In this lesson, we are focusing on the aesthetic effects of stylistic and rhetorical devices. These devices also affect a reader’s comprehension, memory, and attitude. It is often difficult to draw a clear line between aesthetic effects and what we might call the logical effects of these devices.
Source: Sensory, Stephh922, Flickr
As you respond, you should try to keep the distinction in mind, but you might also find it appropriate to refer to the effects of these devices on comprehension (making the text easier to understand), memory (making the text unforgettable), and attitude (making the text valuable to the reader).
Visual imagery and imagery that appeals to the other senses has the immediate effect of bringing us pleasure, pain, or other sensations. As readers, we like to be able to see, hear, taste, touch, and smell at the same time we are thinking about ideas and information. When an author is presenting information or ideas and includes sensory details, the text is usually more pleasurable to read.
All of the devices we are studying in this lesson heighten aesthetic pleasure by creating images or using sensory details, primarily images and details based on seeing and hearing. In the following passages from Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury uses many rhetorical and stylistic devices to add aesthetic enjoyment to his text. Read each passage and answer the question that follows .
Passage 1
Source: Old Piano Keys, adamhenning, Flickr
About seven o’clock you could hear the chairs scraping back from the tables, someone experimenting with a yellow-toothed piano, if you stood outside the dining-room window and listened. Matches being struck, the first dishes bubbling in the suds and tinkling on the wall racks, somewhere, faintly, a phonograph playing.
Which of the following phrases contains an image—something that makes you hear, taste, touch, smell, or see what is being described?
Passage 2
Source: fern, Amanda Krueger, Flickr
It wasn’t important to anyone what the adults talked about; it was only important that the sounds came and went over the delicate ferns that bordered the porch on three sides; it was only important that the darkness filled the town like black water being poured over the houses, and that the cigars glowed and that the conversations went on, and on.
Which of the following phrases contains an image—something that makes you hear, taste, touch, smell, or see what is being described?
Passage 3
Source: knitting, GIRLintheCAFE, Flickr
Sitting on the summer-night porch was so good, so easy and so reassuring that it could never be done away with. These were rituals that were right and lasting: the lighting of pipes, the pale hands that moved knitting needles in the darkness, the eating of foil-wrapped, chilled Eskimo Pies, the coming and going of all the people.
Which of the following phrases contains an image—something that makes you hear, taste, touch, smell, or see what is being described?
Passage 4
Source: Doug and Treble, Sydigill, Flickr
Oh, the luxury of lying in the fern night and the grass night and the night of susurrant, slumbrous voices weaving the dark together. The grownups had forgotten he was there, so still, so quiet Douglas lay, noting the plans they were making for his and their own futures.
Which of the following phrases contains an image—something that makes you hear, taste, touch, smell, or see what is being described?