I used this video to study for my year 12 HSC (High School Certificate) English course. So now on whenever I see this video it reminds me of the good old days at school. A wonderful and helpful video. God bless you.
Great introductory presentation. Complex Chiasm are characteristic in Semitic and Meso American writings and are often used to reinforce or emphasize a given point. the whole of the Pentateuch could be studied as one long complex Chiasm with its turning point in the middle of the middle book Leviticus which itself could be examined as a long complex Chiasm. Literary Scholar John Welch goes into great detail on the subject.
Hi Mark! I am a songwriter and I have been trying to deconstruct this Bo Burnham lyric I came across: "A gift shop at the gun range A mass shooting at the mall" At first glance I thought it was some sort of chiasmus, but I am not so sure. The phrases are certainly parallel in structure, a structural chiasmus would be something along the lines of "there was gift shop at the gun range, at the mall there was a mass shooting". The craft of this sentence seems to be a more conceptual inversion, with the concepts in a sort of ABBA form (shopping concept, gun concept, gun concept, shopping concept) - hence the confusion with chiasmus. Anyway it's thrown me a little bit - do you have any thoughts on what is going on here or have you come across this sort of thing before? Many thanks!
This video was extremely helpful, this video wasn't not insightful. I needed this, this I needed. thank you. To be or not to be... You should do one on isocolon. :)
Hi As with all parallelism, it creates a sense of harmony and balance. Making it chiasmus is just a stylistic choice (usually) - check context. Regards