Reflection of the concept "memory" in literature

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1. The concept “memory” and stylistic devices as the objects of linguistic research

`Memory' labels a diverse set of cognitive capacities by which we retain information and reconstruct past experiences, usually for present purposes. Memory is one of the most important ways by which our histories animate our current actions and experiences. Most notably, the human ability to conjure up long-gone but specific episodes of our lives is both familiar and puzzling, and is a key aspect of personal identity. Memory seems to be a source of knowledge. We remember experiences and events which are not happening now, so memory differs from perception. We remember events which really happened, so memory is unlike pure imagination. Yet, in practice, there can be close interactions between remembering, perceiving, and imagining. Remembering is often suffused with emotion, and is closely involved in both extended affective states such as love and grief, and socially significant practices such as promising and commemorating. It is essential for much reasoning and decision-making, both individual and collective. It is connected in obscure ways with dreaming. Some memories are shaped by language, others by imagery. Much of our moral and social life depends on the peculiar ways in which we are embedded in time. Memory goes wrong in mundane and minor, or in dramatic and disastrous ways.

The Concept of Memory

At the end of an intricate treatment of remembering in chapter 9 of The Analysis of Mind, Bertrand Russell laments that “this analysis of memory is probably extremely faulty, but I do not know how to improve it” [1] In similar vein, one of Hume's editors complains that “the unsatisfactory nature of Hume's account of memory is noticed by nearly all his commentators. It is a fault however which he shares with nearly all other philosophers” [2]. Why is memory so hard to understand?

The answer, in part, is that the term labels a great variety of phenomena. I remember how to play chess and how to drive a car; I remember the date of Descartes' death; I remember playing in the snow as a child; I remember the taste and the pleasure of this morning's coffee; I remember to feed the cat every night. “Many very different things happen when we remember” [3]. Some philosophers take this heterogeneity as reason to be wary of any attempt to explain memory [4]. But subtleties of subjective memory experience need not be neglected or obliterated by careful theorizing: an explanatory framework which omitted the phenomenological and interpersonal diversity of memory would fail on its own terms.

This point is worth reiterating. In a letter to Mersenne, Descartes asks why “what makes one man want to dance may make another want to cry”: it may be, he suggests, that the second man has “never heard a galliard without some affliction befalling him”, so that he cries “because it evokes ideas in [his] memory” [5]. But this explanation does not distinguish between two possibilities about the second man's memory. He may simply find himself tearful, the music making him sad because of its previous coupling with affliction in his experience, although he remains unaware of this association. Alternatively, he may be well aware of the specific and tragic past occasions on which he has heard the galliard, perhaps being able to give detailed affective, temporal, and contextual information about those past experiences, and perhaps even to use this knowledge to work through the revived emotions.

Philosophers often focus on the latter kind of case, sometimes denying that the merely implicit learned association in the former case is a genuine form of memory at all. But the distinction between conscious, personal memory and the non-conscious ways in which we are influenced by the past does not drive a useful wedge between philosophy and the sciences. On the one hand, scientific psychology is not, either in principle or in practice, restricted to the study of implicit learning and the varieties of conditioning: indeed, the study of our rich, socially-embedded capacities to remember our personal experiences is at the heart of much current research. On the other hand, philosophers too want to understand the operations of habit memory, skill memory, and involuntary memory, and their implications for expanded notions of agency and identity.

C.B. Martin and Max Deutscher concluded an influential analysis of memory by stressing “the complex and partly theoretical nature of our commonplace notion of remembering” [7]. Ordinary usage hides a battery of different but related concepts of memory, which are now investigated by philosophers and psychologists alike, attending to conceptual distinctions and subjective experience in conjunction with functional and empirical concerns about the nature and the basis of memory processes and systems.

The Varieties of Remembering

A rough consensus has emerged among philosophers and psychologists around one promising, more-or-less unified terminology for the forms of long-term memory. Bergson and Russell distinguished `recollective memory' from `habit memory', while Broad and Furlong further distinguished recollective memory from `propositional memory'. This classification [8] is (roughly) consonant with more recent psychological terminology, used here for convenience in exposition. These varieties of remembering are marked by grammatical, phenomenological, and (on some views) psychological and neural differences. The ontological implications of such terminological distinctions are disputed: there are substantive disagreements about what's meant by the notion of a 'memory system', and about the utility of `systems' taxonomies [9]. Progress in understanding psychological kinds and systems more generally is required in order to settle these issues. The following general characterisations are accepted even by those who stress the interactive coordination of the various forms of remembering.

