I see that Marshall Grossman got there before me. I'd only add that I
don't think that this is pathetic fallacy because this figure of speech
does not depend on any concept of sympathy between the two nouns or
whatever they denote. It just transfers the attribute to something else to
produce a linguistic frisson rather than to suggest something more
animistic about the world or to suggest a connection between animate and
inanimate .
Best wishes,
Richard Ramsay
> Thanks to those of you who have, amazingly enough, already responded.
> But
> isn't there a more specific term than "pathetic fallacy"? I'm thinking
> of
> a more condensed figure of speech in which, instead of a speaker's
> imagining the external world responding to his or her emotions in kind, an
> adjective signifying emotion is simply applied to an inanimate object
> rather than to the human subject. The knights who leap out of their
> roused
> beds when they hear Malecasta's shrieks aren't mooning around like
> Petrarchan lovers, imagining that their beds are sympathizing with them.
>
> Dot
>
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