Epiphrase

Its stylistic resources can be an idea or word amplification, a feeling or reflection highlighting, and the effect of distance or on the contrary of approaching the reader, with an often comic or humorous intention.

[3] The Dictionnaire de la langue française by Émile Littré defines epiphrase as a figure of speech in which "one or more words are added to a phrase that seemed finished in order to develop more ideas".

[4] According to the linguist and stylist Bernard Dupriez, the epiphrase is part of a phrase that is added specially to indicate the author or character's feelings[5] as in this example from the novel Le Curé de Cucugnan by Alphonse Daudet: "Tomorrow, Monday, I will confess the old men and women.

"[7]For the French academic and specialist in stylistics Henri Suhamy, the epiphrase is almost synonymous with epiphonemas (the addition of an often sententious statement to a textual whole that seems to be finished) and paremboles (a proposition inserted into a speech to express the personal point of view of the author or narrator), especially when it designates "indignant exclamations, moralistic reflections, conclusions and general ideas with which orators or fictitious characters comment on their own speeches[8]".

As an example, Suhamy quotes the words of Ferrante, a character in Henry de Montherlant's tragedy La Reine Morte: "I forgive you.

"Patrick Bacry points out that the figure also designates a "development, always terminative and as if added to an idea on which the sentence, the narrative, the discourse seemed to have to end.

that by force they took,In powder, smashing images and altars,Venerable residence of our immortal saints.The sentence, which gave the impression of ending with the third verse, continues in a "sort of final rebound that constitutes the epiphrase.

[10]" Georges Molinié, a specialist in French stylistics, considers that the epiphrase is formed when the added utterance is "thematically and syntactically attached to what precedes", by means of a linguistic index such as an anaphoric for example.

Moreover, if the epiphrase is removed, the discourse does not lose any raw information, as in this sentence by Marcel Proust: "Mrs. Verdurin was still telling me this on the last day (you know, on the eve of departure we talk better).

There is indeed an epiphrase when the author intervenes in his work by means of comments inserted in the discourse, points out the literary critic and theorist Gérard Genette, for whom it is, in fact, close to the parenthesis, of which it is considered a variant:[1] For who avenges his father, there is no forfeit, And it is to sell one's blood to surrender to kindness.In this sense, it always marks the opinion of the enunciator and can constitute a disjunct.

[5] Gérard Genette, in Figures II (chapter " Vraisemblance et motivation "), sees in the epiphrase the privileged mode of appearance of the author within his work, the one by which he can address his reader.

[17] The epiphrase adds a comment from the author, who wants to specify a particular point or to deliver a feeling or an idea, as in this extract from The Reveries of the Solitary Walker by Jean-Jacques Rousseau: "I should have counted on this metamorphosis in advance, but so many strange circumstances were attached to it; so many obscure remarks and reticences accompanied it; I was told about it with air so laughably discreet that all these mysteries worried me.

[28]" By creating an epiphrase, the author allows for a break in tone, an effect of distance or, on the contrary, a rapprochement towards the reader, often with a comic or humorous intention as in this passage from Hector Berlioz in which "the memoirist intervenes directly to break the spell of his style himself":[8] "For this glorious day, the academicians put on their beautiful green embroidered garments; they shine, they dazzle.

"[29]In the short story L'Amour impossible, Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly questions his own writing practice through numerous epiphrases: "The impression that I kept from it, it is that there is in all this book enough the instinct of the nuances and some big features which announce the width of the touch for later; – of the remainder, the style without natural [... A style made of oyster shells, so overloaded with different layers of ideas that it would take punctuation made on purpose to unravel it [...] the truth is that there are too many incidences to my sentence, too many intersecting insights, harming the march of thought and the clarity of expression.

In this perspective, Houellebecq's "epiphrastic commentary" is a "tool chosen to describe and denounce this rotten society stuck in its contradictions," used in combination with the cliché.