Dead Metaphors Research Articles

Inventio and the Unsurpassable Metaphor

Paul Ricoeur begins Volume 1 of his Time and Narrative with an investigation of time meditation Book XI of Augustine's Confessions. In Ricoeur's general characterization of Augustine's time meditation, he calls attention to aporetical character of pure reflection on time.1 Because of this intimate intertwining of argument and description, Ricoeur concludes that there is pure phenomenology of time Augustine; from that point he moves on to declare Time and Narrative's thesis, namely, that speculation on time is an inconclusive rumination to which narrative activity alone can respond. Such resolution, Ricoeur continues, is a poetical and not theoretical of word. Finally, Ricoeur allows that Augustine might be said in one sense to move toward poetic, narrative resolution fusion of argument and hymn.2 Later this first chapter, Ricoeur calls attention to Augustine's return to experience, articulated by language and enlightened by intellect3 to solve aporias he evokes. Ricoeur also claims that Augustine's meditation language is thus simply reformulated manner.4 However, Ricoeur does not show what he means by more rigorous either his own, or Augustine's, terms. Later, Ricoeur will claim that Augustine uses quasi-spatial terms, and that the metaphor of transit of events through present seems unsurpassable (indepassable). It is good metaphor, . Ricoeur then claims, surprising evocation of Hegel: There seems to be no concept that 'surpasses' (aufhebt) this metaphor.5 This essay will show that these statements of Ricoeur do not do justice to Augustine's attempt Book XI of Confessions to ground statements about time metaphysics that reveals being of time. Augustine's intention Book XI of Confessions is not to allow everyday expressions about measurement of time to stand as metaphors, nor to resolve them kind of poetic narrative fusion, but to ground them metaphysical order revealed God's light. I will argue that Augustine does indeed think he has theoretically resolved aporias he has evoked. He writes Chapter 26 of Eleventh Book, with definite tone of conclusion: From this [preceding argument] it is visible to me, that time is nothing else but distention [inde mihi visum est nihil esse aliud tempus quam distentionem] (XI 26).6 The light which being of time is visible is God's light, so I will argue that Augustine intends that we recognize that distentio animi has been grounded, that is, that it has indeed, although Augustine would not recognize Ricoeur's anachronism, become concept capable of an Aufhebung of its predecessors course of time meditation by having its place metaphysical order discovered. To enable us to see Augustine's intention this regard, I will examine his writings on metaphor, which place him squarely Aristotelian tradition that sees metaphor as transfer of sign from its proper signification to another. Working within such tradition, Augustine aims, process he calls inventio, to reduce signs he uses from metaphoric to proper (signa translata to signa propria), that is, precisely to reduce those expressions to what Ricoeur would call dead metaphors, that is, concepts. As such, Augustine's inventio is radically incompatible with Ricoeur's notion of living metaphor. I. Ricoeur on Metaphor In this section I will briefly sketch Ricoeur's theory of metaphor, as it is developed The Rule of Metaphor.7 In eight Studies that make up this work, Ricoeur moves discussion of metaphor from use of word as the unit of reference, where it was consigned by classical rhetoric, to discussing it on hermeneutic level, where discourse is under consideration. In this movement, we move from substitution theory of metaphor to theory, which tension develops between two conflicting interpretations, literal one, which is nonsensical, and figurative one, that refigures nonsensical, and figurative one, that refigures world, creating second-level reference. …

Ironic Context-Free Ironies in Thai as Conventionalized Implicatures

It is claimed that there are no lexical items in English which are carries of ironic meanings (Myers 1978). Thai is, to determine whether an expression is ironic or not depends on context. Similar to English, most cases of verbal irony in Thai are context-dependent (Panpothong 1996). Yet Thai has expressions which always convey the opposite of literal meaning. In this paper, I refer to them as context-free ironies. Like dead metaphors, these expressions start life as conversational implicature before by-passing their literal meaning. Thus, they are appropriately viewed as conventionalized ironic implicatures. The paper consists of three sections. In the first section, the definition of verbal irony adopted in this paper shall be provided. In the second section, examples of context-free irony in Thai shall be presented. And in the last section, the context-free ironies shall be viewed on the basis of Grice’s theory.

