Allusion
Allusion is a figure of speech, in which an object or circumstance from unrelated context is referred to covertly or indirectly. It is left to the audience to make the direct connection. Where the connection is directly and explicitly stated by the author, it is instead termed a reference. In the arts, a literary allusion puts the alluded text in a new context under which it assumes new meanings and denotations, it is not possible to predetermine the nature of all the new meanings and inter-textual patterns that an allusion will generate. Literary allusion is related to parody and pastiche, which are "text-linking" literary devices. In a wider, more informal context, an allusion is a passing or casually short statement indicating broader meaning, it is an incidental mention of something, either directly or by implication, such as "In the stock market, he met his Waterloo." In the most traditional sense, allusion is a literary term, though the word has come to encompass indirect references to any source, including allusions in film or the visual arts.
In literature, allusions are used to link concepts that the reader has knowledge of, with concepts discussed in the story. In the field of film criticism, a film-maker's intentionally unspoken visual reference to another film is called an homage, it may be sensed that real events have allusive overtones, when a previous event is inescapably recalled by a current one. "Allusion is bound up with a vital and perennial topic in literary theory, the place of authorial intention in interpretation", William Irwin observed, in asking "What is an allusion?"Without the hearer or reader's comprehending the author's intention, an allusion becomes a decorative device. Allusion is an economical device, a figure of speech that uses a short space to draw upon the ready stock of ideas, cultural memes or emotion associated with a topic. Thus, an allusion is understandable only to those with prior knowledge of the covert reference in question, a mark of their cultural literacy; the origin of allusion is in the Latin verb ludere, lusus est "to play with, jest."
Recognizing the point of allusion's condensed riddle reinforces cultural solidarity between the maker of the allusion and the hearer: their shared familiarity with allusion bonds them. Ted Cohen finds such a "cultivation of intimacy" to be an essential element of many jokes; some aspect of the referent must be identified for the tacit association to be made. Addressing such issues is an aspect of hermeneutics. William Irwin remarks that allusion moves in only one direction: "If A alludes to B B does not allude to A; the Bible does not allude to Shakespeare, though Shakespeare may allude to the Bible." Irwin appends a note: "Only a divine author, outside of time, would seem capable of alluding to a text." This is the basis for Christian readings of Old Testament prophecy, which asserts that passages are to be read as allusions to future events due to Jesus's revelation in Luke 24:25-27. Allusion differs from the similar term intertextuality in that it is an intentional effort on the author's part.
The success of an allusion depends in part on at least some of its audience "getting" it. Allusions may be made obscure, until at last they are understood by the author alone, who thereby retreats into a private language. In discussing the richly allusive poetry of Virgil's Georgics, R. F. Thomas distinguished six categories of allusive reference, which are applicable to a wider cultural sphere; these types are: Casual Reference, "the use of language which recalls a specific antecedent, but only in a general sense", unimportant to the new context. A type of literature has grown round explorations of the allusions in such works as Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock or T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. In Homer, brief allusions could be made to mythic themes of generations previous to the main narrative because they were familiar to the epic's hearers: one example is the theme of the Calydonian boarhunt. In Hellenistic Alexandria, literary culture and a fixed literary canon known to readers and hearers made a densely allusive poetry effective.
Martin Luther King, Jr. alluded to the Gettysburg Address in starting his "I Have a Dream" speech by saying'Five score years ago...". King's allusion called up parallels in two historic moments without overwhelming his speech with details. A sobriquet is an allusion. By metonymy one aspect of a p
Invocation
An invocation may take the form of: Supplication, prayer or spell. A form of possession. Command or conjuration. Self-identification with certain spirits; these forms are not mutually exclusive. See Theurgy; as a supplication or prayer it implies to call upon a god, goddess, or person, etc.. When a person calls upon God, a god, or goddess to ask for something or for worship, this can be done in a pre-established form or with the invoker's own words or actions. An example of a pre-established text for an invocation is the Lord's Prayer. All religions in general use invoking liturgies, or hymns. An invocation can be a secular alternative to a prayer. On August 30, 2012, Dan Nerren, a member of the Humanist Association of Tulsa, delivered a secular invocation to open a meeting of the City Council of Tulsa. Nerren was invited to perform the invocation as a compromise following a long-running dispute with the City Council over prayers opening meetings; the invocation was written by Andrew Lovley, a member of the Southern Maine Association of Secular Humanists who had used the invocation in 2009 to invoke an inauguration ceremony for new city officials in South Portland, Maine.
