pathetic fallacy
- noun
- /pəˈθɛtɪk ˈfæləsi/
- Literature
:
falacia patética
- Context suggests that the sister spoken to here is a cow—"soster ku" sister cow—and that the poem is a dramatization of the pathetic fallacy.
Examples
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Rather, Kavan is giving us a pathetic fallacy description of a seductive, welcomed, apocalyptic death taking place at the center of one person's soul and physical body, as well as in the outside world.
Academic text (1997) -
In a dynamic scene of the pathetic fallacy in play, Baldwin projects affective states onto the clouds: they are "ponderous" or "sleepy" and shift according to the attitudes suggested by those states (56-57).
Academic text (2017) -
The author uses a pathetic fallacy when he describes the gloomy weather reflecting the character's sadness.
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In literature, a common example of pathetic fallacy is when the storm rages to mirror the conflict in the story.
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The poem effectively employs pathetic fallacy, depicting the winds as angry to emphasize the character's turmoil.
Synonyms
Giving human feelings to animals, things, or gods
A way of making an idea speak like a person in stories and poems
Surface Forms
Morphology
pathetic + fallacy
This is a specialized literary term whose meaning (attributing human feelings to inanimate things) is not predictable from the everyday senses of 'pathetic' and 'fallacy'. A B1 learner knowing 'pathetic' as 'pitiful' and 'fallacy' as 'wrong belief' would likely misinterpret the phrase and would not infer the technical literary-device sense, so it is not transparently compositional.
Etymology
Pathetic fallacy was first used by writer John Ruskin to describe the habit of giving things human feelings, for example calling clouds 'angry' to show a character's mood. He used pathetic to mean 'feeling' and fallacy to mean a 'false idea', so the phrase helps you remember it means treating nature or objects as if they feel like people.
