Trope
Tropes are what Hayden White calls "swerves of locution sanctioned neither by custom or logic. Tropes generate figures of speech or thought by their variation from what is 'normally' expected.... The word trope derives from tropikos, tropos, which in Classical Greek means meant 'turn' and in Koine 'way' or 'manner.' (Tropics of Discourse 2)
Tropes is thus an intentional "move" made by a speaker, writer, or designer to create meaning.
Work Cited
- White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.
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