Matthew Potolsky offers an insight into this process that has much to tell us about how Muslim misery memoirs gain the assent of their Western audience: "Details in realist works highlight the artist's observational fidelity.… Yet the realist detail is also a highly conventional stylistic technique. Jakobson, for example, argues that realist details are based on … metonymy. Unlike metaphor, which compares dissimilar things, metonymy substitutes one thing for something associated or close to it.… Realist metonymies create an entire world by way of such associations: one or two details imply the possibility of infinite details 'outside' the scene that might have been described." Realist details in Muslim misery memoirs rely on such associations, but they are always deeply imbued with a particular kind of exoticism.

DEFINE: Distinguishes metonymy (substitution by association) from metaphor (comparison of dissimilar things) as the engine of realist world-building.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 241