Readings
Jess, Tyehimba. Olio. Wave Books, 2016. pp. 12–29. ISBN: 9781940696201.
DuBois, W.E.B. "Of Spiritual Strivings of the Negro People." Chapter 1, of Souls of Black Folk. CreateSpace, 2017. ISBN: 9781505223378.
Things to mark as you read:
- Simile: the figure of speech that asserts a resemblance between two things that goes beyond their membership in a common class: "I was like a ship adrift on the ocean," as distinct from "I am, like Arthur Bahr, a professor of Literature." Generally signaled by "A is like B" or "A is as B."
- Metaphor: the figure of speech that asserts identity between two non-identical things: "I am the walrus," as distinct from "I am a professor."
- Metonymy: the figure of speech that identifies a thing by a term closely related to it: "What does Building 14 think about instituting a requirement in computational thinking?" as distinct from, "What do faculty in GSL, CMS/W, and Literature think about…?"
- Synecdoche: the figure of speech that identifies a thing by naming something that is a smaller part of it
Our ordinary speech is full of metonymies and synecdoches, many of which are conventional to the point that they don’t stand out as non-literal, much less poetic. (Actually, the same is true for some metaphors: e.g., the "face" of a clock). So these may require some active attention to identify. Always a possibility, too, is that something literally described (e.g., Williams' cat) may additionally function as a synecdoche for a larger class of things (e.g. agents in a narrative with a rising and falling trajectory). Tests of plausibility and explanatory value always apply—does a conjecture of this kind make better and more consistent sense of the poem? But the typical compression of (especially) shorter poems makes appealing the possibilities of layering literal (it’s a cat) and figurative (that cat typifies a larger class of agents) meanings in the same space.
The two parts of metaphor are generally designated as tenor, or thing meant ("I"), and vehicle, or thing identified with ("the walrus"). It can be useful to think about the larger domain from which the vehicle is drawn (the sea, the Arctic, creatures that swim, the natural world in general, things that are out of place in Kendall Square…).