"What is a Trope?": A Literary Guide for English Students and Teachers

Why are there two meanings for the word trope in literature? Which one is correct? What are some examples of tropes? In this short lesson, Professor Tekla Bude answers these questions using examples from folk tales and William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. The video is designed to help high school and college English students make meaningful arguments about the literature they read.
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Timestamps
0:00 Trope's First Definition and Examples
0:37 Trope's Second Definition and Examples
2:04 Trope's Semantic Shift Explained
Below are a few more videos in the series. Please drop us a comment letting us know what literary terms you would like us to explore in future videos!
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[@SWLF]

If you enjoyed this video lesson, let us know by liking it, offering a comment on your favorite or least favorite trope, or suggesting other literary terms that you'd like to see covered. Thanks so much!

[@Khatoon170]

Trope is pharse , stop and smell roses and meaning we take from it . Example of trope . Derived from Greek word tropes which means turn , direction , way . Tropes are figures of speech that moves . Meaning of text from literal to figurative. Popular romance tropes for writers such as love triangle. Second chance. Enemies to lovers . Examples of tropes calling fool ass or , cunning person fox , he is snake . Personification is trope . There are four master tropes metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony . Thank you for your wonderful educational literary channel.

[@Khatoon170]

Trope is kind of literary device of any specific examples can be trope . Trope most often word is used to refer to tropes that are widespread such as irony , metaphor, juxtaposition, hyperpole , themes such as Nobe savage or reluctant hero . Play Romeo and Juliet , scene Juliet is sun Romeo says . Is story telling convention device , motif , specific trope might be characteristics of particular genre of story telling. Thank you for your wonderful literary educational channel.

[@SWLF]

Nice work with these two definitions of trope, @khatoon170 !

[@contemplater620]

Thank you for resolving my confusion ;))

[@SWLF]

Thanks so much, @contemplater620 ! We're delighted to hear that you found the lesson useful and we hope you'll check out more from the series!

[@nishantadas40]

Good interpretation 👍🏻😊

[@SWLF]

Thanks so much, Nishanta! We hope you enjoy the other video lessons in our series as well!

[@emmanueldeleon3074]

This is wonderful! I wonder if you have videos about rhetoric in the Baroque period. I am writing a dissertation about the German Baroque Rhetoric.

[@SWLF]

Thanks so much, Emmanuel! We don't currently have any videos that specific target the Baroque period, but if you have any suggestions, we hope you'll offer them.

[@ColtraneTaylor]

What led you to that? Just curious.

[@user-hm2gb6pm6b]

Excellent

[@DeladisKythera]

Are "social banter tropes" a thing, also?

[@SWLF]

Interesting! Could you give us a bit more information or an example or two to clarify what you mean?

[@FlareGunDebate]

The first definition is correct, the second definition is incorrect. Using the term "trope" to refer to convention and/or cliché is a result of semantic drift (not shift) thanks to the websites like TV Tropes in 2004 and Anita Sarkeesian in 2013. Harold Bloom used the word "trope" properly but pseudo-intellectuals outside the domain of literature misuse the term for a false sense of credibility. It's as foolish as saying "literally" when you mean "figuratively".

[@SWLF]

Dang, you're coming in hot, FlareGunDebate! As we mention in our Grammar Series on this same site, we aren't trying to be the arbiter of who is right and who is wrong in discussions of certain key literary or grammatical terms. We're instead trying to explain as best we can how people employ certain linguistic practices--literary or otherwise--to help clear up confusions that people may have about those terms. In the case of trope, two different definitions of the term are now being used at once, and in a practical sense, we therefore think it is useful to show people what both senses of trope means so that they can understand the term in non-academic as well as academic settings.

[@FlareGunDebate]

@@SWLF I'm not confused, I'm disagreeing with you in part. It's practical to show where the drift occurred and why. Otherwise you're potentially validating lazy usage out of a false sense of compromise. It's not even an issue of Structuralism. Tons of people in the past have tried to catalogue types of stories, conventions, cliche, and what would later be repackaged as "genre". It's got it's place but it's similar to hording. The issue is taking a word designed to identify primitive forms of human experience and twist it into a synonym for derivative.

[@sarwagya-esque]

Why do we not make "figures of speech"-metaphor, simile, synecdoche, etc.-and "tropes" two different ideas? Is it just that we refuse to decline the Aristotelian conventions?

[@SWLF]

Great question, Sarwagya! The answer is that it is impossible to control language in a top-down manner. As our grammar series suggests, words acquire and lose meanings all the time based upon convention. We suspect that in a few years, the word trope will lose its meaning as a "figure of speech" because of the popularity of the new usage, but we cannot make that change happen (unless, of course, everyone in the world were to watch this video. Hey, we can hope...) Language and meaning are slippery things, but we hope we cleared up why this term is so difficult to pin down!

[@rodnertylerduo4115]

I'm not following. How is "the rule of three" a figure of speech? 🤔

[@SWLF]

Great question, @rodnertylerduo4115! Within the video, Prof. Bude distinguishes between two definitions of the word trope--one that means figurative language and another that means storytelling convention. The "rule of three" corresponds to the second definition, not the first. Hope that helps!

[@rodnertylerduo4115]

@@SWLF But that's not to the point of my question. The Prof says "figures of speech get used over and over and then become commonplace, they become less poetically powerful but perhaps more structurally important to our language". But "the rule of three" isn't a metaphor, or figure of speech, or any of those. It is specifically a literary construct, just like "villain vs hero" or some other common place device we see in storytelling. It seems unlikely that a "generalized literary construct" could evolve from a mere "figure of speech". There seems to be much more going on with the modern usage of "trope" than simply a cliched figure of speech becoming a constructed way of presenting ideas. To me it seems like they are completely unrelated concepts that just happen to share a term. Your thoughts?

[@SWLF]

Hmm, well, you are certainly welcome to explore the topic further, @rodnertylerduo4115, but we are pretty confident that this is an example of a semantic shift. The same kind of thing seems to operate in figurative language, in which the term "metaphor" has taken on meanings far beyond its original definition to describe all elements of figurative language. We're not necessarily advocating for this flattening of language, of course, but misappropriation of language can become calcified over time.

[@daffyduck4195]

The mic volume is set too damn LOUD !!!!

[@SWLF]

Thanks for the comment, Daffy Duck. We'll try to set it a bit lower for future videos, but we hope you enjoyed the lesson!