characterismus

characterismus (uncountable)

1. The rhetorical enargia used to describe a person.
   • 1975, Dissertation Abstracts International, page 7268:

     In a considerable body of passages of characterismus, Spenser presents a detailed portrait of Britomart's heart and soul an anatomy of her passions.

   • 1983, Danny Lee Alexander, A Rhetorical Analysis of Selected Television Sermons, page 68:

     Therefore, in respect to characterismus the majority of observations made by the television-evangelists describe the mental rather than physical state.

   • 1991, Richard Brathwaite, Allen H. Lanner, A Critical Edition of Richard Brathwait's Whimzies, page 9:

     Such descriptive techniques as characterismus, prosopopoeia, ethopoeia, and topographia encouraged men to seek out the typical qualities in their experience and environment.

   • 1992, Christy Desmet, Reading Shakespeare's Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity, page 46:

     In Henry IV's concluding scene, Falstaff does nothing, but Richardson transforms the absence of action into evidence of thought; to fill the gap, he writes his own characterismus, or representation of Falstaff 's thought processes.

   • 2015 January, Giorgio Baruchello, “A classification of classics. Gestalt psychology and the tropes of rhetoric”, in New Ideas in Psychology, volume 36:

     An analogous focus upon good continuation is to be found in the many forms of enargia or figures of description recorded by rhetoricians, such as anemographia (of wind), astrotesia (of stars), characterismus (of personality), chorographia (of nations), chronographia (of time), dendrographia (of trees), etc.