In Chapter 5 of Literary Theory, Culler talked about the “rhetoric figures”, “genres”, “poetry as word and act”, “the extravagance of lyric”, “rhythmic words” and “interpreting the poems”. The rhetoric part left a deep impression on me. Culler introduced four rhetoric figures to us, which are metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony. In my opinion, some of these rhetoric techniques have actually been used in our daily life. Take irony as an example, imagine one lady coming out of a salon with a new hairstyle and it suddenly rained, ruining her new hairstyle. She said, “what a nice weather”. But actually, she was complaining. I think this is an example of how irony rhetoric technique is used in our life, which is a verbal way.

“A metaphor treats something as something else (calling George a donkey or my love a red, red rose).” (72) When I was reading “Diving into the Wreck”, I found that metaphor is the main rhetoric technique of this poem. The wreck represents women’s rights and social class, which is neglected in a male-neglected society. The wreck is in the deep see. The same is true of women’s rights. I found this metaphor technique is interesting because this poem tells a story of diving into the wreck, which makes people wonder what the wreck is, how the story goes and what message the poet wants to convey. Especially in the beginning of this poem, the poet introduced her equipment for the diving, which attracted the attention of readers and continued reading. In addition, this metaphor helps transfer the meaning of this poem vividly by a story form.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.