Sinestesia e similitudine: descrizione dell'interazione retorica all'interno del testo letterario

Literary synaesthesia is characterized by a syntactic ductility that allows it to interact with other rhetoric configurations, such as the simile. The aim of this essay is to describe this kind of interaction in the literary context. In the first part of the article we illustrate the functionality of synaesthesia, and we also focus our attention on the structure of the simile, describing the semantic relationship between the tertium comparationis and the other elements of the comparative construction. Then we give some examples from Romanian literature, in order to provide a systematization of this rhetoric combination, identifying two main processes: the “synaesthetic simile” and the “comparative-based synaesthesia”.