Philosophers' `habit memory' is, roughly, psychologists' `procedural memory'. These labels cover a range of phenomena, from simpler forms of associative learning through to kinesthetic, skill, and sequence memory. We naturally refer to procedural, habit, and skill memories with the grammatical construction `remembering how'. I continue to remember how to type, play piano, or dance, even when I am not, now, occurrently engaged in the relevant activity. While some habit memories may have something in common with rigid, inflexible, automated conditioning mechanisms, others are flexible and open to the changing influences of context, mood, and personal memory. But even richer, idiosyncratic memories for skills differ from other, more explicit forms of memory in their acquisition, nature, content, phenomenology, articulability, and patterns of breakdown. Alongside revived interest in the general problem of relations between knowing how and knowing that, the philosophy of kinesthetic memory and skilled movement can draw on applied fields including philosophy of sport, dance, and music [9]. `Propositional memory' is `semantic memory' or memory for facts, the vast network of conceptual information underlying our general knowledge of the world: this is naturally expressed as `remembering that', for example, that Descartes died in Sweden.

Recollective memory is `episodic memory', also sometimes called `personal memory', `experiential memory', or `direct memory' by philosophers: this is memory for experienced events and episodes, such as a conversation this morning or the death of a friend eight years ago. Episodic memories are naturally expressed with a direct object: I remember arguing about Descartes yesterday, and I remember my feelings as we talked. Such personal memories can be generic or specific, and can be memories of more or less extended temporal periods. But the most characteristic feature of episodic remembering, arguably, is the way it brings us into contact with the particular past events which such memories are about and by which they are caused.

Both semantic and episodic memories, whether linguistically expressed or not, usually aim at truth, and are together sometimes called `declarative memory', in contrast to nondeclarative forms of memory, which don't seem to represent the world or the past in the same sense. In declarative remembering, we seek to track the truth: this is why we are uneasy or dismayed when our take on the past is challenged or overturned. This contrast between declarative and nondeclarative memory is sometimes lined up with a more controversial distinction between `explicit' and `implicit' memory: explicit memories, roughly, can be accessed verbally or otherwise by the subject, whereas implicit memory is memory without awareness. But the category of implicit memory includes a range of heterogeneous phenomena, and it may be better to see `implicit memory' as a label for a set of memory tasks rather than a distinct variety or system of memory.

We sometimes use `remember' in its declarative senses as a `success-word', so that `false memories' are not `memories' at all. It's possible either to think that I remember when in fact I am imagining or confabulating, or to think that I am creating something quite new (such as a melody, painting, or story) when in fact I am remembering it.[10] Classification and explanation of the many varieties of false `memory' are also intriguing philosophical tasks [11]; and the attempt to understand and explain any features, both phenomenological and causal, which veridical remembering and (some cases of) imagining, confabulating, and misremembering might have in common is a legitimate part of the overall interdisciplinary enquiry into memory. The very idea of truth in memory, and the attendant possibility of error, implies that we are naturally realists about the past: but this fact about us doesn't dictate answers to questions about just how, or how often, we do remember the past truly.

Much 20th-century philosophical discussion of memory addressed its status as a source of knowledge, either in the context of general sceptical concerns about knowledge of the past, or in investigating criteria for the reliability of particular memory beliefs; and see the entry on epistemological problems of memory). But philosophers also have a special concern with the nature of human personal memory for episodes and experiences in the autobiographical past.

Memory and Causal Connectedness

For me to have a personal episodic memory, my present act of remembering must be causally connected in an appropriate way to the past experience being recollected. Even if it happens to be true that, as a child of four, I got lost in a shopping mall, we would deny that I personally remember the experience if I had completely forgotten it, and have only later been told about it by my parents, or had such a possibility suggested to me by a therapist or an experimental psychologist. Genuine episodic memories, then, causally depend in certain ways on the particular remembered experiences.

Martin and Deutscher , developing a causal theory of memory, argued that the past experience itself must have been causally operative in producing (intervening) states which are in turn causally operative in producing the present recollective experience. While some degree of prompting may be necessary to trigger my present recollection, this recollection of a past experience must also causally derive from states which themselves causally derive from that experience. What's surprising about this analysis is that it suggests that built in to common sense concepts of memory is a reliance on the existence of some kind of `memory trace' as a continuous bridge across the temporal gap, causally connecting past and present.

If we had no grasp of these kinds of causal connection in memory, it is arguable that our autobiographical narratives would not get off the ground. We are often aware, of course, of the selective and gappy nature of these narratives: but our ability sometimes to identify such gaps and errors in memory, some philosophers have argued, itself presupposes a conception of the causal connectedness of the self. John Campbell (1997), for example, posits conceptual connections between autobiographical memory, a grasp of time as linear, and a strong conception of the spatio-temporal continuity of the self. Children need to grasp that both world and self have a history for genuine autobiographical remembering to emerge. This suggests that a temporal asymmetry is built in to autobiographical memory, in that (again) we are inevitably realists about the past, conceiving of past events as being all, in principle, integratable on a single temporal sequence. Various principles of plot construction thus ground our ordinary memory practices: we assume, for example, that the remembered I has traced “a continuous spatio-temporal route through all the narratives of memory, a route continuous with the present and future location of the remembering subject”[12].

