1. FIGURES
AND
TROPES

2. FIGURES AND TROPES
What is the opposite of figures and tropes?
• Literal
What is a Trope?

3. WHAT ARE THEY USED
FOR?
 Some say figures and  Others say they make you
tropes are more for look deeper into the meaning
decoration. of a text and shape its
meaning.

4. DEAD METAPHORS
A figure of speech that has lost its force and
imaginative effectiveness through frequent use.
• “Legs of a chair”

5. HYPERBOLE
A vast exaggeration.
• Elvis Presley being called the “king”.

6. METONYMY
 A figure of speech that consists of the use of the name of
one object or concept for that of another to which it is
related, or of which it is a part.
• Crown/Queen

7. ANTHROPOMORPHISM
Giving human characteristics to something that is
not.
• Arthur the aardvark.

8. METAPHOR
Comparing something with an unlike thing
without using like or as.
• Love is a battlefield.
Tenor and Vehicle
• Juliet is the sun.

9. SIMILE
Comparing something with an unlike thing using
like or as.
• “Life is like a box of chocolates”. – Tom Hanks in
Forest Gump

10. SYNECDOCHE
Using a part to refer to a whole.
• “Twenty sails came into the harbor.”

11. ANIMISM
An inanimate object is given life like
characteristics.
• When god is angry it might rain.

12. PARONOMASIA
A pun or word ploy.
• Without geometry, life is pointless.

13.  The eliminating of the CATHARSIS
emotions or relieving of Oedipus the “T” Rex
emotional tensions, especially
through certain kinds of art, as
tragedy or music.
• When Oedipus Rex
discovers that his wife is his
own mother and the person
he had killed on the road
was his own father.

14. ONOMATOPOEIA
The naming of a thing or action by a vocal
imitation of the sound associated with it.
• Buzz, hiss, bang.

15. PERSONIFICATION
The attribution of a personal nature or character
to inanimate objects or abstract notions.
• The stars danced playfully in the moonlit sky.

16. INFORMATION FROM…
 http://dictionary.reference.com/
 Bennett, Andrew, and Nicholas Royle. An Introduction to
Literature, Criticism and Theory. Harlow, U.K.:
Pearson/Longman, 2009. Print.
 "Tropes and Figures." Wake Forest University. Web. 27 Feb. 2012.
<http://www.wfu.edu/~zulick/454/figures/tropesindex.htm>.