Meaning of chiasmus | Babel Free

Definitions

An inversion of the relationship between the elements of phrases.

countable, rhetoric, uncountable

Equivalents

Examples

“The book of Habakkuk has been discovered to consist of a closely knit chiastic structure throughout. This is the first poem of such length to stand revealed as a literary unit of this kind, though chiasmus has already been discovered throughout many psalms[…]”

“John F. Kennedy is more famous for his chiasmus than for many of his policies: "Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country."”

“Leeman therefore holds that chiasmus is the basic order in Greek and Latin: antithesis is, he claims, normal for the modern, rational mind, but for the Greeks and Romans chiasmus was more natural.”

“The realization that Mawlānā was using parallelism and chiasmus to organize the higher levels of his work has been a major surprise.”

CEFR level