Definition:
(1) A figure of speech in which an absent or imaginary person is represented as speaking. (2) Another name for personification. See also: What Is Personification?
Etymology:
From the Greek, "face, mask"Examples and Observations:
- "That a catechresis can be a prosopopeia, in the etymological sense of 'giving face,' is clear from such ordinary instances as the face of a mountain or the eye of a hurricane. But it is possible that, instead of prosopopeia being a subspecies of the generic type catachresis (or the reverse), the relationship between them is more disruptive than that between genus and species."
(Paul De Man and Wlad Godzich, The Resistance to Theory. Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986) - "Under the term prosopopeia, as can be inferred etymologically from the Greek and Latin appellations, authors use the device of introducing in discourse a feigned presentation of characters or personified things, that is, feigned sub specie personae. The usual form of this presentation is through the attribution of human properties or qualities, especially those of speaking or listening (the terms dialogismos and sermonocinatio refer to this property). The device must be properly regulated by the literary norms of stylistic decorum.
"The majority of authors usually distinguish between two modalities in attributing the device to characters or personified things: (1) 'direct discourse' (prosopopoeia recta) or (2) 'indirect discourse' (prosopopoeia obliqua). The most elaborated doctrine concerning this figure of speech, as in the case with ethopoeia, appeared in ancient Greek handbooks for rhetorical exercises (progymnasmata), in which both appear tightly linked."
(Jose Antonio Mayoral, "Prosopopoeia." Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, ed. by Thomas O. Sloane, Oxford Univ. Press, 2001)
Pronunciation: pro-so-po-po-EE-a