In this usage, it is comparable to an affirmation as an alternative for those who conscientiously object to taking oaths of any kind, be it for reasons of belief or non-belief. The word "possession" is used here in its neutral form to mean "a state in which an individual's normal personality is replaced by another"; this is sometimes known as'aspecting'. This can be done as a means of communicating with or getting closer to a deity or spirit, as such need not be viewed synonymously with demonic possession. In some religious traditions including Paganism and Wicca, "invocation" means to draw a spirit or Spirit force into one's own body and is differentiated from "evocation", which involves asking a spirit or force to become present at a given location. Again, Aleister Crowley states that To "invoke" is to "call in", just as to "evoke" is to "call forth"; this is the essential difference between the two branches of Magick. In invocation, the macrocosm floods the consciousness. In evocation, the magician, having become the macrocosm, creates a microcosm.
Possessive invocation may be attempted singly or, as is the case in Wicca, in pairs - with one person doing the invocation, the other person being invoked. The person invoked may be moved to speak or act in non-characteristic ways, acting as the deity or spirit. A communication might be given via imagery, they may be led to recite a text in the manner of that deity, in which case the invocation is more akin to ritual drama. The Wiccan Charge of the Goddess is an example of such a pre-established recitation. See the ritual of Drawing Down the Moon; the ecstatic, possessory form of invocation may be compared to loa possession in the Vodou tradition where devotees are described as being "ridden" or "mounted" by the deity or spirit. In 1995 National Geographic journalist Carol Beckwith described events she had witnessed during Vodoun possessions: A woman splashed sand into her eyes, a man cut his belly with shards of glass but did not bleed, another swallowed fire. Nearby a believer a yam farmer or fisherman, heated hand-wrought knives in crackling flames.
Another man brought one of the knives to his tongue. We cringed at the sight and were dumbfounded when, after several repetitions, his tongue had not reddened. Possessive invocation has been described in certain Norse rites where Odin is invoked to "ride" workers of seidr, much like the god rides his eight-legged horse Sleipnir. Indeed, forms of possessive invocation appear throughout the world in most mystical or ecstatic traditions, wherever devotees seek to touch upon the essence of a deity or spirit; some have performed invocation for the purpose of controlling or extracting favors from certain spirits or deities. These invocations involve a commandment or threat against the entity invoked; the following is a curious example of such an invocation, found engraved in cuneiform on a statue of the Assyrian demon Pazuzu. Although it seems to constitute an identification with the demon, it was considered a protective amulet with the power to command this entity not to harm people or their possessions.
I am Pazuzu, son of the king of the evil spirits, that one who descends impetuously from the mountains and bring the storms. That is the one. Another example is found in the book Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches during the Conjuration of Diana, where the goddess is evoked into a piece of bread and threatened to grant a wish: Invocation can refer to taking on the qualities of the being invoked, such as the allure of Aphrodite or the ferocity of Kali. In this instance the being is called up from within oneself or into oneself, depending on the personal belief system of the invoker; the main difference between this type of invocation and the possessive category described above is that the former may appear more controlled, with self-identification and deity-identification mixed tog
Italian Renaissance
The Italian Renaissance was a period of Italian history that began in the 14th century and lasted until the 17th century. It peaked during the 15th and 16th centuries, spreading across Europe and marking the transition from the Middle Ages to Modernity; the French word renaissance means "Rebirth" and defines the period as one of cultural revival and renewed interest in classical antiquity after the centuries labeled the Dark Ages by Renaissance humanists. The Renaissance author Giorgio Vasari used the term "Rebirth" in his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters and Architects but the concept became widespread only in the 19th century, after the works of scholars such as Jules Michelet and Jacob Burckhardt; the Renaissance began in Tuscany, was centred in the city of Florence. Florence, one of the several city-states of the peninsula, rose to economic prominence by providing credit for European monarchs and laying down the groundwork for capitalism and banking; the Renaissance spread to Venice, heart of a mediterranean empire and in control of the trade routes with the east since the participation in the crusades and the voyages of Marco Polo, where the remains of ancient Greek culture were brought together and provided humanist scholars with new texts.