Oscar Wilde: Sexuality and Creativity in the Social Organism

OSCAR WILDE: SEXUALITY AND CREATIVITY IN THE SOCIAL ORGANISM KATHLEEN McDOUGALL Ottawa, Ontario Oscar Wilde, like many of his contemporaries, grappled with the authority of scientific naturalism, the scientific movement that dominated the second half of the nineteenth century and that led to the widespread view that society, ruled by the laws of nature, was geared to collective survival rather than individual fulfillment. In a world dominated, from an evolutionary point of view, by procreation and other forms of dutiful production, Wilde endeavored to defend a nonprocreative eros allied with artistic creativity. This involved drawing upon various discourses, in particular scientific discourse, to fashion a range of credible versions of self, each featuring a sexual/creative mode. In this essay, I will focus on the version of self that Wilde put forward most consistently and that he featured in a narrative, threaded through various texts, of "the artistic life [as] ... a long and lovely suicide" (Letters 185). The increasing authority of science, in the nineteenth century, must be placed in the context of a general trend towards secularization, itself to be placed in the context of industrialization and the rise of the bourgeoisie (see Barnes and Shapin 93). Despite its contingent nature, however, Victorian science often figures as a cause producing effects in other discursive fields, as though it were a kind of primary discourse, one with a high "truth value," lending shape to supposedly more fictional discourses such as Wilde's formulations of self. This is because many Victorians felt that it was science that had invalidated the traditional defense against life's absurdity, namely Christianity. Since most thinkers embraced the principle whereby all manifestations of life can be accounted for by natural law — the principle of continuity or uniformity — a frequent reaction was to turn to science for the most credible arguments against the fears that it had created. Precisely because Darwin's arguments against anthropocenirism were so Victorian Review 23.2 (Winter 1997) KATHLEEN McDOUGALL2 1 3 convincing, for example, it was felt that the relevance of human aspirations had to be re-established in Darwinian terms — hence the idea of certain human beings as evolution's product and pilot, summing up the best that has gone before and pointing the way towards the fullest realization of humanity's potential. Wilde was very well-informed in scientific matters, as attested by his Oxford notebooks, and various aspects of scientific theory are featured in Wilde's construction of an erotic/aesthetic mode of being. For the purposes of this essay, I will be singling out those theories that contributed to the idea of society as an organism composed of interdependent parts. This old analogy was rejuvenated thanks, largely, to cell theory. In 1858, for example, Rudolf Virchow's Die Cellularpathologie compared the body to "a state in which every cell is a citizen," and defined disease as "civil war" (qtd. in Singer 413). This metaphor is the converse of Paul Bourget's description, now a mustquote in discussions of late-nineteenth-century fears of degeneration, of the individual as a "social cell," one that must subordinate its energy to that of the larger organism, lest social decadence set in.1 In the same vein, Wilde wrote in one of his Oxford notebooks: The history of every nation ... is ... the passage from cantonal individuality to national unity: the growth of an organism in fact. . . . The division of Labour, the differentiation of function, the evolution of organisms can be illustrated from History as clearly as from the microscope. (117) This quotation demonstrates how the social organism was a "dead metaphor" in the late nineteenth century (Pick 180); the literalness with which it was employed reinforced the notion of a powerless self permeated by biological processes. Bourget's description of social health in terms of energy use illustrates how "degeneration is the cultural counterpart of the second law of thermodynamics" (Brush 14). This law, also called the law of energy dissipation, "asserts that although the total quantity of energy remains constant, its quality or 'usefulness' is continually being degraded" (10). Thus nature is running down, as all matter tends towards a state of uniform inertness. In the very long term this...

The Rise and Fall of Black Britain

As if to confirm the nostrum that all things cultural and economic are transnational, poetry's stock in the U.K. has soared in the nineties, much as it has here in the U.S. Individual issues are up, and the entire portfolio is performing well: small poetry presses are thriving, Penguin has revived its once-seminal Modern Poets series with great fanfare, and poetry has even been assigned various civic tasks, from humanizing the London Underground to (literally) reporting the evening news. There as here, established page-poets are along for the ride, and the odd performance poet of an earlier generation gets paid her ritual respects. But the real catalysts of the poetry boom are younger folks-grandchildren of Albion, in the words of poetry activist Michael Horowitz-who, like their counterparts in the U.S., work in a variety of styles across the line dividing hiphop from highbrow. Often reluctant to assume the mantle of poet, they crowd -some gratefully, some sheepishlyunder spoken word, the modish umbrellalabel the press has eagerly held aloft. The term has become so hip and hyped, especially since the triumphant I994 and I995 tours of Manhattan's Nuyorican Poets Cafe, that nowadays you can't swing a dead metaphor without hitting a poetry slam. As with their Nuyorican counterparts, part of the cachet of the new U.K. poken-word artists is that their skins and their voices cover a delicious range of tones. After an uneasy decade in which it was merely touchy, what's now called the black-and-Asian experience in Britain is once again hot, and Albion's grandkids are understood to speak authentically to it and for it. Fred D'Aguiar, a poet and novelist of Guyanese descent who's had occasion to track such trends, calculates that there are at least sixty poets of Afro-Caribbean or Asian descent currently living and working in the U.K.; many of them-including John Agard,Valerie Bloom, Jean Binta Breeze, Merle Collins, Lemn Sissay, and Benjamin Zephaniah-are primarily per-

Resuscitation of dead metaphors

The Resuscitation of Dead Metaphors Sujata Iyengar “Incorporating the Antibody: Women, History and Medical Discourse,”a conference held at the University of Western Ontario, October 5–6, 1996, and the accompanying exhibition, “Speculations: Selected Works from 1983–1996,” by Barbara McGill Balfour. When I told the Canadian Customs official that I was presenting a conference paper, she languidly enquired what the conference was called. “Incorporating the Antibody,” I replied unthinkingly. She perked up and scrutinized me more closely. “Are you bringing any samples?” she fired back. I looked back at her blankly. “Specimens?” she continued. She laughed at my bewildered gaze. “You’re just reading a paper, right? You’re not carrying any viruses?” I finally and belatedly awoke to my own metaphor and hastened to reassure her that I studied English, not epidemiology, and that the only infectious agents I might be harboring would be the cold viruses I’d contracted on the plane. I recount this anecdote because it illustrates some of the points that “Incorporating the Antibody: Women, History and Medical Discourse” succeeded gloriously in making: namely, that we have become so accustomed to hearing medical discourse employed in figurative contexts that we are no longer alert to its full implications, and that, conversely, practitioners of medicine just as frequently fail to examine the assumptions and consequences of the metaphorical language that they themselves borrow from imaginative writing and other disciplines. The conference title, “Incorporating the Antibody,” expressed, according to conference organizers Elizabeth Harvey and Barbara McLean (Western Ontario), a desire for interdisciplinary feminist scholarship to reclothe with flesh (to re-incorporate) the increasingly disembodied dry bones of medical discourse about women (who have been historically figured as “anti-bodies” in binary opposition to men) and to provide a kind of antidote or antibody to medical and rhetorical complacency. The conference attracted participants from three continents and several walks of life. Speakers included professors, graduate students, and independent scholars of English Literature, Anthropology, History, and American Studies; health-care workers from Australia, Canada, and the U.S. (some of whom expressed anxiety at the growing commercialization of their fields and its uneasy alliance with care-giving); professional and amateur artists; community activists; and concerned parents. Plenary speaker Emily Martin (Princeton) spoke of her wish to revive or recover clichés and dead medical metaphors and follow them through to their logical conclusions. Her beautifully illustrated presentation on “The Woman in the Flexible Body” began by contrasting early twentieth-century images of the body as machine or fortress, protected from a germ-laden, disease-ridden outside world by the skin, with the “flexible,” three-dimensional, transparent body more familiar to us from images over the past decade. Early depictions of the body’s immune system figure the body as a fortress or castle, surrounded by ramparts and battlements; in this model, the working body and its parts function like a stable mechanical apparatus. More recent images, in contrast, display the body’s struggle against infection as one that takes place both inside and outside the body; they use three-dimensional imaging techniques to treat the skin as an active, permeable boundary rather than a barricade, and the healthy human body as a system working according to the rules of chaos theory—quick, subtle, and responsive to infinitesimal changes in its environment. 1Martin found that these metaphors of flexibility and adaptability travel between popular and scholarly writing on the body’s immune system and advertising campaigns for, among other things, ink-jet printers and employment agencies, and suggested that chaos models might offer us a new way of regarding women’s health. Such a model might, for example, regard menopause as the body’s dextrous response to changing conditions rather than as the shutdown of “normal” functions. She also offered a caveat: while the flexible body might seem to offer us a new and exciting way of looking at the world, it appears in current advertising campaigns as the telosof a late capitalist neo-Darwinism. In today’s employment market, “flexibility” is the key to survival. The ways in which we figure our bodies reflect our historical notions of selfhood and identity. The postmodern subject’s constantly...

