Metaphor as argument: A stylistic genre-based approach

Abstract

One of the most intriguing questions in both stylistic and rhetorical analyses relates to determining textual effect on readers, aesthetic or otherwise. Whether the power of the text is directly associated with the role of the text producer and his or her intentions, the linguistic, paralinguistic, extralinguistic and situational context of the text, the background and socio-cognitive expectations of the reader, or a combination of some or all of these factors (or other factors) is a question that is still the subject of stylistic and rhetorical analysis today. This article is a further step in this direction. It attempts to investigate one dimension of textual effect, namely uniformity in reader reaction to an argumentative poem entitled Dinner with the Cannibal, by focusing on the roles that genre and metaphor play in ideologically positioning readers. It argues, on the one hand, that literature is the dominant genre in this hybrid literary-argumentative poem, channelling the readers’ initial interpretations almost exclusively in the interest of more traditional literary interpretative approaches. On the other hand, and more importantly, it focuses on the role that metaphor, as a cognitive link between text producer and reader, plays in the construction of an extremely controlled, uniform interpretation of the argumentative dimension to the poem. The overall effect of the way genre and metaphor function in this argumentative poem, it is concluded, is highly ideological.