The Renaissance had a significant effect on the Papal States and Rome rebuilt by Humanist and Renaissance popes, who were involved in Italian politics, in arbitrating disputes between competing colonial powers and in opposing the Reformation. The Italian Renaissance is best known for its achievements in painting, sculpture, music, philosophy and exploration. Italy became the recognized European leader in all these areas by the late 15th century, during the Peace of Lodi agreed between Italian states; the Italian Renaissance peaked in the mid-16th century as domestic disputes and foreign invasions plunged the region into the turmoil of the Italian Wars. However, the ideas and ideals of the Italian Renaissance endured and spread into the rest of Europe, setting off the Northern Renaissance. Italian explorers from the maritime republics served under the auspices of European monarchs, ushering the Age of discovery; the most famous among them are Christopher Columbus who sailed for Spain, Giovanni da Verrazzano for France, Amerigo Vespucci for Portugal, John Cabot for England.
Italian scientists such as Falloppio, Galileo, played a key role in the scientific revolution and foreigners such as Copernicus and Vesalius worked in Italian universities. Various events and dates of the 17th century, such as the conclusion of the European Wars of Religion in 1648, have been proposed for the end of the Renaissance. Accounts of Renaissance literature begin with the three great poets of the 14th century: Dante Alighieri and Boccaccio. Famous vernacular poets of the Renaissance include the renaissance epic authors Luigi Pulci, Matteo Maria Boiardo, Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso. 15th-century writers such as the poet Poliziano and the Platonist philosopher Marsilio Ficino made extensive translations from both Latin and Greek. In the early 16th century, Castiglione laid out his vision of the ideal gentleman and lady in The Book of the Courtier, while Machiavelli cast a jaundiced eye on "la verità effettuale della cosa"—the actual truth of things—in The Prince, composed, in humanistic style, chiefly of parallel ancient and modern examples of Virtù.
Historians of the period include Machiavelli himself, his friend and critic Francesco Guicciardini and Giovanni Botero. The Aldine Press, founded by the printer Aldo Manuzio, active in Venice, developed Italic type and portable printed books that could be carried in one's pocket, as well as being the first to publish editions of books in Ancient Greek. Venice became the birthplace of the Commedia dell'Arte. Italian Renaissance art exercised a dominant influence on subsequent European painting and sculpture for centuries afterwards, with artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Giotto di Bondone, Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesca, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Perugino and Titian; the same is true for architecture, as practiced by Brunelleschi, Leon Battista Alberti, Andrea Palladio, Bramante. Their works include, to name only a few, the Florence Cathedral, St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini, as well as several private residences; the musical era of the Italian Renaissance was defined by the Roman School and by the Venetian School and the birth of Opera in Florence.
In philosophy, thinkers such as Galileo, Giordano Bruno and Pico della Mirandola, emphasized naturalism and humanism, thus rejecting dogma and scholasticism. By the Late Middle Ages, the former heartland of the Roman Empire, southern Italy were poorer than the North. Rome was a city of ancient ruins, the Papal States were loosely administered, vulnerable to external interference such as that of France, Spain; the Papacy was affronted when the Avignon Papacy was created in southern France as a consequence of pressure from King Philip the Fair of France. In the south, Sicily had for some time been under foreign domination, by the Arabs and the Normans. Sicily had prospered for 150 years during the Emirate of Sicily and for two centuries during the Norman Kingdom and the Hohenstaufen Kingdom, but had declined by the late
Commedia dell'arte
Commedia dell'arte was an early form of professional theatre, originating from Italy, popular in Europe from the 16th to the 18th century. Commedia dell'arte is known as commedia alla maschera, commedia improvviso, commedia dell'arte all'improvviso. Commedia is a form of theatre characterized by masked "types" which began in Italy in the 16th century and was responsible for the advent of actresses and improvised performances based on sketches or scenarios. A commedia, such as The Tooth Puller, is both improvised. Characters' entrances and exits are scripted. A special characteristic of commedia dell'arte are the lazzi. A lazzo is a joke or "something foolish or witty" well known to the performers and to some extent a scripted routine. Another characteristic of commedia dell'arte is pantomime, used by the character Arlecchino; the characters of the commedia represent fixed social types and stock characters, such as foolish old men, devious servants, or military officers full of false bravado. The characters are exaggerated "real characters", such as a know-it-all doctor called Il Dottore, a greedy old man called Pantalone, or a perfect relationship like the Innamorati.