In autobiographical memory, we thus assign causal significance to specific events, so that our temporal orientation is by particular times rather than simply by rhythms or phases. Because we can grasp the temporal relations between different cycles or phases, we have a conception of the connectedness of time which gives us the concept of the past [12]. For Christoph Hoerl, this feature of our concept of time grounds our awareness of the singularity of events and especially of actions. We are thus “sensitive to the irrevocability of certain acts”, so that we, unlike other animals and (perhaps) some severely amnesic patients, incorporate a sense of the uniqueness and potential significance of particular choices and actions into our plans and our conceptions of how to live. There are potential connections here with moral psychology and studies of the specificity of autobiographical memory and emotion: many emotionally disturbed people, for example those suffering depression, tend to have overgeneral memories which summarize categories of events rather than retrieving a single episode.[13]

Transcultural memory: new directions of literary memory studies

Cultural memory is a theoretical perspective which links literary and media studies closely to interdisciplinary research in the humanities and social sciences. Memory studies is a broad convergence field, with contributions from cultural history, social psychology, media archaeology, political philosophy, and comparative literature. With the term ``cultural memory'' scholars describe all those processes of a biological, medial, or social nature which relate past and present (and future) in sociocultural contexts. Cultural memory entails remembering and forgetting. It has an individual and a collective side, which are, however, closely interrelated. There are many different ways of engaging in memory studies from the vantage point of literary and media studies. Some scholars are, for example, interested in the significance of ancient mnemotechnics (ars memoriae) for literature and art, others study from perspectives such as intertextuality as ``literature's memory'', canon formation as a way of defining cultural heritage, the relation of narrative, memory and identity, the role of media (such as photographs and movies) for remembering, orality and literacy as different modes of memory, or memory in the age of digital media. From this wealth of possible approaches, this chapter will very selectively present three topics which are currently much-discussed in interdisciplinary memory studies which simultaneously pertain to key areas of literary and media studies:

1. The representation of ``traumatic pasts'' in media such as literature and film.

This topic links memory research to Holocaust studies and the cultural history of war and violence. We encounter mediated ``traumatic'' memories in Holocaust writing, war movies, ``9/11''-novels, the poetry of World War I, and in the ways in which historical injustices and the violation of human rights are represented all over the globe (e.g. colonial wars,slavery in the U.S., South African Apartheid, or the Australian ``stolen generation''). The logic of individual and cultural trauma, narrative and other aesthetic forms used to represent memory, and the social functions of literature and film are some of the central questions memory studies has to deal with in this area of research.

2. The``afterlives'' of literature. The study of literary afterlives (which is reminiscent of Aby Warburg's research on art's afterlife) opens diachronic perspective. Stories appear, disappear, and reappear. Literary works are read, reread, and rewritten across decades and centuries. In the process they are constantly transformed and put to ever-new uses. Intertextuality, rewriting, intermediality and remediation are key concepts which describe the``social life'' of texts and other media in a mnemohistorical perspective.

3. Transnational and transcultural memory. Most recently, memory studies has begun to turn away from its prevailing methodological nationalism and become interested in forms of remembering across nations and cultures. A similar development can be observed in comparative literature and media studies, namely an increased interest in global media cultures, transcultural writing, world literature, and in the negotiation of colonialism and decolonization, migration, cultural globalization, and cosmopolitanism in literature and other media.

Literature and film can vividly portray individual and collective memory its contents, its workings, its fragility and its distortions by coding it into aesthetic forms, such as narrative structures, symbols, and metaphors. Fictional versions of memory are characterized by their dynamic relationship to memory concepts of other symbol systems, such as psychology, religion, history, and sociology: they are shaped by them and shape them in turn; they may perpetuate old or anticipate new images of remembering and forgetting. It is at least since the modernist writings of Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf that this close relationship of literature to social discourses of memory has become obvious. In ``memory novels ''such as Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925), ideas about the individual memory which had been circulating at the beginning of the twentieth century (e.g. Sigmund Freud's concept of the unconscious and Henri Bergson's memoire invoontaire) are staged with specifically literary forms, such as free indirect discourse and a complex time structure. Literary studies has shown how memory is represented in poetry, drama, and fiction.