The problem of dead metaphors

Defendant la these selon laquelle l'usage metaphorique des phrases s'accompagne d'un contenu cognitif, l'A. etudie le probleme des metaphores mortes qui consiste a se demander pourquoi, ayant perdu sa force metaphorique, la metaphore acquiert telle signification litterale precise, que D. Davidson designe par une part de langage

Presence, Analogy, and Earth in the Balance

Vice-President Albert Gore, Jr.'s bestselling book on environment, Earth In Balance, has generated a storm of controversy. Admirers, such as Lance Morrow of Time magazine and Martin Peretz of New Republic, argue that Gore speaks with a certain rare passionate authenticity, a ring of unfakable that is rare enough in (usually ghostwritten) outpourings of politicians (Morrow, 1992). Such opinions won Gore 13th annual Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. Detractors, on other hand, call Gore an out-and-out radical and maintain that the heart of his world view is an apocalyptic vision of an Earth teetering on brink of destruction (Bailey, 1992). They dispute Gore's evidence (Lucian, 1992) and come close accusing him of deception (Easterbrook, 1992). The heart of book, and sections that make supporters and detractors Gore most uncomfortable, consists of three analogies. The first is Gore's comparison of nuclear war environmental difficulties facing world. The second, and most disconcerting, is Gore's likening of civilization's relationship earth with that of a dysfunctional family. The third is a familiar one; he compares effort needed Marshall plan. These three analogies focus argument of book. The first provides an interpretive framework for magnitude of problem; second suggests a language describe spiritual issues behind problem and solution; third structures proposals necessary save Earth. Gore's use of analogies gives book its rhetorical power or, in Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's terms, gives his arguments. The ill-defined concept of has tantalized argumentation scholars since English translation of The New Rhetoric in 1969. As Karon (1989) argues, presence, loosely translated as attention paid or importance accorded an argument, is a critical element in rhetorical theory of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca; if goal of argument is to induce or increase mind's adherence theses presented for its assent (1969, p. 4), then attention granted those theses is of utmost salience. Presence, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca state, is of paramount importance technique of Yet is ambiguous. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca identify it as both a psychological and a rational mode of argumentation. Its relationship rest of their rhetorical theory is uncertain. There is no analysis of its role in uses of analogy, metaphor, example, quasi-logical argumentation, or any of other strategies Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca forward. The secondary literature is equally scant. Only Karon (1989) and Kauffman and Parson (1990), and Leroux (1992) comment upon presence at length. Karon's intriguing analysis is concerned with what presence reveals about Perelman's epistemology. Kauffman and Parson comment insightfully on relationship between metaphor and presence, but they are interested in use of dead metaphors. Rather than detailing of presence, they study strategic absence of presence. Leroux (1992) opens most useful path an analysis of presence. His discussion of presence, situated within development of a critical vocabulary for understanding of style, emphasizes function of presence. He argues that style is initial encounter through which auditors apprehend meaning and that presence, treated as a stylistic device rather than a philosophical concept, can be useful for understanding the language variations and tactics [that] can enlarge or vivify a subject. Leroux notes important role that analogy can play in creating presence and suggests that presence is one way through which critics can collapse troublesome form/content distinction. In this essay, I extend work of these authors, particularly Leroux, by exploring relationship between analogy and presence through a critique of Earth in Balance. …