Many troupes were formed to perform commedia dell'arte, including I Gelosi, Confidenti Troupe, Desioi Troupe, Fedeli Troupe. Commedia dell'arte was performed outside on platforms or in popular areas such as a piazza; the form of theatre originated in Italy, but travelled throughout Europe and to Moscow. The commedia genesis may be related to carnival in Venice, where by 1570 the author/actor Andrea Calmo had created the character Il Magnifico, the precursor to the vecchio Pantalone. In the Flaminio Scala scenario for example, Il Magnifico persists and is interchangeable with Pantalone, into the seventeenth century. While Calmo's characters were not masked, it is uncertain at what point the characters donned the mask. However, the connection to carnival would suggest that masking was a convention of carnival and was applied at some point; the tradition in Northern Italy is centered in Mantua and Venice, where the major companies came under the aegis of the various dukes. Concomitantly, a Neapolitan tradition emerged in the south and featured the prominent stage figure Pulcinella.
Pulcinella has been long associated with Naples, derived into various types elsewhere—the most famous as the puppet character Punch in England. Although commedia dell'arte flourished in Italy during the Mannerist period, there has been a long-standing tradition of trying to establish historical antecedents in antiquity. While it is possible to detect formal similarities between the commedia dell'arte and earlier theatrical traditions, there is no way to establish certainty of origin; some date the origins to the period of the Empire. The Atellan Farces of the Roman Empire featured crude "types" wearing masks with grossly exaggerated features and an improvised plot; some historians argue that Atellan stock characters, Maccus+Buccus, Manducus, are the primitive versions of the Commedia characters Pantalone, il Capitano. More recent accounts establish links to the medieval jongleurs, prototypes from medieval moralities, such as Hellequin; the first recorded commedia dell'arte performances came from Rome as early as 1551.
Commedia dell'arte was performed outdoors in temporary venues by professional actors who were costumed and masked, as opposed to commedia erudita, which were written comedies, presented indoors by untrained and unmasked actors. This view may be somewhat romanticized since records describe the Gelosi performing Tasso's Aminta, for example, much was done at court rather than in the street. By the mid-16th century, specific troupes of commedia performers began to coalesce, by 1568 the Gelosi became a distinct company. In keeping with the tradition of the Italian Academies, I Gelosi adopted as their impress the two-faced Roman god Janus. Janus symbolized both the comings and goings of this traveling troupe, the dual nature of the actor who impersonates the "other." The Gelosi performed in Northern Italy and France where they received protection and patronage from the King of France. Despite fluctuations the Gelosi maintained stability for performances with the "usual ten": "two vecchi, four innamorati, two zanni, a captain and a servetta".
It should be noted that commedia performed inside in court theatres or halls, as some fixed theatres such as Teatro Baldrucca in Florence. Flaminio Scala, a minor performer in the Gelosi published the scenarios of the commedia dell'arte around the start of the 17th century in an effort to legitimize the form—and ensure its legacy; these scenari are structured and built around the symmetry of the various types in duet: two zanni, vecchi and inamorati, etc. In commedia dell'arte, female roles were played by women, documented as early as the 1560s. In the 1570s, English theatre critics denigrated the troupes with their female actors. By the end of the 1570s, Italian prelates attempted to ban female performers. T
Alliteration
In literature, alliteration is the conspicuous repetition of identical initial consonant sounds in successive or associated syllables within a group of words those spelled differently. As a method of linking words for effect, alliteration is called head rhyme or initial rhyme. For example, "humble house," or "potential power play." A familiar example is "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers". "Alliteration" is from the Latin word littera, meaning "letter of the alphabet". Some literary experts accept as alliteration the repetition of vowel sounds, or repetition at the end of words. Alliteration narrowly refers to the repetition of a letter in any syllables that, according to the poem's meter, are stressed, as in James Thomson's verse "Come…dragging the lazy languid line along". Consonance is a broader literary device identified by the repetition of consonant sounds at any point in a word. Alliteration is a special case of consonance where the repeated consonant sound is in the stressed syllable.
