Aesthetic Devices Revision

Question 1

Simile

Answer 1

Direct comparison using ‘like’ or ‘as’

Example: “Your heart is like an ocean, mysterious and dark.” (Bob Dylan)

Question 2

Metaphor

Answer 2

Comparing two different things that have some characteristics in common.

Example: “Love is clockworks and cold steel.”

Question 3

Personification

Answer 3

Attributing human characteristics to nonhumans.

Example: Practically all animals in fairy tales act like human beings. They speak and have traits that are typical of people.

Question 4

Hyperbole

Answer 4

Exaggeration of the statement.

Example: If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times.

Question 5

Imagery

Answer 5

Imagery is descriptive language used to appeal to a reader’s senses: touch, taste, smell, sound, and sight.

Example: The autumn leaves are a blanket on the ground.

Question 6

Symbolism

Answer 6

the idea that things represent other things.

Example:
the color red - it represents not the color red itself but something beyond it: for example, passion, or love, or devotion. Or maybe the opposite: infidelity.

Question 7

Foreshadowing

Answer 7

indicate or hint to readers something that is to follow or appear later in a story.

Examples:
- Dialogue, such as “I have a bad feeling about this”
- Symbols, such as blood, certain colors, types of birds, weapons
- Weather motifs, such as storm clouds, wind, rain, clearing skies
- Omens, such as prophecies or broken mirror
- Character reactions, such as apprehension, curiosity, secrecy
- Time and/or season, such as midnight, dawn, spring, winter
Settings, such as graveyard, battlefield, isolated path, river

Question 8

Allusion

Answer 8

Reference to a myth, character, literary work, work of art, or an event.

Example: I feel like I’m going down the rabbit hole (an allusion to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll).