Metonym: Figurative Technique in Metropolis

Freder builds a bridge between Grot (the unofficial leader of the workers) and Joh Fredersen (the architect and de facto ruler of Metropolis)

Being a silent film, Metropolis is primarily a visual text - a piece of cinema reliant on the audience's ability to read film grammar. If a silent film cannot convey its narrative in this way then it will die on its feet and, thankfully, Metropolis is highly effective to this end. Visual literacy aside though, I wanted to get my students to tap into the core message of the film by examining the epigraph that precedes the action:

"The mediator between Head and Hands must be the Heart"

...which is a quote that skews towards literary analysis rather than the visual. In this case it's a piece of figurative language, making use of the metaphorical device known as metonymy.

I start by showing the epigraph to the students via a worksheet as an example of a metonym and ask if anyone would like to venture a guess as to what exactly this technique is (or how it works). I then go on to explain it on the worksheet:

Metonymy is a metaphorical/rhetorical device in which a thing or concept is not called by its proper name but instead referred to by a part of the overall whole, or something associated with the whole. In other words, metonyms are usually parts of a thing/concept that are used to stand-in for the bigger idea. 

Examples:

• Washington refers to the American Government.
• The King's Hand (in Game of Thrones) refers to an actual person designated to do the King's work, not just their hand.
• The bush refers to Australian forest. Not just one bush!
• Chili is an American dish made up on beans, mince and chili peppers, yet it is only referred to by the one defining ingredient.
• The Crown refers to the British royal family.
• A hired gun isn't just a gun, you're paying for the whole assassin who holds the gun.
• Chernobyl is a city in Ukraine but the word on its own has also come to refer to the nuclear disaster that occurred there in 1986, EG. "We don't want another Cheynobyl".

Students can examine a few more by explaining them on their own, and could even come up with some of their own identified examples:

1. 9/11
2. "Going down the street"
3. "We've got 10 000 boots on the ground"  

Then, to bring it all full circle, the big question is:

Explain the example from Metropolis, as seen in the epigraph.

Students should at first address it on the most immediate level, that the Heart refers to Freder operating as the 'mediator' (the figure foretold by Maria when she sermonises the workers). In addition to this, though, students should connect the epigraph on a figurative level to the class system in Metropolis. The Hands are the workers, with the metonym connecting to connotations associated with the working class and the sort of labour they undertake, and the Head is Joh Fredersen - a sole figure who controls all else, cold and calculating.

The worksheet can be found here.

Technique Revision - Focus on Connotation

I started teaching a Preliminary Advanced English class this year and they're an absolutely fantastic bunch of students. As with all new classes, however, there needs to be some diagnostic testing (or pre-testing, if you prefer that term). Not all of this kind of 'testing' needs to be formalised and markable, oft-times it can just be something I've used to gather information that will influence the direction I take my class in over the next few weeks.

At the moment, we're looking at the Area of Study (Belonging) with a Prescribed Text (Immigrant Chronicle by Peter Skrzynecki). To get the ball rolling I decided to go over a big list of techniques and ascertain which ones the students were familiar with. So I put the list up on the board, like so:

Then an idea hit me. I told each student to rank each term out of 3 to show how well they knew them, with a score of '1' indicating that it was a term they didn't know at all. Then I ran around the class collecting all the 1s onto my own copy of the sheet, resulting in this:

The hand-scribbled term on the bottom right is 'enjambment', which I added after we had covered it in the poem St. Patrick's College.

Now I know which techniques we should be revising. I've been working through these over the last few days; just with a few asides where I put up some quotes on the board with the title of the technique and then asked the students to try and work out what the technique was. Here's an example that went quite well, where we discussed 'Connotation' and what it meant:

I forgot to take a photo before I started drawing all over it and editing bits of it. Sorry.

I started with two sentences:

• "Corporal Jones squeezed the trigger and removed the enemy"
• "Corporal Jones squeezed the trigger and murdered the enemy"

Then asked the question, what does connotation mean in relation to these sentences? The students started offering answers, most of them quite pertinent. We talked about the associations we made with the two different words:

• Removed = Good guy, tactical, in war.
• Murdered = Harsher, modal (emotional reaction)

And then, as a class, we came up with our own definition for Connotation: "The associations a reader makes with certain words".

After this, it was time to link it to our Prescribed Text, so I trotted out the poem Feliks Skrzynecki and eagled in on the word 'father'. What are the connotations of this term? What if it were a different term that essentially meant the same thing?

I put up these words:

• Father:
• Dad:
• Patriarch:
• Daddy:
• Guardian:

And asked students to fill in their own word associations, with some interesting results:

As these are senior students, I decided not to censor their association of the word 'Daddy' with 'sexual' and 'fetish'. Their minds went there and this is meant to be about word-association. It is what it is; that's the whole point of connotation. Plus there's far 'worse' in some of the HSC Prescribed Texts.

After we had finished brainstorming each of the terms, we established that 'Father' had a more formal connotation that set up a distance between the poet and Feliks.

Buoyed by how successful this quick exercise was, I decided to plough on a little further with the quote "They dug cancer out of his foot".

This went well too, with connections made between 'dug' with visceral language and gardening. Meanwhile, 'took' implied something far less painful than, say, 'scraped'.

Here's the technique sheet below if you'd like an electronic copy:
Techniques List