The Great Chain of Being

THE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING / Gary Fincke "Three generations of imbecUes are enough." Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1927 1 Too Little Air There, on her carpet, we sat Our year-old sons, and my cousin Watched me count the handicaps In her firstborn until I froze Like four legs in the headlights. An accident, the doctor had Told her, too little air, citing The bride thesaurus of cause. 1 nodded like someone saving His job in an office of Ues: Her son crawled Uke he's Ughted On the huge, invisible web Of God. "My sister's boy has A problem, too," she murmured. "Both of us are moving closer To cities so this never Happens again." Too Uttle air In Pennsylvania, in Georgia. Too little air in the room Where we stared from one boy to The other, so quiet, so long, We might have been practicing Conservation, as if that room Had been sealed by landslide, and We were finding the essential, Slow rhythms of survival. 2 Vulcan and the Fire King Planet Vulcan had to be there, hidden between Mercury and the sun. What else, according to Newton, could vary an orbit? What better name For a planet so close to molten, in theory, The Missouri Review · 105 A hideout where Satan might be perfecting heU? But when Vulcan stayed unspotted, the mystique of Congruence stuck science to the keyhole until, Soon enough, the impetus of impatience brought The first sighting, the second, astronomers claiming Discovery. There, they said, pointing the lens. There. And there, the nineteenth-century, fireproof women And men headed playbUls by surviving tortures, Taking advantage of expectation's effect On the eyes, one way we tend the infrastructure Of error, relying, like Christians, upon The necessity of the unobserved, as awed As the audience for "Chabert the Fire King," who Qimbed into his personal woodstove with raw steaks And emerged, later, with a meal, well done, sitting To eat after visiting Vulcan's test kitchen. Soon enough, a royal family of magicians Could enter fire, reappear unscathed, dUuting The Bible with the commonplace of Ulusion. Soon enough, the frequent tracts on explanation, Scientists clamoring their revisionist clues Until, finaUy, the appearance of the cage Of fire, this woodstove open in front to appease The jaded. There, they said, there he is, beUeving Again, the Fire King standing in towering flames Like the personification of a planet. 3 The Little Moron In health class, eighth grade, we learned The descending categories Of the Stanford-Benet: You couldn't do worse, if you Made a mark, than idiot. We knew one who loved Urne soda And laughed at the end of a leash In his backyard. We saw imbecUes Bused in and out of half-days In the resources room, and we told, In the haUs, little moron jokes: The Uttle moron was playing 106 · The Missouri Review Gary Fincke With matches and burned the house down. "Your daddy's going to kül you When he gets home," his mother said, But the Uttle moron laughed and laughed Because he knew his daddy Was asleep on the couch. We laughed and laughed at everything The Uttle moron did. Why would He take his ruler to bed? we asked. He wanted to see how long he slept; And he wanted, joke by joke, To bring the dead metaphors To life—time, butter, and fire Flying out his busy window. "That wUl do," our teachers said. "Three generations of imbecUes Are enough," the Chief Justice said, In 1927, supporting The eugenics Record Office, Which wanted to sterilize everyone Deemed unfit. Harry Laughlin, Superintendent, hoped to eUminate, In two generations, the submerged tenth Of our population. He meant the blind, The deaf, the orphans and the homeless; He meant the poor and the stupid, And the Supreme Court backed him up, Finding a "clear and present danger" In the famUy tree of the Bucks— Who were Ulegitimate and poor; Who were Emma, Carrie, and Vivian Who made enough of these morons, Declared deficient at seven months After this expert testimony: "There is a look about the baby That is not quite normal, but What it is I can...

What do idioms really mean?

The “dead” metaphor view of idiomaticity suggests that idioms were once metaphoric but have lost their metaphoricity over time and now are equivalent to simple literal phrases such that blow your stack = “to get very angry,” crack the whip = “to exert authority,” and spill the beans = “to reveal a secret.” The purpose of the present studies was to demonstrate that idioms are not dead metaphors but have more complex meanings that are motivated by conceptual metaphors linking idiom phrases with their figurative interpretations. Six experiments are reported that examine the difference between idioms and their literal paraphrases. A first study examined people's intuitions about different knowledge domains to illustrate that the meanings of idioms are consistent with the source-to-target domain mappings of the conceptual metaphors that motivate these phrases' figurative meanings. The data from Experiments 2 and 3 indicate that people view idioms as having more complex meanings than do their roughly, equivalent literal paraphrases. Experiments 4 through 6 show that idioms are most appropriate to use and easiest to comprehend when they are encountered in discourse situations that are consistent with the entailments of the conceptual metaphors that motivate these phrases' idiomatic meanings. The findings from these studies suggest that idioms are not dead metaphors with simple figurative interpretations. Instead, idioms have complex meanings that are motivated by independently existing conceptual metaphors that are partly constitutive of everyday thought.

