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Classification chart with the original "figurative system of human knowledge" tree, in French. The "figurative system of human knowledge" (French: Système figuré des connaissances humaines), sometimes known as the tree of Diderot and d'Alembert, was a tree developed to represent the structure of knowledge itself, produced for the Encyclopédie by Jean le Rond d'Alembert and Denis Diderot.
A classic example of this systematized approach is the aforementioned figurative system of human knowledge, which quantifies knowledge by dividing it into three categories: memory, reason, and imagination. The purpose of this was to place knowledge within general framework that could be added to or expounded upon if necessary.
Henry Peacham, for example, in his The Garden of Eloquence (1577), enumerated 184 different figures of speech. Professor Robert DiYanni, in his book Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, Drama and the Essay [8] wrote: "Rhetoricians have catalogued more than 250 different figures of speech, expressions or ways of using words in a nonliteral sense."
Uses of figurative language, or figures of speech, can take multiple forms, such as simile, metaphor, hyperbole, and many others. [12] Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature says that figurative language can be classified in five categories: resemblance or relationship, emphasis or understatement, figures of sound, verbal games, and errors.
The easiest stylistic device to identify is a simile, signaled by the use of the words "like" or "as".A simile is a comparison used to attract the reader's attention and describe something in descriptive terms.
Ernst Robert Curtius studied topoi as "commonplaces", themes common to orators and writers who re-worked them according to occasion, e.g., in classical antiquity the observation that "all must die" was a topos in consolatory oratory, for in facing death the knowledge that death comes even to great men brings comfort. [2]
In the novels, Butler argues, women do not progress from ignorance to knowledge, for example, and many of them are "oddly and even unnaturally ineffective". Instead, they marry authority figures. [108] As Gilbert and Gubar put it, "becoming a woman means relinquishing achievement and accommodating oneself to men and the spaces they provide". [109]
Imagery is visual symbolism, or figurative language that evokes a mental image or other kinds of sense impressions, especially in a literary work, but also in other activities such as. Imagery in literature can also be instrumental in conveying tone. [1]