Literary notes about antithesis (AI summary)
Antithesis is deployed in literature as a versatile tool for highlighting stark contrasts between ideas, characters, and settings. Writers use it to sharpen distinctions—whether contrasting physical spaces with a geographical antithesis ([1]), pitting elements like soul against body ([2]) or subject against object ([3]), or delineating conflicting philosophical stances such as empiricism versus rationalism ([4]). The device is also employed to intensify dramatic tension, as when contrasting character traits or states of mind ([5], [6]), and to frame broader dialectical structures within both prose and poetry ([7], [8]).
- The following phrase is a typical example of a geographical antithesis.
— from Argonauts of the Western Pacific by Bronislaw Malinowski - Such a confusion was natural, and arose partly out of the antithesis of soul and body.
— from Phaedo by Plato - Its first essential, fundamental form is the antithesis of subject and object.
— from The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 1 of 3) by Arthur Schopenhauer - On the side of the antithesis, or Empiricism, in the determination of the cosmological ideas: 1.
— from The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant - Lord John Roxton has some points in common with Professor Summerlee, and others in which they are the very antithesis to each other.
— from The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle - For myself, I am your complete antithesis.
— from Dead Souls by Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol - It is a question whether the antithesis, classic and romantic, does not conceal that other antithesis, the active and the reactive.
— from The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values. Book III and IV by Nietzsche - The antithesis of art and inspiration, though not meaningless, is often most misleading.
— from Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth by A. C. Bradley