Why idioms mean what they do.

This reply to Kreuz and Graesser (1991) expands on some of the theoretical and empirical issues discussed in an article on idiom interpretation by Nayak and Gibbs (1990). Specifically addressed are (a) the generality of Nayak and Gibbs's earlier findings on emotion idioms to idioms representative of other conceptual categories, (b) Nayak and Gibbs's characterization of the dead metaphor theory of idiomaticity, (c) the need for a componential analysis of idioms, and (d) a problem in the design and interpretation of one of Nayak and Gibbs's experimental studies

Deconstructing the Metaphor: Empty Spaces in Calderonian Drama

Aristotle, in Rhetoric, praised metaphor as the greatest thing by far for poetry,1 and poets and critics have generally upheld this view. Wayne Booth surmised in 1978 that shall soon have more metaphoricians than metaphysicians-or should that be metamorticians, embalmers of dead metaphor?2 Such theoretical luminaries as Roman Jakobson, Paul Ricoeur, Jean Cohen, Gerard Genette, Tzvetan Todorov, and Paul de Man, among others, look closely at metaphor in their elaboration of a neo-rhetoric. In an essay entitled Metaphor and Cultivation of Intimacy, Ted Cohen writes: These are good times for friends of metaphor. They are so salutary that we are in danger of overlooking some very thorny underbrush as we scramble over high road to figurative glory.3 This paper will attempt to foreground underbrush-begging reader's pardon for mixed metaphor-encoded in Calderonian drama.

The Death of Dead Metaphor

METAIVIETAPHORICAL ISSUES The Death of Dead Metaphor George Lakoff Department of Linguistics University of California, Berkeley The term qdead metaphorq is a holdover from a traditional folk theory of language that has turned out not to be workable. According to the old theory, the locus of metaphor was language not thought, ordinary everyday language was qliteral,q and only novel poetic or rhetorical expressions were candidates for being metaphors. Metaphorical qlifeq was seen in poetic novelty alone, and mundane unpoetic language supported no metaphorical life. A qdeadq metaphor was defined relative to that theory as a linguistic expression that had once been novel and poetic, but had since become part of mundane conventional language, the cemetary of creative thought. As we saw in this column (L4, 000-000), the term qliteralq is a cluster con- cept, defined relative to the old theory. When empirical research showed the old theory to be wrong, the term qliteralq split. The four senses making up the cluster had to be distinguished, and one could no longer use qliteralq in its old overly simplistic sense in discussions of metaphor. Like qliteralq, qdead metaphor“ has been has been defined in a theory- dependent way. As that theory dissolves under the scrutiny of empirical research, the meaning of “dead metaphorq cannot remain constant. What were called dead metaphors inthe old theory have turned out to be a host of quite disparate phenomena, including those metaphors that are most alive -- the ones that we use constantly in everyday thought. If one wants to keep the term qdead metaphorq, it will have to come to mean something very different in contemporary theories. To see where the problem lies, we need to consider some examples. Let us begin with a clear case, something that would be a dead metaphor in any theory, old or new: the word pedigree. The word comes from the Middle English pedegru, which in turn came from the Old French pie dc grue, which meant qfoot of a crane.“ Why foot of a crane? The answer is that family-tree diagrams of period used a three-line claw-shaped mark to indicate family lineage. The family-tree diagram looked like a crane’s foot. What was the metaphor‘? Conceptually, it was a mapping from one conventional image (a crane’s foot) to another (a family—tree diagram). The term for the source image, pie de grue, was used for the target image, the family-tree diagram. At the time this metaphor was alive, it was a one-shot metaphor, not a sys- tematic one. It was used for one term only. It did not map one complex conceptual structure onto another, as rich metaphors do. It merely mapped one conventional mental image onto another. The was no whole system of source-domain terminol- ogy mapped onto a corresponding system of target-domain terminology, as for example in the LOVE IS A JOURNEY metaphor discussed in this column (L3, 215- 225); only one expression from the source domain was used. One image-mapping, one linguistic mapping, and nothing else.

