Chiasmus

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The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Chiasmus

a type of antithetical parallelism in which the parts of two parallel elements are placed in reverse sequence, in the pattern ab = b¹a¹. An example is “It was not a grass-blade in the open field that was nodding,/Nodding was my poor little homeless head.” Sometimes the sense of parallelism is maintained by the repeating of intermediate words in the pattern abc = c¹ba¹, as in Pushkin’s lines Avtomedony nashi boiki,/Neutomimy nashi troiki (“Lively our Automedons,/Our troikas tireless”).

References in periodicals archive ?

chiastic equation, plural-singular: singular-plural.

Figuring Nature: Tropics of Romantic Environmentality

At the next highest level, I read two more chiastic structures, one in the first metrical section and one in the third.

A reading in temporal poetics: Elizabeth Bishop's "The Map"

(71) The composite of ordo--weaving, lining up, and beginning--thus appears most evidently, like the chiastic X, in an almost invisible structure.

Stem and skein: order and evolution in Hopkins

Kieslowski's "passion for alternative scenarios," taking form here as a chiastic movement, takes us far beyond the metafictional relativism that some of the critics I've mentioned seem to impute to Kieslowski; his interest here is not strictly epistemological or ethical, but rather, is of a religious order, but without permitting us to settle for the simpler and deeply attractive religious acceptance imputed by others.

Faith, doubt, and chiasmus in Krzysztof Kieslowski's Decalogue I

A good example of a poem that depicts one of Whitman's "hellscenes," one that includes an anonymous soldier-narrator who sees a number of other nameless figures, is "A March in the Ranks Hard-prest, and the Road Unknown." This poem is also one of the chiastic poems in Drum-Taps, ending where it begins.

Walt Whitman's vision of the Inferno, or Dante in Drum-Taps

Marlowe's lack of family creates a tidy chiastic structure with the thoroughly dysfunctional families of his clients, a gulf that aids the suppression of his desire for family.

Philip Marlowe, family man

Simon looks at chiastic elements in the book, and considers the date of Jonah's composition.

JPS Bible Commentary

In this case, four lines from the series Abnu gikin[section]u--whether they come from the same or from a similar manuscript--were not only borrowed in a chiastic manner, but they were also interwoven into the narrative of the royal inscription.

Borrowings to create anew: intertextuality in the babylonian poem of "creation" (enuma elis)

My bile ran so dark and deep that it pooled on a memory that, to me, exemplified the contradictory nature of this complicated thing called love: the time Tony had tried to explain to our poetry workshop something called chiastic structure, using as an example an elegiac couplet written by Catullus to his mistress Lesbia.

Girl gone wild

The chiastic composition shows the seated Mary looking down at the young St.

Context and meaning: an investigation of The Holy Family with the Young St. John the Baptist attributed to Giorgio Vasari in the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, Jacksonville, Florida

The chi in chiasmus stands for the letter X in the Greek alphabet, and the word comes from the Greek khiasmos, meaning "crossing; to mark with a X." In most chiastic statements, if you stack the first clause on the second and then draw straight lines from the key words in the first to the second, you will draw an X.

A light-hearted look at Greek figures of rhetoric

(17) The description is direct, guiding the viewer and pointing out the details; one notes the repetition of [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (2, 4) and [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (3) and the chiastic arrangement of [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (A) [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (B) and [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (B), [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (A).