Metaphors of memory, the narrative representation of consciousness, the literary production of mnemonic space and of subjective time are some of the key issues in literary studies' engagement with memory. From a narratological viewpoint, it is interesting to note that the distinction between an `` experiencing I'' and a ``narrating I'' already rests on a (largely implicit) concept of memory, namely on the idea that there is a difference between pre-narrative experience on the one hand, and, on the other, narrative memory which creates meaning retrospectively. The occupation with first-person narrators is thus always an occupation with the literary representation of individual remembering. Referring to these and other literary forms, and using Charles Dickens' David Copperfield (1850) as an example, Martin Lo schnigg subsumes under the term ``rhetoric of memory'' those narrative means with which the illusion of authentic autobiographical remembering is created. The possibilities and limits of literary representation are gauged when it comes to the memories of violent history, such as war, terror, and genocide. Recent studies, often comparative in their approach, have looked at the literary memory of the world wars, the experience of colonialism and decolonization, of authoritarian regimes, genocide, and of global terror. Nine Eleven can be conceived of as a global traumatic event. It has brought forth a large body of Anglophone writing which tries to give literary shape to its impact on cultural memory (e.g. the novels by Don De Lillo, Jonathan Safran Foer, Moshin Hamid, and Ian McEwan). It is, however, clearly the Holocaust which takes center stage in the project of conveying traumatic pasts through literature and other art forms. As in the mnemohistory of other events, we can distinguish between different generations and perspectives of writing about the Holocaust for example, survivors' testimonies (Primo Levi), writers of the second generation (Art Spiegelman), and various other forms of imaginative reconstruction (from Anita Desai to Ann Michaels) and ask how the memories of those who experienced the events first-hand are transmitted to their children and grandchildren (transgenerational memory) and to people not immediately involved in the events (prosthetic memory, see below). It is especially within American discussions that the notion of trauma as a ``crisis of representation'' has gained great prominence. This idea was introduced to literary studies in the framework of poststructuralist thinking, notably by Cathy Caruth's Unclaimed Experience. In a clear-sighted, critical survey of the expanding field of trauma studies, Ruth Leys identifies at its heart of the concern with the ``constitutive failure of linguistic representation in the post-Holocaust, post-Hiroshima, post-Vietnam era.'' In poststructuralist trauma discourse, ``the Holocaust is held to have precipitated, perhaps caused, an epistemological-ontological crisis of witnessing, a crisis manifested at the level of language itself.'' Such equations between the individual and the cultural, the biological and the linguistic levels, can be highly misleading and the ethical consequences of trauma studies' tendency to personify texts (i.e. to conflate literary works with real people) must be critically assessed. Media studies' approaches to memory are perhaps better suited to getting to grips with the question of how literature and film represent traumatic pasts and to what degree these ``pasts'' are always already mediated memories. Marita Sturken, for example, in Tangled Memories , studies how the Vietnam War and the AIDS epidemic were turned into elements of cultural memory by means of television, movies and other popular media. Sturken brings out the complex entanglements of memory and media in the social arena. She emphasizes the active and memory-productive role of media: ``Cultural memory is produced through objects, images, and representations.

These are technologies of memory, not vessels of memory in which memory passively resides''. Addressing the experiential dimension of mediated memory, Alison Landsberg introduced the notion of `` prosthetic memory''. Landsberg studies the age of mass culture, with a particular focus on the effects that representations of slavery and the Holocaust in literature, cinema and museum exhibits have on memory. She argues that what makes mass media so powerful in memory culture is that they allow us to `` take on'' other people's and groups' experiences and memories ``like an artificial limb''. For Landsberg, prosthetic memory has deeply ethical implications: it is characterized by its ``ability...to produce empathy and social responsibility as well as political alliances that transcend race, class, and gender.

THE ``AFTERLIVES'' OF LITERATURE

Approaches to the ``life'' and ongoing impact of literary stories and patterns address the basic process of memory in culture: that of continuation and actualization. In reconstructing the ``social life'' of a literary text we may ask how it was across long periods of time received, discussed, used, canonized, forgotten, censored, and re-used. What is it that confers upon some literary works, again and again, a new lease of life in changing social contexts whereas others are forgotten and relegated to the archive? These questions can be addressed from social, medial, and textual viewpoints and the phenomenon of literary afterlives will arguably be tackled best by a balanced combination of all three.

1. The social perspective emphasizes the active appropriations of a literary text by social actors. How do changing social formations with their specific views of history and present challenges, their interests and expectations, discourses and reading practices receive and reactualize literature? How do different generations respond in changing ways to the same literary work? The worldwide reception of Shakespeare, Bunyan or Milton across the centuries gives ample evidence of how different audiences de- and resemiotize literary works and how different readings may be related to transformations in society.

2. Looking at literary afterlives from a media culture-perspective means directing attention to the intermedial networks which maintain and sustain the continuing impact of certain stories: intertextual and intermedial references, rewriting and adaptation, forms of commentary and cross-reference. Using the concepts of premediation and remediation I have shown elsewhere how the narratives and iconic images of the ``Revolt of 1857'' (a colonial war in Northern India against British rule) were pre-formed by stories and images of similar earlier events (such as the ``Black Hole of Calcutta'' of 1756), then remediated in colonial and postcolonial contexts across the spectrum of available media technologies.

3. In a more text-centred perspective, we may ask if there are certain properties of literary works which make them more ``actualizable'' than others, which effect that the works lend themselves to rereading, rewriting, remediating, and continued discussion. For example, studying the long and rich afterlife of Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, Ann Rigney has shown that the novel's continuing appeal can be attributed to a combination of two (seemingly contradictory) characteristics of its plot: More than any other novel by Walter Scott, Ivanhoe is both highly schematic and highly ambivalent.