Personification in Piers Plowman by Lavinia Griffiths

REVIEWS LAVINIA GRIFFITHS. Personification in Piers Plowman. Piers Plowman Studies III. Woodbridge, Suffolk, and Dover, N.H.: Boydell and Brewer, 1985. Pp. ix, 125. $25.00. Given the tendency ofcriticism to find personification the most mechanical and uninteresting ofallegorical devices, and the familiarity ofits promi­ nence in Piers Plowman, one expects that a study called Personification in Piers Plowman will prove a tired war pony trotting a well-worn track. Lavinia Griffiths's concise addition to the Brewer Piers Plowman Studies is anything but that. Griffiths finds the current state ofliterary theory, to say nothing ofPiers Plowman criticism, propitious for a recognition that in personification "The two poles ofthe figure and the relation between them are essentially problematic" and that the figure "is transformed as it is drawn into the narrative and stylistic conditions ofPiers Plowman" (p. 1). She approaches personification not as the giving ofan abstract name to a figure in an action but "as the grammatical transformation ofa noun or other part of speech into a proper name" (p. 5). As a result, she must approach Langland's use of the figure through an analysis of how his rhetorical devices can be placed on a spectrum between commonplace usage or dead metaphor at one extreme and fully developed personifica­ tions at the other, and how difficult it is to tell at many points "whether the dreamer is talking about the constituents of the dream or simply the constituents ofhis own discourse" (p. 6). Griffiths draws on Mary Carruthers's argument that personification is "the obvious tool for exploring the nature and limitations of human language" (The Searchfor St. Truth, p. 40) as well as on her analysis ofthe "referential instability" (p. 44) of Langland's personifications; she also makes good use of recent analysis (like that of Maureen Quilligan) of allegory and word play. Her argument, however, illuminates especially how Langland presents even ostensibly simple concepts in words that "belong to a set of related often overlapping matrices, the systems of thought, ethical, psychological and economic which constitute a perplex­ ing intellectual world in which the dreamer wanders" (p. 21). As a result, "The discourse monopolizes the narrative, interpreting and criticising the story, and the subject ofthe discourse, the dreamer.... Personifications are not sustained as actants, and their readiness to revert to discourse undermines the completeness ofthe represented world" (p. 9). Griffiths focuses primarily on the B-text, making some use ofC where its alternative development is of special interest. Rather than offering a 195 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER complete reading of the poem, she focuses on a limited number of impor­ tant complexes of imagery, especially the Meed Debate, the Confession of the SevenDeadly Sins, Wit's Castle, andtheTreeof Charity.Asaresult, she can deal analytically with a problem central both to Langland's style and to his thought in an extremely useful way. She does not offer a systematic poetics of allegory, but places her argument in a number of pertinent perspectives.Especiallyusefulisherdiscussionofcontemporarynominalists and realists which argues that Langland offers an inherently "nominalist" allegoryinwhich"whatisbeingtransformedbymetaphorisnotathingbuta name, a term which becomes a proper name in a transformation which is formal and functional rather than ontological" (p. 45). Her conceptual frameworkisnot, however, historicalonly, butincludesperspectivesoffered by contemporary theorists and philosophers.Without using the vocabulary of any onereadership in such a way as to excludeothers, shemakes excellent use of Carruthers, Bloomfield and Barney, of M. R.Jung, Angus Fletcher and Anthony Nuttall, ofZumthor, Ricoeur, Todorov and Barthes, and of the categories devised by Inge Crossman to discuss metaphor in Proust. She offers convincing comparisons notonly betweenLangland'spersonifications and those of TheRomance oftheRose and Deguilleville, but with Spenser. Her conciseness results in an understated, lucid and suggestive analysis, illuminating rather than polemical. Precisely because it defines its scope so strictly, its observations will be ofreal use to those considering Langland's contemporaries, especially Chaucer in some of the respects in which he seems to differ most from Langland. ELIZABETH D. KIRK Brown University RALPH HANNA III. The Index ofMiddle English Prose. Handlist I: A Handlist of Manuscnpts Containing Middle English Prose in the Henry E. Huntington Library. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 1984. Pp. xiii, 81. £ 19.50. G. A. LESTER...

