Session Three
Søren Hattesen Balle
English
Department of Culture and Identity
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Introduction: the summary assignment for today
and next time
Introduction: today’s session
Presentation:
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figurative language
defamiliarization
Romanticism, Victorianism, Late Modernism
Class room discussion:
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William Wordsworth, ”Composed upon Westminster Bridge,
September 3, 1802” (1802/1807); Thomas Hardy, ”The Darkling
Thrush” (1900, 1901); Craig Raine, ”A Martian Sends a Postcard
Home” (1979)
The use of figurative language and the role and function of
defamiliarization in the three poems
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Summing up on figurative language in poetry:
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genre-constitutive (vs. genre-specific)
poetic language (vs. ’ordinary’ language)
figurative language (vs. ’literal’ language) (cf. F. Nietzsche:
”What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms,
and anthropomorphisms [..]: truths are illusions about which
one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which
are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have
lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as
coins”)
essential (vs. historical)
figure (vs. imagery)
trope/figure of thought (vs. rhetorical figure/figure of
speech/scheme)
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The function and effect of figurative language in literary and
poetic texts:
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ornamental/decorative, abusive/seductive,
(de)constructive/(de)mystifying/(de)familiarizing
the inextricable relation between figures, images and meaning in poetic
texts
 cf. imagery ”as a major factor in poetic meaning, structure, and effect” (Abrams &
Harpham)
 image motifs, image clusters, thematic imagery (cf. ’falling’ and ’death’ in J. Joyce,
”The Dead”)
 image vs. symbol vs. emblem (cf. W. Blake, ”A Poison Tree” and E. Morgan
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figures and images as means of making the abstract concrete (cf. The
Petrarchan conceit and W. Shakespeare’s demythologizing of Petrarchan
poetic imagery)
figures and images as means of ’(de)familiarizing’ (V. Shklovsky) our
world: re-figuration of the world; to see the world figuratively is to ’see
things’ (cf. Wordsworth, ”Tintern Abbey” and R. Ellison, Invisible Man)
The self-reflexivity and critique of figurative language (cf. E. Dickinson, ”A
Bird came down the Walk” and R. Ellison, Invisible Man): (de)constructive
of the illusion of reference+(re)figuring of racist metaphors/synecdoches )
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Types of figurative language
(dead) metaphor/(epic) simile (a ’is’ (’like’ or ’as’) b)
mixed metaphor
metonymy (a ’is associated with’ b)
synecdoche (a ’is part of’ b)
anthropomorphism/prosopopoeia (personification)
paranomasia (pun)
chiasmus (syntactic inversion)
synaesthesia (fusion of different sense impressions)
apostrophe (address to an inanimate or non-human entity)
anaphora (repetition of word or phrase at the beginning of a
sequence of sentences)
rhetorical question (a question asked not to request
information; the answer is self-evident)
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Romanticism, Victorianism, Late Modernism
Romanticism: faith in the power of the imagination
and figurative language to transform and humanize
the outside world (Greenblatt, p. 11)
 Victorianism: belatedness and distance in relation to
the Romantic confidence in the power of the
imagination (Greenblatt, p. 996)
 Late Modernism/’the Martian School’: the eye/’I’
”sees the world with the freshness of a child or a
painter or a visitor from Mars and records what it
sees with an often exubererant
wit”(Abrams/Greenblatt, p. 1903) → fidelity to
experience and the everyday world
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William Wordsworth, ”Composed upon Westminster Bridge,
September 3, 1802” (1802/1807); Thomas Hardy, ”The Darkling
Thrush” (1900, 1901); Craig Raine, ”A Martian Sends a Postcard
Home” (1979)
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compare the textual media which the reader is invited to think the three
poems are representations of. Does it make any difference to our reading
of the poems that Wordsworth’s poem is meant to be read as a poem, and
a sonnet at that, just as Hardy’s poem is, while Raine’s is presented as a
postcard from a Martian visiting the earth?
compare the speakers of the three poems
what creates strangeness in the three poems?
compare the figurative and rhetorical devices the poems use as means of
defamiliarization
compare the effect each poem means to achieve by its use of
defamiliarizing strategies
can you translate the figurative terms of “A Martian Sends a Postcard
Home” into literal terms? did you find the work of translation difficult or
easy? Depending on your answer, state your reasons why.
outline a poetics for each poem