On the one hand, it offers a basic narrative paradigm that can be used as a model ``for dealing with other events''; on the other hand, it keeps readers puzzled and engaged by its `` de-stabilizing tension between the outcome of the story and its emotional economy''.

The ``afterlives-approach'' asks, in a diachronic perspective, about the continuing impact of literature, how it manages to ``live on'' and remain in use and meaningful to readers. It means addressing the complex social, textual and intermedial processes involved in this dynamics, and it therefore requires a sophisticated combination of

various approaches, some of which can boast a long tradition in literary studies: close textual and media analysis, the study of intermediality and intertextuality, the history of literary functions, and the social history of literature and art.[15]

2. Use of stylistic devices and expressive means in literary works

Lexical stylistic device is such type of denoting phenomena that serves to create additional expressive, evaluative, subjective connotations. In fact we deal with the intended substitution of the existing names approved by long usage and fixed in dictionaries, prompted by the speaker's subjective original view and evaluation of things. Each type of intended substitution results in a stylistic device called also a trope. This act of substitution is referred to transference - the name of one object is transferred onto another, proceeding from their similarity (of shape, color, function, etc.) or closeness (of material existence, cause/effect, instrument/result, part/whole relations, etc.).[2]

Lexical stylistic devices

Metaphor

The most frequently used, well known and elaborated among lexical stylistic devices is a metaphor - transference of names based on the associated likeness between two objects, as in the “pancake”, “ball” for the “sky” or “silver dust”, “sequins” for “stars”. So there exist a similarity based on one or more common semantic component.[4]

And the wider is the gap between the associated objects the more striking and unexpected - the more expressive - is the metaphor. If a metaphor involves likeness between inanimate and animate objects, we deal with personification, as in the “face of London” or “the pain of the ocean”. Metaphor, as all other lexical stylistic devices, is fresh, original, genuine when first used, and trite, hackneyed, stale when often repeated. In the latter case it gradually loses its expressiveness.

Metaphor can be expressed by all notional parts of speech. Metaphor functions in the sentence as any of its members. When the speaker (writer) in his desire to present an elaborated image does not limit its creation to a single metaphor but offers a group of them, this cluster is called sustained (prolonged) metaphor.

Simile

The intensification of some one feature of the concept in question is realized in a device called simile. Ordinary comparison and simile must not be confused. They represent two diverse processes. Comparison means weighing two objects belonging to one class of things with the purpose of establishing the degree of their sameness or difference. To use a simile is to characterize one object by bringing it into contact with an­other object belonging to an entirely different class of things. Comparison takes into consideration all the properties of the two objects, stressing the one that is compared. Simile excludes all the properties of the two ob­jects except one which is made common to them. "Maidens, like moths, are ever caught by glare" (Byron), we have a simile. 'Maidens' and 'moths' belong to heterogeneous classes of objects and Byron has found the concept moth to indicate one of the secondary fea­tures of the concept maiden, i.e. being easily lured. Of the two concepts brought together in the simile--one characterized (maidens), and the other characterizing (moths)--the feature intensified will be more inher­ent in the latter than in the former. Moreover, the object characterized is seen in quite a new and unexpected light, because the writer, as it were, imposes this feature on it.

Similes forcibly set one object against another regardless of the fact that they may be completely alien to each other. And without our being aware of it, the simile gives rise to a new understanding of the object characterizing as well as of the object characterized.

The properties of an object may be viewed from different angles, for example, its state, actions, manners, etc. Accordingly, similes may be based on adjective-attributes, adverb-modifiers, verb-predicates, etc.

Similes have formal elements in their structure: connective words such as like, as, such as, as if, seem. Here are some examples of similes taken from various sources and illustrating the variety of structural de­signs of this stylistic device.

The structure of this simile is interesting, for it is sustained. Let us analyse it. The word 'jerked' in the micro-context, i.e. in combination with 'thoughts' is a metaphor, which led to the simile 'like the misfirings of a defective carburettor' where the verb to jerk carries its direct logical meaning. So the linking notion is the movement jerking which brings to the author's mind a resemblance between the working of the man's brain and the badly working, i.e. misfiring, carburettor. In other words, it is action that is described by means of a simile. Another example:

"It was that moment of the year when the countryside seems to faint from its own loveliness, from the intoxication of its scents and sounds." (J. Galsworthy)

This is an example of a simile which is half a metaphor. If not for the structural word 'seems', we would call it a metaphor. Indeed, if we drop the word 'seems* and say, "the countryside faints from...," the clue-word 'faint' becomes a metaphor. But the word 'seems' keeps apart the notions of stillness and fainting. It is a simile where the second member--the human being--is only suggested by means of the concept faint.

