Archetypes stem from the "Collective unconscious".
Category: Literary Devices
Schadenfreude
Thou Shalt Not! Besides our abundant egos, we humans also have a sufficient amount of envy, jealousy, and sadism coursing through our blood. Although most of us don’t set out to deliberately hurt anyone, we secretly take pleasure when someone we don’t like lands in a pickle. We may even rejoice, thereby practicing schadenfreude. It is …
Hubris
Hubris - When false belief sets in and reality slips away, when new money and sudden power settles over someone like a layer of thick dust and fogs their perceptions, when psychotic delusions and manic energy gushes through the veins, and when the line between virtue and vice diminishes. Alexander Pope sums up the impact …
Anaphora
The first crack in the wood sends shivers of excitement down the spine of the woodcutter. The periodic and consistent chopping thereafter yields a cadence that fills the inner ear with inexplicable pleasure. Humans have been notorious for not only desiring patterns in music and language but also for getting agitated when it is lacking. …
The Quintessential Narrator
Owen Flanagan of Duke University, a leading consciousness researcher, writes that "Evidence strongly suggests that humans in all cultures come to cast their own identity in some sort of narrative form. We are inveterate storytellers." Centuries ago, the written form changed the storytelling sandbox when the passed-down oral versions could be compiled into books, making …
Jeremy Bentham, Push Pin, and Poetry
The Founder of Utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham once said, " All poetry is misrepresentation." A pretty utilitarian concept, of course! He asserted that push-pin (a trivial but popular game of that time) is as good as poetry or that a push pin player is as good as a reader of poetry. Art, he maintained, was devoid of …
Strengthening your short stories by ‘Theory of Omission’ or ‘The Iceberg Theory’
Strengthening your short stories by 'Theory of Omission' or 'The Iceberg Theory'
Paraprosdokian: Politically Incorrect but …
PARAPROSDOKIAN SENTENCES - funny, witty, satirical, widely used. They may not be politically correct but one can get the desired effect at a gathering by uttering these brilliantly put-together phrases - total party pleasers! Paraprosdokian sentences generally start with a cliché but then pivot and surprise with their creative humor. Do you get my drift? …
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