Life as opera: A Cultural Metaphor in Chinese

Abstract

This chapter argues that life is an opera is a cultural metaphor with a rich cultural schema, representing an important aspect of the conceptualization of life in Chinese culture, and characterising cultural cognition of the Chinese as a cultural group. In this cultural metaphor, the source domain, opera, is a cultural category, referring specifically to Chinese opera, with Beijing opera as its prototype. While this metaphor is instantiated richly in the Chinese language, this chapter focuses on its salient manifestation in multimodal format in Chinese culture as cultural artefacts. More specifically, “cultural artefacts” refers to song lyrics, calligraphies, paintings and photographs. The study of multimodal manifestation of this cultural metaphor reinforces the earlier finding based on linguistic evidence that the life is an opera metaphor in Chinese culture contrasts with the life is a play metaphor in the West, representing a core component of the Chinese cultural conceptualization of life. The chapter also discusses how three kinds of experience, cultural, bodily and linguistic, interact, giving rise to such metaphorical conceptualization in cultural cognition.