39. Suspense

Definition:

Suspense is the intense feeling that an audience goes through while waiting for the outcome of certain events. It basically leaves the reader holding their breath and wanting more information. The amount of intensity in a suspenseful moment is why it is hard to put a book down. Without suspense, a reader would lose interest quickly in any story because there is nothing that is making the reader ask, “What’s going to happen next?” In writing, there has to be a series of events that leads to a climax that captivates the audience and makes them tense and anxious to know what is going to happen.

Example:

A cliffhanger is a great way to create suspense. You remember when you were a kid and very excited to watch those Saturday morning shows. You can probably recall the feeling you had at the pit of your stomach when, after about 25 minutes and lots of commercials, you were hoping to find out what happened to your favorite character. However, you didn’t get to find out. Instead they would make the “Tune In Next Week” announcement and you already knew that you would be there. Same time, same place. Suspense is a powerful literary tool because, if done correctly, you know your audience will be back for more and more.

climax the point of highest dramatic tension or a major turning point in the action of the text or the point of greatest dramatic interest in a play Höhepunkt • climatic text structuring means arranging material in order of importance, with the most important arguments coming last

40-41. Parallel construction.40Their types and stylistic functions.

41Chiasmus. Its types and stylistic functions.

Parallel construction is a device which may be encountered not so much in the sentence as in the macro - structures dealt with the syntactical whole and the paragraph. The necessary condition in parallel construction is identical or similar, syntactical structure in two or more sentences or parts of sentence. Constructions formed by the same syntactical pattern, closely following one another present the stylistic device of parallelism. Parallelism strongly affects the rhythmical organization of the paragraph, so it is imminent in oratoric speech, in pathetic and emphatic extracts.

Parallelism can be complete when the construction of the second sentence fully copies that of the first one. Or parallelism can be partial, when only the beginning or the ends of several sentences are structurally similar. The necessary condition in parallel constructions is identical or similar, syntactical structure in two or more sentences or parts of sentence in close succession.

- Summer was silent as well. In much of what had been the United Stale's, no birds sang, no dogs barked, no frogs croaked, no fishes leaped. - The south had been truly shabby, faded and desperate. The taps had been large and brass, the floor had been of spotted marble, the staircases had been wide, the porter had been thirteen years old, and the roof garden had been utterly empty, deserted like a closed building site.

The two examples show, that one should differentiate complete (as in the first case") and incomplete, or partial parallelism (as in the second example).

Chiasmus is based on repetition of syntactical patterns, but it has a reversed order in one of the utterances. - She was a good sport about all this, but so was he.

In chiasmus the central part of the sentence – the predicate remains the hinge around which occur syntactical changes – the subject of the first sentence becomes the object of the second and vice versa.

- The coach was waiting, the horse were fresh, the roads were good, and the driver was willing.