Alliteration may refer to the use of different but similar consonants, such as alliterating z with s, as does the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or as Anglo-Saxon poets would alliterate hard/fricative g with soft g. There is one specialised form of alliteration called Symmetrical Alliteration; that alliteration containing parallelism, or chiasmus. In this case, the phrase must have a pair of outside end words both starting with the same sound, pairs of outside words starting with matching sounds as one moves progressively closer to the centre. For example, "rust brown blazers rule" or "fluoro colour co-ordination forever". Symmetrical alliteration is similar to palindromes in its use of symmetry; the Raven by Edgar Allan Poe has many examples of alliteration, including the following line: "And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain". Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner has the following lines of alliteration: "The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew/ The furrow followed free".
Robert Frost's poem Acquainted with the Night has the following line of alliteration: "I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet". The Lake Isle of Innisfree by W. B. Yeats has the following line of alliteration: "I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore". William Shakespeare's play As You Like It has the following lines of alliteration: "And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind/ Which, when it bites and blows upon my body". In Walter Abish's novel Alphabetical Africa the first chapter consists of words beginning with "A". Chapter two permits words beginning with "B", so on, until in chapter 26, Abish allows himself to use words beginning with any letter at all. In the next 25 chapters, he reverses the process. Kalevala: The Karelian-Finnish a national epoch book Kalevala written by Elias Lönnrot in the 1800s contains alliteration in the Eastern Finnish Karelian dialect, for example "Vaka vanha Väinämöinen", "Steady old Wainamoinen". In "Thank-You for the Thistle" by Dorie Thurston, poetically written with alliteration in a story form: "Great Aunt Nellie and Brent Bernard who watch with wild wonder at the wide window as the beautiful birds begin to bite into the bountiful birdseed".
In the nursery rhyme Three Grey Geese by Mother Goose, alliteration can be found in the following lines: "Three grey geese in a green field grazing. Grey were the geese and green was the grazing." The tongue-twister rhyme Betty Botter by Carolyn Wells is an example of alliterative composition: "Betty Botter bought a bit of butter, but she said, this butter's bitter. Another recited tongue-twister rhyme illustrating alliteration is Peter Piper: "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, where's the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?". Alliteration is used in the alliterative verse of Old English, Old Norse, Old High German, Old Saxon, Old Irish, it was an important ingredient of the Sanskrit shlokas. Alliteration was used in Old English given names; this is evidenced by the unbroken series of 9th century kings of Wessex named Æthelwulf, Æthelbald, Æthelberht, Æthelred. These were followed in the 10th century by their direct descendants Æthelstan and Æthelred II, who ruled as kings of England.
The Anglo-Saxon saints Tancred and Tova provide a similar example, among siblings. In relation to English poetry, poets can call attention to certain words in a line of poetry by using alliteration, they can use alliteration to create a pleasant, rhythmic effect. In the following poetic lines, notice how alliteration is used to emphasize words and to create rhythm: "Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling!' Walt Whitman, "Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun" “They all gazed and gazed upon this green stranger,/because everyone wondered what it could mean/ that a rider and his horse could be such a colour-/ green as grass, greener it seemed/ than green enamel glowing bright against gold". Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by Bernard O'Donoghue "Some papers like writers, some like wrappers. Are you a writer or a wrapper?" Carl Sandburg, "Paper I" Alliteration can add to the mood of a poem. If a poet repeats soft, melodious sounds, a calm or dignified mood can result.
