Antithesis

Placing opposite ideas or words side by side, so that one illuminates the other through contrast.

In The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

I am not, properly speaking, a dead author, but an authoring corpse, for whom the grave was another cradle

The words "dead author" and "authoring corpse" swap places to oppose the writer who dies to the dead man who writes, and "grave" and "cradle" set the end and the beginning of life side by side.

Chapters I to IX: Death, plaster, and delirium, the narrator

a supremely philosophical work, of an uneven philosophy, now austere, soon playful, [...] and yet more than a pastime and less than an apostolate

Chapters I to IX: Death, plaster, and delirium, the narrator

Call me Nature or Pandora; I am your mother and your enemy

Chapters I to IX: Death, plaster, and delirium, Pandora (in Brás's delirium)

Living is not the same as dying; so say all the jewelers of this world, people who know their grammar well.

Chapters X to XVI: Childhood and Marcela, the narrator