高级英语第二册修辞复习.doc

Lesson 1 Pub Talk and the King’s English

1. The conversation had swung from Australian convicts of the 19th century to the English peasants of the 12th century. Who was right, who was wrong, did not matter. The conversation was on wings.—metaphor
2. As we listen today to the arguments about bilingual education, we ought to think ourselves back into the shoes of the Saxon peasant. —metaphor
3. I have an unending love affair with dictionaries-Auden once said that all a writer needs is a pen, plenty of paper and "the best dictionaries he can afford"--but I agree with the person who said that dictionaries are instruments of common sense. —metaphor
4. Even with the most educated and the most literate, the King's English slips and slides in conversation. —alliteration
5. Other people may celebrate the lofty conversations in which the great minds are supposed to have indulged in the great salons of 18th century Paris, but one suspects that the great minds were gossiping and judging the quality of the food and the wine. —synecdoche
6. Otherwise one will tie up the conversation and will not let it go on freely. —metaphor

Lesson 3 Inaugural Address
1 Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of these human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.—alliteration
2 Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty—parallelism
3 United, there is little we cannot do in a host of co-operative ventures. Divided, there is little we can do, for we dare not meet a powerful challenge at odds and split asunder.—antithesis
4 …in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.—metaphor
5 If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. —antithesis

Lesson 4 Love Is a Fallacy
1 Charles Lamb, as merry and enterprising a fellow as you will meet in a month of Sundays, unfettered the informal essay with his memorable Old China and Dream’s Children.—metaphor
2 Read, then, the following essay which undertakes to demonstrate that logic, far from being a dry, pedantic discipline, is a living, breathing thing, full of beauty, passion, and trauma.—metaphor, hyperbole
3 She was, to be sure, a girl who excited the emotions but I was not one to let my heart rule my head. —metonymy
4 Back and forth his head swiveled, desire waxing, resolution waning.—antithesis
5 It is not often that one so young has such a giant intellect. Take, for example, Petey Butch, my roommate at the University of Minnesota. Same age, same background, but dumb as an ox. —hyperbole, simile
6 One more chance, I decided. But just one more. There is a limit to what flesh and blood can bear. —synecdoche
7 Maybe somewhere in the extinct crater of her mind, a few embers still smoldered. Maybe somehow I could fan them into flame.—metaphor, extended metaphor
8 "1 may do better than that," I said with a mysterious wink and closed my bag and left. —transferred epithet

Lesson 5 The Sad Young Men
1 The slightest mention of the decade brings nostalgic recollections to the middle-aged and curious questionings by the young: memories of the deliciously illicit thrill of the first visit to a speakeasy, of the brave denunciation of Puritan morality, and of the fashionable experimentations in amour in the parked sedan on a country road; questions about the naughty, jazzy parties, the flask-toting ”sheik”, and the moral and stylistic vagaries of the “flapper” and the “drug-store cowboy”.—transferred epithet
2 War or no war, as the generations passed, it became increasingly difficult for our young people to accept standards of behavior that bore no relationship to the bustling business medium in which they were expected to battle for success.—metaphor
3 The prolonged stalemate of 1915-1916, the increasing insolence of Germany toward the United States, and our official reluctance to declare our status as a belligerent were intolerable to many of our idealistic citizens, and with typical American adventurousness enhanced somewhat by the strenuous jingoism of Theodore Roosevelt, our young men began to enlist under foreign flags.—metonymy
4 Before long the movement had become officially recognized by the pulpit (which denounced it), by the movies and magazines (which made it attractively naughty while pretending to denounce it), and by advertising (which obliquely encouraged it by 'selling everything from cigarettes to automobiles with the implied promise that their owners would be rendered sexually irresistible).—metonymy
5 Younger brothers and sisters of the war generation, who had been playing with marbles and dolls during the battles of Belleau Wood and Chateau-Thierry, and who had suffered no real disillusionment or sense of loss, now began to imitate the manners of their elders and play with the toys of vulgar rebellion.—metaphor
6 These defects would disappear if only creative art were allowed to show the way to better things, but since the country was blind and deaf to everything save the glint and ring of the dollar, there was little remedy for the sensitive mind but to emigrate to Europe where “they do things better.”—personification, metonymy, synecdoche
7 The war acted merely as a catalytic agent in this breakdown of the Victorian social structure, and by precipitating our young people into a pattern of mass murder it released their inhibited violent energies which, after the shooting was over, were turned in both Europe and America to the destruction of an obsolescent nineteenth century society.—metaphor

Lesson 6 Loving and Hating New York
1 The giant Manhattan television studios where Toscanini’s NBC Symphony once played now sit empty most of the time, while sitcoms cloned and canned in Hollywood, and the Johnny Carson show live, preempt the airways from California. — alliteration and metaphor
2 Tin Pan Alley has moved to Nashville and Hollywood. — metonymy
3 New York was never Mecca to me. —metonymy
4 Nature constantly yields to man in New York: witness those fragile sidewalk trees gamely struggling against encroaching cement and petrol fumes. —personification
5 So much of well-to-do America now lives antiseptically in enclaves, tranquil and luxurious, that shut out the world. —metonymy
6 The defeated are not hidden away somewhere else on the wrong side of town. —euphemism
7 Characteristically, the city swallows up the United Nations and refuses to take it seriously, regarding it as an unworkable mixture of the idealistic, the impractical, and the hypocritical. —personification

Lesson 8 The Future of the English
1 Some cancer in their character has eaten away their Englishness. —metaphor, personification
2 Against this, at least superficially, Englishness seems a poor shadowy show – a faint pencil sketch beside a poster in full colour. —metaphor
3 As it is they are like a hippopotamus blundering in and out of a pets’ tea party —simile
4 But it is worth noting along the way that while America has been for many years the chief advocate of 'Admass', America has shown us too many desperately worried executives dropping into early graves. —transferred epithet
5 Yes, Englishness is still with us. But it needs reinforcement, extra nourishment, especially now when our public life seems ready to starve it. —metaphor
6 There are English people of all ages, though far more under thirty than over sixty, who seem to regard politics as a game but not one of their games – polo, let us say. —metaphor
7 And this is true, whether they are wearing bowler hats or ungovernable mops of hair. —metonymy

Lesson 10 The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American

1 When it did, I like many a writer before me upon the discovery that his props have all been knocked out from under him, suffered a species of breakdown ad was carried off to the mountains of Switzerland.—metaphor
2 There, in that absolutely alabaster landscape armed with two Bessie Smith records and a typewriter I began to try to recreate the life that I had first known as a child and from which I had spent so many years in flight.—metaphor
3 Once I was able to accept my role—as distinguished, I must say, from my “place”—in the extraordinary drama which is America, I was released from the illusion that I hated America.—metaphor
4 It is not meant, of course, to imply that it happens to them all, for Europe can be very crippling too; and, anyway, a writer, when he has made his first breakthrough, has simply won a crucial skirmish in a dangerous, unending and unpredictable battle.—metaphor
5 Whatever the Europeans may actually think of artists, they have killed enough of them off by now to know that they are as real—and as persistent—as rain, snow, taxes or businessmen.—simile
6 In this endeavor to wed the vision of the Old World with that of the New, it is the writer, not the statesman, who is our strongest arm.—metaphor

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