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Grammar Made Visible: Rhetorical Antithesis in Laurence Sterne's Prose
In the history of English literature, few works have tested the boundaries of narrative form and typographical convention as boldly as Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Published across nine volumes between 1759 and 1767, Sterne's masterpiece turned the nascent novel genre inside out. Sterne populated his pages with eccentric punctuation, sudden dashes, blank chapters, and even a completely black page to mourn a character's death. Yet behind this playful typographical rebellion lay an exquisite mastery of classical rhetoric, most notably the figure of antithesis. For Sterne, antithesis was not merely a decorative trope; it was the syntactic engine that captured the perpetual conflict between human aspiration and bodily frailty.
Antithesis achieves its dramatic power by setting contrasting ideas into sharp syntactic opposition within a balanced grammatical framework. Throughout the rambling memoirs of Tristram Shandy