LITERARY DEVICESBy Megan Shelton

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Definition: writing where a characters thoughts, memories and perceptions are presented as random, and without sequence or syntax. It often has no difference between dreams, memory, thoughts, or real time. Also known as interior monologue

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS CONT.

Examples: "Such fools we all are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street.

For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.“ -Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS CONT.

Examples: "Everything (he kept saying) is something it isn't. And

everybody is always somewhere else. Maybe it was the city, being in the city, that made him feel how queer everything was and that it was something else. Maybe (he kept thinking) it was the names of the things. The names were tex and frequently koid. Or they were flex and oid or they were duroid (sani) or flexsan (duro), but everything was glass (but not quite glass) and the thing that you touched (the surface, washable, crease-resistant) was rubber, only it wasn't quite rubber and you didn't quite touch it but almost. The wall, which was glass but turned out on being approached not to be a wall, it was something else, it was an opening or doorway--and the doorway (through which he saw himself approaching) turned out to be something else, it was a wall. And what he had eaten not having agreed with him.“ E.B. White, The Door

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS CONT.

FUNCTION: The function of stream of

consciousness, or interior monologue is to give insight to a characters point of view by showing their thought process.

SYNECDOCHE

Definition: a figure of speech in which a part of something is used to represent the whole.

Examples: “Nice wheels.”

“Wheels” is the part, that refers to the Car as a whole.

ABC’s “ABC’s” is a part of the Alphabet as a whole.

Function: Synecdoche's are used to aid in the understanding of the whole.

PARALLELISM

Definition: The grammatical framing of syntax to give structural similarity. It can involve repetition of grammatical elements as well.

Examples: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the

age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of believe, it was the epoch of incredulity....” Charles Dickens, Tale of Two Cities

"Our transportation crisis will be solved by a bigger plane or a wider road, mental illness with a pill, poverty with a law, slums with a bulldozer, urban conflict with a gas, racism with a goodwill gesture." Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness

Function: Parallelism is used to organize and attract attention, or just to provide rhythm to the work.