If harsh
Interrogation
Interrogation is interviewing as employed by law enforcement officers, military personnel, intelligence agencies with the goal of eliciting useful information. Interrogation may involve a diverse array of techniques, ranging from developing a rapport with the subject to outright torture. There are multiple techniques employed in interrogation including deception, increasing suggestibility, the use of mind-altering drugs. A person's suggestibility is how willing they are to act on suggestions by others. Interrogators seek to increase a subject's suggestibility. Methods used to increase suggestibility may include moderate sleep deprivation, exposure to constant white noise, using GABAergic drugs such as sodium amytal or sodium thiopental. Attempting to increase a subject's suggestibility through these methods may violate local and national laws concerning the treatment of detainees, in some areas may be considered torture. Sleep deprivation, exposure to white noise, the use of drugs may inhibit a detainee's ability to provide truthful and accurate information.
Deception can form an important part of effective interrogation. In the United States, there is no law or regulation that forbids the interrogator from lying about the strength of their case, from making misleading statements or from implying that the interviewee has been implicated in the crime by someone else. See case law on trickery and deception; as noted above, traditionally the issue of deception is considered from the perspective of the interrogator engaging in deception towards the individual being interrogated. Work completed regarding effective interview methods used to gather information from individuals who score in the medium to high range on measures of psychopathology and are engaged in deception directed towards the interrogator have appeared in the literature; the importance of allowing the psychopathic interviewee to tell one lie after another and not confront until all of the lies have been presented is essential when the goal is to use the interview to expose the improbable statements made during the interview in future court proceedings.
The major aim of this technique is to investigate to what extent verbal and non-verbal features of liars’ and truth-tellers’ behaviour change during the course of repeated interrogations. It has shown that liars display fewer smiles, self-manipulations and less gaze aversion than truth-tellers. According to Granhag & Strömwall, there are three approaches to non-verbal deceptive behavior; the first is the emotional approach, which suggests that liars will alter their behaviors based on their own emotional feelings. For example, if a subject is lying and they begin to experience guilt, they will shift their gaze; the second approach is the cognitive approach, which suggests that lying requires more thought than telling the truth, which in turn, may result in a liar making more errors in speech. Lastly, the attempted control approach suggests a subject, lying will attempt to be normal or honest, will try to adjust their behaviors to make themselves believable. A common technique, used in interrogation is Good Cop/Bad Cop.
With this technique, two officers will pretend to take opposing sides while interacting with a subject. While the ‘bad cop’ is against the subject, the'good cop' seems to take the side of the subject, sympathizing with and defending the subject; the purpose of this technique is to have the subject think that he or she can confide in the ‘good cop,’ thus providing him or her with information that may help further the case. There are two pride-and-ego techniques used in interrogation. One is the pride-and-ego up approach; the pride-and-ego up approach involves seeking information from a subject through the use of constant flattery and compliments. As the subject is being continuously praised, the interrogator hopes that through speaking of the subject in a positive light, he or she will provide the necessary information. On the contrary, the pride-and-ego-down approach occurs when the interrogator demeans and insults the subject, with the intent of having the subject provide information; the interrogator will verbally/emotionally abuse the subject, hoping that the subject will attempt to salvage his or her sense of pride or self-worth.
The Reid Technique is a trademarked interrogation technique used by law enforcement agencies in North America. The technique has been criticized for being difficult to apply across cultures and eliciting false confessions from innocent people; the use of drugs in interrogation is both illegal. The Body of Principles for the Protection of All Persons under Any Form of Detention or Imprisonment forbids "methods of interrogation which impair the capacity of decision of judgment." Furthermore, the World Medical Association and American Medical Association, for example, both forbid participation by physicians in interrogations. In the past, various mind-altering substances have been tried as "truth serums", including sodium pentothal, sodium amytal, scopolamine. In the context of Project MKUltra, the CIA conducted trials on LSD as a potential truth serum, beginning in the 1950s; the history of the state use of torture in interrogations extends over more than 2,000 years in Europe—though it was recognized early on as the Roman imperial jurist Ulpian in the third century AD cautioned, that information extracted under duress was deceptive and untrustworthy.
