Metaphor as Rhetoric: The Problem of Evaluation

Abstract

were no conferences on metaphor, ever, in any culture, until our own century was already middle-aged. As late as 1927, John Middleton Murry, complaining about the superficiality of most discussions of metaphor, could say, There are not many of them.' If we take what he said at face value, what we are doing in this symposium appears as part of an intellectual movement that is--to use the word that Thucydides uses to set things up for his history--one of the greatest in the history of thought. Explicit discussions of something called metaphor have multiplied astronomically in the past fifty years. This increase is not simply parallel to the vast general increase in scholarly and critical writing. Shakespeareans have multiplied too, as have scholars of Homer, of Dickens, and of Charles the Second. But students of metaphor have positively pullulated. The bibliographies show more titles for 1977, for example, than for--well, the truth is that I refuse to do the counting to make this point, but I'll wager a good deal that the year 1977 produced more titles than the entire history of thought before 1940. We shall soon no doubt have more metaphoricians than metaphysicians-or should that be metamorticians, the embalmers of dead metaphor? I have in fact extrapolated with my pocket calculator to the year 2039; at that point there will be more students of metaphor than people.