The semantic nature of the simile-forming elements seem and as if is such that they only remotely suggest resemblance. Quite 'different are the connectives like and as. These are more categorical and establish quite straightforwardly the analogy between the two objects in question.

Sometimes the simile-forming like is placed at the end of the phrase almost merging with it and becoming half-suffix, for example:

"Emily Barton was very pink, very Dresden-china-shepherdess like."

In simple non-figurative language, it will assume the following form: "Emily Barton was very pink, and looked like a Dresden-china-shepherdess"

Similes may suggest analogies in the character of actions performed. In this case the two members of the structural design of the simile will resemble each other through the actions they perform. Thus:

"The Liberals have plunged for entry without considering its effects, while, the Labour leaders like cautious bathers have put a timorous toe info the water and promptly withdrawn it"

The simile in this passage from a newspaper article 'like cautious bathers' is based on the simultaneous realization of the two meanings of the word plunge. The primary meaning 'to throw oneself into the wa­ter'--prompted the figurative periphrasis 'have put a timorous toe into the water and promptly withdrawn it' standing for 'have abstained from taking action.'

In the English language there is a long list of hackneyed similes point­ing out the analogy between the various qualities, states or actions of a human being and the animals supposed to be the bearers of the given quality, etc,, for example: treacherous as a snake, sly as a fox, busy as a bee, industrious as an -ant, blind as a bat, faithful as a dog, to work like a horse, to be led like a sheep, to fly like a bird, to swim like a duck, stubborn as a mule, hungry as a bear, thirsty as a camel, to act like a puppy, playful as a kitten, vain (proud) as a peacock, slow as a tortoise and many others of the same type.

These combinations, however, have ceased to be genuine similes and have become cliches in which the second component has be­come merely an adverbial intensifier. Its logical meaning is only vaguely perceived.

Periphrasis

Periphrasis is a device which, according to Webster's diction­ary, denotes the use of a longer phrasing in place of a possible shorter and plainer form of expression. It is also called circumlocution due to the round-about or indirect way used to name a familiar object or phenomenon. Viewed from the angle of its linguistic nature, periphrasis represents the renaming of an object and as such may be considered along with a more general group of word designations replacing the direct na­mes of their denotata. One and the same object may be identified in different ways and accordingly acquire different appelations. Thus, in different situations a certain person can be denoted, for instance, as either 'his benefactor', or 'this bore', or 'the narrator', or 'the wretched witness', etc. These names will be his only in a short fragment of the dis­course, the criterion of their choice being furnished by the context. Such naming units may be called secondary, textually-confined designations and are generally composed of a word-combination.

This device has a long history. It was widely used in the Bible and in Homer's Iliad. As a poetic device it was very popular in Latin poetry (Virgil). Due to this influence it became an important feature of epic and descriptive poetry throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. It is due to this practice of re-naming things that periphrasis became one of the most favoured devices in the 17th and 18th centuries giving birth even to a special trend in literature in France and other countries called periphrastic. There exists in English a whole battery of phrases which are still used as periphrastic synonyms (see below) for ordinary denominations of things and phenomena.

As a SD, periphrasis aims at pointing to one of the seemingly insignif­icant or barely noticeable features or properties of the given object, and intensifies this property by naming the object by the property. Periphra­sis makes the reader perceive the new appellation against the background of the one existing in the language code and the twofold simultaneous perception secures the stylistic effect. At the same time periphrasis, like simile, has a certain cognitive function inasmuch as it deepens our know­ledge of the phenomenon described. The essence of the device is that it is decipherable only in context. If a periphrastic locution is understandable outside the context, it is not a stylistic device but merely a synonymous expression. Such easily decipherable periphrases are also called traditi­onal, dictionary or language periphrases. The others are speech periphra­ses. Here are some examples of well-known dictionary periphrases (peri­phrastic synonyms): the cap and gown (student body); a gentleman of the long robe (a lawyer); the fair sex (women); my better half (my wife).

Most periphrastic synonyms are strongly associated with the sphere of their application and the epoch they were used in. Feudalism, for example, gave birth to a cluster of periphrastic synonyms of the word king, as: the leader of hosts; the giver of rings; the protector of earls; the victor lord. A play of swords meant 'a battle'; a battle-seat was 'a saddle'; a shield-bearer was 'a warrior'.

Traditional, language or dictionary periphrases and the words they stand for are synonyms by nature, the periphrasis being expressed by a word-combination. Periphrasis as a stylistic device is a new, genuine nomination of an object, a process which realizes the power of language to coin new names for objects by disclosing some quality of the object, even though it may be transitory, and making it alone represent the ob­ject, Here are some such stylistic periphrases: "I understand you are poor, and wish to earn money by nursing the little boy,,niy son, who has been so prematurely deprived of what can never be replaced." (Dickens)

The object clause 'what can never be replaced' is a periphrasis for the word mother. The concept is easily understood by the reader within the given context, the latter being the only code which makes the deci­phering of the phrase possible. This is sufficiently proved by a simple trans­formational operation, viz. taking the phrase out of its context. The mean­ing of 'what can never be replaced' used independently will bear no refe­rence to the concept mother and may be interpreted in many ways. The periphrasis here expresses a very-individual idea of the concept.