There is "no means of obtaining the truth" from tho
Conceit
In modern literary criticism, more common with genre fiction, conceit means an extended rhetorical device, summed up in a short phrase, that refers to a situation which either does not exist, or exists but is needed for the plot. "Faster than light travel" and "superior alien science" are examples from science fiction. The word conceit was coined in the context of poetry, deriving from the root concept, conceive, it has subsequently been extended to other forms of literature, the performing arts, painting and architecture. The term conceit can derogatorily. In the positive sense, a conceit referred to an extended metaphor with a complex logic that governs a poetic passage or entire poem. By juxtaposing images and ideas in surprising ways, a conceit invites or challenges the reader to discover a more sophisticated understanding of an object of comparison. Conceits in English are part of the poetic idiom of Mannerism, during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century; this has been extended to describe presentation of any material whose creator uses one or more techniques to induce a desired effect on the reader or viewer, such as setting a mood.
In movie-making, examples include deliberately filming in black and white, emphasizing shadows, using panoramic views or employing extended zoom for a scene. In a derogatory sense, "conceit" refers to an excessively elaborate, contrived or unconvincing approach to the material being presented, such as a fundamentally flawed idea, preposterous plot device, or pretentious dialog or phrasing. Again, this was applied to poetry that someone disliked, the areas of application broadened. An example of derogatory use is in the title of economist Friedrich Hayek's book, "The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism" In modern writing, the word "conceit", when used by itself without preceding adjectives, tends to be used more as criticism than as praise; such use is common when writing for a broad audience rather than specialists in poetry or literary criticism. Which sense is intended, must be inferred from the overall content and tone of the passage containing the phrase. In English literature the term is associated with the 17th century metaphysical poets, an extension of contemporary usage.
The metaphysical conceit differs from an extended analogy in the sense that it does not have a clear-cut relationship between the things being compared. Helen Gardner observed that "a conceit is a comparison whose ingenuity is more striking than its justness" and that "a comparison becomes a conceit when we are made to concede likeness while being conscious of unlikeness." An example of the latter occurs in John Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning", in which a couple faced with absence from each other is likened to a compass. The metaphysical conceit is imaginative, exploring specific parts of an experience. John Donne's "The Flea" is a poem about fleas in a bed; when Sir Philip Sidney begins a sonnet with the conventional idiomatic expression "My true-love hath my heart and I have his", he takes the metaphor and teases out a number of literal possibilities in the exchange of hearts. The result is a formed conceit; the Petrarchan conceit is a form of love poetry wherein a man's love interest is referred to in hyperbole.
For instance, the lover is a ship on a stormy sea, his mistress is either "a cloud of dark disdain" or the sun. The paradoxical pain and pleasure of lovesickness is described using oxymoron, for instance uniting peace and war and freezing, so forth, but images which were novel in the sonnets of Petrarch, in his innovative exploration of human feelings, became clichés in the poetry of imitators. Romeo uses hackneyed Petrarchan conceits when describing his love for Rosaline as "bright smoke, cold fire, sick health". In the Renaissance, the term indicated any fanciful expression of wit, was used pejoratively of outlandish poetic metaphors. Recent literary critics have used the term to mean the style of extended and heightened metaphor common in the Renaissance and in the 17th century, without any particular indication of value. Within this critical sense, the Princeton Encyclopedia makes a distinction between two kinds of conceits: the Metaphysical conceit, described above, the Petrarchan conceit.
In the latter, human experiences are described in terms of an outsized metaphor, like the stock comparison of eyes to the sun, which Shakespeare makes light of in his Sonnet 130: "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun." Lakoff and Mark Turner. More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Princeton, NJ: University of Chicago Press Preminger, Alex and T. V. F. Brogan; the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press George Herbert, "Praise" Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 – via Wikisource
![Jacques, Callot. Balli di Sfessania: Captain Cermonia and Larinia. c. 1620. Etching. [dimensions unknown]. Courtesy Artstor.](/wiki/File:Captain_Cermonia_and_Larinia.jpg)
![[Artist Unknown]. Scene From The Commedia dell' Arte. 17th Century. Oil on wood panel. (64x75cm). Drottningholms Teatermuseum, Stockholm.](/wiki/File:Scene_from_commedia_dell%27arte.jpg)
![[?]. Prima Buffa della Compagnia dei Comici Gelosi. 1590. Oil on Canvas. [?]. Carnavalet Museum.](/wiki/File:Commedia_dell%27arte_-_troupe_Gelosi.JPG)