comparison of A & B: metaphor: "the fever was a tempest, raging wildly" [add "like" or "as," and you change a metaphor into a simile: "the fever raged wildly, like a tempest"
• Allusion: reference to a familiar, often old literary or historical person or event ("I'm not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be")
• Word play (puns, word games, fake/silly/foreign words, etc.)