A term you'll meet in literary technique.
Juxtaposition is the deliberate placement of two contrasting elements — words, images, scenes, characters, ideas — next to each other to highlight their differences or, more interestingly, their unexpected similarities. The word is from the Latin juxta ("near") + positio ("placing"). It is one of the most flexible techniques in literature because it operates at every scale, from the phrase to the entire structure of a novel.
The classic example is the opening of Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…
Each clause juxtaposes its opposite. The cumulative effect is not paradox but unease — the narrator refuses to settle on a single characterisation, and the reader is left holding the contradictions.
Modernist fiction made structural use of juxtaposition. In T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, a Cockney pub scene ("HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME") juxtaposes directly with allusions to Hamlet ("Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night"). The collision of registers — working-class English and Shakespeare — is the point. Eliot is arguing, by juxtaposition, that modernity is the place where these voices have collapsed into the same room.
In film, this technique has its own name: montage. Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, with its cuts between the massacre on the steps and the mother holding her child, is juxtaposition raised to a theory of cinema.
The three are cousins:
Juxtaposition is the broadest of the three; oxymoron is the narrowest. All oxymorons are juxtapositions; not all juxtapositions are oxymorons.
Juxtaposition is one of the most efficient ways a writer can make an argument without making it explicit. To set the rich landlord's manor next to the labourer's hovel is to say something about class without writing an essay about class. To cut from a politician's speech to a hospital ward is to argue about priorities without naming them. The technique works because human cognition automatically looks for relationships between things placed next to each other — and the writer who controls the placement controls the relationship the reader will infer.
When a passage or scene seems to be doing two unrelated things at once, ask why those two things and not others. The juxtaposition is the author's invisible argument; the relationship you infer between the parts is the meaning the author was building toward.
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