In some cases periphrasis is regarded as a demerit and should have no place in good, precise writing. This kind of periphrasis is generally called circumlocution. Thus Richard Altick states that one of the ways of obscuring truth "...is the use of circumlocutions and euphe­misms."

A round-about way of speaking about common things sometimes has an unnecessarily bombastic, pompous air and consequently is devoid of any aesthetic value. That is why periphrasis has gained the reputation of lead­ing to redundancy of expression. Here is an example of the excessive use of periphrasis by such an outstanding classic English writer as Dickens:

"The lamp-lighter made his nightly failure in attempting to brighten up the street with gas (= lit the street lamps)."

The means supplied to enable the reader to decipher stylistic peri­phrasis are very subtle and have aesthetic value. In the following ex­ample the word of address is the key to the periphrasis:

"Papa, love. I am a mother. I have a child who will soon call Walter by the name by which I call you." (Dickens)

Genuine poetical periphrasis sometimes depicts the effect without mentioning the cause, gives particulars when having in view the general, points out one trait which will represent the whole. Stylistic periphrasis, it must be repeated, like almost all lexical stylistic means, must effici­ently and intentionally introduce a dichotomy, in this case the dichoto­my of two designations for one object or idea. If it fails to do so, there is no stylistic device, only a hackneyed phrase.

Periphrases, once original but now hackneyed, are often to be found in newspaper language. Mr. J. Donald Adams, who has written a number of articles and books on the use of English words in different contexts, says in one of his articles:

"We are all familiar with these examples of distended English, and I shall pause for only one, quoted by Theodore M. Bernstein, who as assistant managing editor of this newspaper acts as guardian over the English employed in its news columns. It appears in his recent book, "Watch Your Language", and reads "Improved finan­cial support and less onerous work loads." Translation (by Clifton Daniel): "High pay and less work.1' l

Stylistic periphrasis can also be divided into logical and / i g-u r a t i v e. Logical periphrasis is based on one of the inherent properties or perhaps a passing feature of the object described, as in instruments of destruction (Dickens) = 'pistols'; the most pardonable of human weaknesses (Dickens) --'love'; the object of his admiration (Dickens); that proportion of the population which... is yet able to read words of more than one syllable, and to read them without perceptible movement of the lips 'half-literate'.

Figurative periphrasis is based either on metaphor or on metonymy, the key-word of the collocation being the word used figuratively, as in 'the punctual servant of all work' (Dickens) -- 'the sun'; 'in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes' (Sh.akespeare) ='in misfortune'; 'to tie the knot' ='to marry'.

Euphemism

There is a variety of periphrasis which we shall call euphemistic.

Euphemism, as is known, is a word or phrase used to replace an unpleasant word or expression by a conventionally more acceptable one, for example, the word 'to die' has bred the following euphemisms: to pass away, to expire, to be no more, to depart, to join the majority, to be gone, and the more facetious ones: to kick the bucket, to give up the ghost, to go west. So euphemisms are synonyms which aim at producing a deliberately mild effect.

Euphemism is some­times figuratively called "a whitewashing device".. The linguistic peculi­arity of euphemism lies in the fact that every euphemism must call up a definite synonym in the mind of the reader or listener. This synonym, or dominant in a group of synonyms, as it is often called, must follow the euphemism like a shadow, as 'to possess a vivid imagination', or 'to tell stories' in the proper context will call up the unpleasant verb to lie. The euphemistic synonyms given above are part of the language-as-a-system. They have not been freshly invented. They are expressive means of the language and are to be found in all good dictionaries. They cannot be regarded as stylistic devices because they do not call to mind the key­word or dominant of the group; in other words, they refer the mind to the concept directly, not through the medium of another word. Compare these euphemisms with the following from Dickens's "Pickwick Papers": "They think we have come by this horse in some dishonest manner"

The italicized parts call forth the word 'steal' (have stolen it).

Euphemisms may be divided into several groups according to their spheres of application. The most recognized are the following: 1) religi­ous, 2) moral, 3) medical and 4) parliamentary.

The life of euphemisms is short. They very soon become closely as­sociated with the referent (the object named) and give way to a newly-coined word or combination of words, which, being the sign of a sign, throws another veil over an unpleasant or indelicate concept. Here is an interesting excerpt from an article on this subject.

The evolution over the years of a civilized mental health service has been marked by periodic changes in terminology. The madhouse became the lunatic asylum; the asylum made way for the mental hospital--even if the building remained the same. Idiots, imbeciles and the feeble-minded became low, medium and high-grade mental defectives. All are now to be lumped together as patients of severely subnormal personality. The insane became per­sons of unsound mind, and are now to be mentally-ill patients. As each phrase develops the stigmata of popular prejudice, it is aban­doned in favour of another, sometimes less precise than the old. Unimportant in themselves, these changes of name are the sign­posts of progress."

