Litotes is deliberate understatement also to make a point.

El antimilitarismo, las simpatias republicanas, el laicismo anticlerical, son el resultado moral de estas historias de infancia, nunca proclamado en voz alta, siempre atenuado a traves de breves pinceladas que operan como litotes , como si el escritor desconfiara de las afirmaciones enfaticas.

The gruesome sexual assault affixes the poet's gaze, and his response is constructed with contrasting hyperbole and litotes : "I grasped with sudden shock a scene less pure." (16) The violence depicted here reinforces the death imagery outside the chapel; by undermining the sacrament of holy matrimony depicted in the triptych, the sexual violence also contributes to our perception of spiritual emptiness; and finally the scene reinforces for the reader the elegiac sense of loss and decay.

Sentiments and litotes have plunged us deeper into the bottomless chasm and it is time to awaken.

His Introduction and first chapter serve rather to establish, poetically, a constellation of key terms or motifs that will reappear, with variations, throughout his study: habitus, human right, terra incognita, homelessness, stranger, savage, litotes , sacrifice.

"Denying the Contrary: More's Use of Litotes in the Utopia." Moreana 31-32:106-121.

Adcock's use of litotes draws attention to the complexity in immediately accessing truth.

The religious rhetoric is paired, yet again as is the case in Fallet's novel, with wishing ill upon the concierge--in this instance via litotes presented by the narrative agent: "Je ne veux aucun mal aux concierges, comme je ne veux aucun mal a la scarlatine, a l'impot ou tout simplement la mort" (35).

The multiple negations in stanza 1 reveal the difficulty of not yielding to dejection--a form of resistance that entails the performance of a decisive act of will (notice the strength of the litotes "not choose not to be"; 1.