The Fourth Master Trope, Antithesis

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Four Master Tropes—metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony—are a significant theme in the history of rhetoric, but this grouping is wrong in fundamental ways—irony is not a trope at all properly understood, and the bulk of the arguments in this tradition suggest, along with a few new ones of my own, that the fourth Master Trope should be antithesis.