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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hypotyposis | 2/6 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotyposis | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T15:41:29.493054+00:00 | kb-cron |
Ethopoeia is also a variant of hypotyposis. It consists in painting characters or assemblies of characters by also painting their morals and passions. Less visual than the hypotyposis, it constitutes very often elements of a portrait, as with the moralists, since Les Caractères du philosophe Theophrastus, taken again by Jean de La Bruyère in 1688 in his Caractères de Theophrastus, traduits du grec, avec les Caractères ou les mœurs de ce siècle. For Marc Escola, La Bruyère's portraits achieve the excellence of ethopoeia, which he describes as "hermeneutics of the visible" as in the portrait of Drance, a character in the chapter Du Coeur of Les Caractères:
Drance wants to pass for governing his Master, who believes nothing of it, nor does the public: to speak incessantly to a Great One whom one serves, in places and at times when it is least convenient, to speak to him in his ear or in mysterious terms, to laugh until one bursts in his presence, to cut off his speech, to put oneself between him and those who speak to him, to disdain those who come to make their court, or wait impatiently for them to withdraw, to place oneself close to him in a posture that is too free, to appear with him with one's back to a fireplace, to pull him by his habit, to walk on his heels, to act as a familiar, to take liberties, all of which are more indicative of a fat man than of a favorite.
==== Diatyposis ==== Diatyposis, from a Greek term meaning the action of shaping, of modelling, or evidentia in Latin, also known as "trait", consists of a "dynamic description of an animated scene that can give rise to an oratorical development", unlike hypotyposis which remains static. Some authors sometimes define diatyposis as a short hypotyposis. However, contrary to hypotyposis, diatyposis is a short narrative embedded in a discourse that encompasses it. In other words, the diatyposis is a digression of the gaze or of the diegesis which focuses, for a time, no longer on the unfolding of the action but on a small visualizable scene. It is often introduced by the narrator himself, by means of another figure of speech, the epiphrase, as opposed to the hypotyposis which is self-sufficient and seems closed and autonomous from the rest of the discourse (although it is a figure of speech). Michel Pougeoise's Dictionary of Rhetoric considers diatyposis as a form of reduced and condensed hypotyposis that is found especially in the narrative, in Homer's Iliad, for example:
He struck him under the eyebrow, at the bottom of the eye, from which the pupil was torn out. And the spear, passing through the eye, passed behind the head, and Ilioneus, with his hands extended, fell. Then Penelos, drawing his sharp sword from the sheath, cut off the head, which rolled to the earth with the helmet, the strong spear still fixed in the eye.
==== A similar figure of speech: the ekphrasis ==== Historically, the figure of ekphrasis, which allows to describe in an animated way a work of art, is first in rhetoric. Indeed, the term "hypotyposis" is only attested as early as 1555 under the entry "Hipotipose" in Jacques Peletier du Mans' work, l'Art poétique, whereas ekphrasis has been known since Greek antiquity. The ekphrasis is evoked by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in his Art rhétorique and in Sur la mimésis, but it is Aelius Theon who is the first, in the first century, to attempt a definition of it. He explains that this animated description, which he calls "ekphrasis", is "a discourse which presents in detail and puts before the eyes in an obvious way what it gives to know. There are descriptions of people, facts, places, and time (...) There are also descriptions of manner." In antiquity, ekphrasis is not limited to the evocation of works of art, but designates any vivid evocation capable of conjuring up images in the mind of the listener or the reader; it is only towards the end of the 19th century that the notion is used by scholars in a sense that restricts it to the description of works of art.
== Two types of hypotyposes ==
In spite of its numerous variants with blurred contours, Bernard Dupriez, in his Gradus, proposes to distinguish two types of hypotyposes, a distinction also attested by Jean-Jacques Robrieux:
=== The "descriptive hypotyposis” === The figure then merges with simple description, as an enumeration of details, as following the gaze of the observer. Bernard Dupriez takes as an example the descriptive passage in Gustave Flaubert's L'Éducation sentimentale: "People were arriving out of breath; barrels, cables, baskets of laundry were obstructing traffic; the sailors were not responding to anyone; we were bumping into each other". The hypotyposis presses on the details, resulting in seeing the scene instead of simply reading it. These verses of Racine thus suggest, in three movements, all the sadness of the character of Junia and the love of Nero which is expressed here:
This night I saw her arrive in these places, Sad, raising to heaven his eyes wet with tears, That shone through the torches and weapons. Often the hypotyposis is revealed by the interruption of the narrative or by the creation of a digression. It is recognizable by the development of the subject it wants to show, a development that is sometimes long and typographically marked. For Dupriez, schematization is the opposition of descriptive hypotyposis. Hypotyposis consists mainly of episodes in indirect discourse, often bordering on cliché when it summarizes the action too quickly or too succinctly. In Et que dit ce silence?, Anne Surgers, Gilles Declercq, and Anne-Elisabeth Spica analyze the visual dimension of the figure, through three categories of hypotyposis: one that gives to see and feel, a second by empathy, and a third by the accentuation of the effect of presence, in literary texts, and in painting.