Basic Rhetorical Structures
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Metaphor
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Metonymy
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Synecdoche
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Irony
Metaphor
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Links by implicit similarity
“How sweet the moonlight sleeps
upon this bank”
“A green thought in a green shade”
“My love is a red, red rose”
Not to be confused with simile
where the similarity is explicit
Metonymy
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Links by close association
(contiguity)
“The Crown” for the monarchy
“The Stage” for the theatrical
profession
“Dante” for his works
Synecdoche
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Substitutes the part for the whole
“Some eyes condemn the earth
they gaze upon”
Milton refers to the corrupt clergy
as “blind mouths”
Irony
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Juxtaposes appearance and reality
the speaker’s implicit meaning is
very different from what is said
“It grieves me much … who speaks
so well should ever speak in vain”
Can appear as “dramatic irony”
The Genre of Allegory
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allegory: a story in prose or verse
with at least two levels of meaning:
 primary
or surface meaning
 secondary or under-the-surface
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fable: a short narrative which
points an abstract moral principle.
The most common is the beast
fable.
parable: a short narrative which
“teaches a moral lesson”
Four Levels of Meaning

literal or historical meaning
 narrates
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allegorical meaning
 the
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hidden subtext and allusions
moral meaning
 the
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what in fact happened
‘truth’ signified by the passage
anagogical meaning
 the
‘mystical’ interpretation
Animal Farm
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literally about the revolt of animals
against human overlords
allegorical: Napoleon=Stalin;
Major=Lenin; Snowball=Trotsky;
Jones=corrupt capitalist landowners
moral: ‘power tends to corrupt’
anagogical: human (and animal)
nature does not change