Albert C. Baugh gives another instance of such changes:

"...the common word for a woman's undergarment down to the eighteenth century was 'smock'. It was then replaced by the more delicate word 'shift'® In the nineteenth century the same motive led to the substitution of the word 'chemise' and in the twentieth this has been replaced by 'combinations', 'step-ins', and other euphemisms," 2

Today we have a number of words denoting similar garments, as 'briefs', and others.

Conventional euphemisms--employed in conformity to social usages are best illustrated by the parliamentary codes of expression. In an article headed "In Commons, a Lie is Inexactitude" written by James Fe-ron in The New York Times, we may find a number of words that are not to be used in Parliamentary debate. "When Sir Winston Churchill, some years ago," writes Feron, "termed a parliamentary opponent a 'purveyor of terminological inexactitudes',.every one in the chamber knew he meant 'liar'. Sir Winston hacT been ordered by the Speaker to withdraw a strong­er epithet. So he used the euphemism, which became famous and is still used in the Commons. It conveyed the insult without sounding offensive, and it satisfied the Speaker.

As has already been explained, genuine euphemism must call up the word it stands for. It is always the result of some deliberate clash between two synonyms. If a euphemism fails to carry along with it the word it is intended to replace, it is not a euphemism, but a deliberate veiling of the truth. Here is another good example of euphemistic phrases used by Gals­worthy in his "Silver Spoon."

"In private I should merely call him a liar. In the Press you should use the words: 'Reckless disregard for truth1 and in Parli­ament--that you regret he 'should have been so misinformed.''

Periphrastic and euphemistic expressions were characteristic of cer­tain literary trends and even produced a term periphrastic style. But it soon gave way to a more straightforward way of describing things.

"The veiled forms of expression," writes G. H. McKnight, "which served when one was unwilling to look facts in the face have been succeeded by naked expressions exhibiting reality."1

Hyperbole

Another SD which also has the function of intensifying one certain property of the object described is h ó p e r b î I e. It can be defined as a deliberate overstatement or exaggeration of a feature essential (unlike periphrasis) to the object or phenomenon. In its extreme form this exagge­ration is carried to an illogical degree, sometimes ad absurdum. For example:

"He was so tall that I was not sure he had a face." (O. Henry) or, "Those three words (Dombey and Son) conveyed the one idea of Mr. Dombey's life. The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in and the sun and moon were made to give them light. Riv­ers and seas were formed to float their ships; rainbows gave them promise of fair weather; winds blew for or against their enterprises; and planets circled in their orbits to preserve inviolate a sys­tem of which they were the centre." (Dickens)

In order to depict the width of the river Dnieper Gogol uses the follow­ing hyperbole:

"It's a rare bird that can fly to the middle of the Dnieper."

Like many stylistic.devices, hyperbole may lose its quality as a sty­listic device through frequent repetition and become a unit of the lan-guage-as-a-system, reproduced -in speech in its unaltered form. Here are some examples of language hyperbole:

*A thousand pardons'; 'scared to death\ 'immensely obliged;' 'I'd give the world to see him.'

Hyperbole differs from mere exaggeration in that it is intended to be understood as an exaggeration. In this connection the following quo­tations deserve a passing note:

"Hyperbole is the result of a kind of intoxication by emotion, which prevents a person from seeing things in their true dimen­sions... If the reader (listener) is not carried away by the emotion of the writer (speaker), hyperbole becomes a mere lie." *

V. V. Vinogradov, developing Gorki's statement that "genuine art enjoys the right to exaggerate," states that hyperbole is the law of art which brings the existing phenomena of life, diffused as they are, to the point of maximum clarity and conciseness.2

Hyperbole is a device which sharpens the reader's ability to make a logical assessment of the utterance. This is achieved, as is the case with other devices, by awakening the dichotomy of thought and feeling where thought takes the upper hand though not to the detriment of feeling.

Metonymy

Another lexical stylistic device - metonymy is created by a different semantic process. It is based on contiguity (nearness) of objects. Transference of names in metonymy does not involve a necessity for two different words to have a common component in their semantic structures as is the case with metaphor but proceeds from the fact that two objects (phenomena) have common grounds of existence in reality. Such words as “cup” and “tea” have no semantic nearness, but the first one may serve the container of the second, hence - the conversational clichés “Will you have another cup?”.[3,51]

Metonymy as all other lexical stylistic devices loses its originality due to long use. The scope of transference in metonymy is much more limited than that of metaphor, which is quite understandable: the scope of human imagination identifying two objects (phenomena, actions) on the grounds of commonness of their innumerable characteristics is boundless while actual relations between objects are more limited. One type of metonymy - namely the one, which is based on the relations between the part and the whole - is often viewed independently as synecdoche.