Viktor Shklovskij: Differance in Defamiliarization

of defamiliarization oppose life to death, the vital to the fossilized, created fullness to eroded emptiness, a graphic image to effacement and the empty algebraic symbol, aesthetic perception to habitual recognition, the lively force and beauty of a at its coining to worn stereotype and dead metaphor: in 1914, he inaugurated a metaphorics and a rhetoric that traced a consistent trajectory for more than a decade of Formalist literary-critical theorizing. He began (in The Resurrection of the Word) by defending Futurist poetic experimentation and neologisms, protesting against a prevailing graveyard of and praising Futurism as an indispensable effort to induce perception of the word and, immediately beyond it, of the world and its things: Only the creation of new forms of art can restore to man sensation of the world, can resurrect things and kill pessimism.' He went on to make well-known attempts to distinguish poetic from practical language on the basis of the former's perceptibility (oshchutimost). But Shklovskij first consolidated these views in his 1917 essay Art as Device, which can be considered his chief contribution to the first stage of Formalist analysis.2 In this essay aesthetic perception openly

Nietzsche, Metaphor, and Truth

ions are indeed metonymies, but this not end of story, for at least in some instances i.e., in cases in which we come to believe in reality of our own tropes we give them a causal efficacy which they originally did not possess. Indeed, Nietzsche suggests that this what sets us apart from animals: we are able to place our behavior under the mastery of abstractions . . . to volatilize perceptual metaphors into a schema.3' This not only allows a much greater degree of organization of our perceptual metaphors than would otherwise have been possible, but also promotes eventual development of a world of concepts juxtaposed to immediately given sensations. It a firmer, more general, better known, more human world and thus seen as regulative and imperative, even though it only composed of concepts which are residues of metaphors.32 Thus we forget 28 111/4, 194(04), p. 69. 29 R, p. 319; cf.111/4, 19(415), p. 74 and 19(236), pp. 8i-8z. 30 UWL, III/z, p. 374 = PN, p. 46. 3' Ibid., p. 375. 32 Ibid., pp. 375-76. I90 LAWRENCE M. HINMAN This content downloaded from 157.55.39.181 on Thu, 29 Sep 2016 06:01:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms metaphorical origins of our own concepts, imbue them with an independence and causal efficacy which they did not originally possess, order them in accordance with schemata which are themselves of metaphorical origins, and then place ourselves under domination of that world which was originally of our own construction. Our metaphors thereby acquire an independence and power insofar as they are no longer taken as metaphors but rather as measure of reality itself; in becoming dead metaphors, they come to rule us. A language, as one recent writer on metaphor has suggested, is nothing but a necropolis for dead metaphors.33 Thus we see full scope of Nietzsche's claim that language fundamentally metaphorical and that truth but a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms. If we think of metaphor as a from one sphere to another, we see metaphor permeating process of knowing. Starting from immediate data of sensation (the nerve stimulus, according to Nietzsche), there a in two directions. On one hand, a metonymical carrying over from those data to an imagined external cause of them, a thing-in-itself which imputed cause of our sensations of it; on other hand, a metaphorical carrying over of those nerve stimuli into images. The process continues in both directions. As we then make another metaphorical transition from images to words, so we organize external world into particular kinds of objects which are put into pigeonholes fashioned by our own vocabulary. Finally, as we move from words to concepts, we see these individual external objects as manifestations of a world of essences. In treating each of these transitions as metaphorical, Nietzsche wants to underscore fact that these involve movements between radically different spheres of reality and that it meaningless to talk about a literal translation from one level to another. Yet there a second sense in which this entire process involves a over. Insofar as we carry over some aspects of an experience (and omit others) and thereby come to treat similar experiences as though they were equal, we order our experiences metaphorically; in other words, categories and concepts in terms of which we order experience have no more epistemic justification than other metaphors, except for fact that we have forgotten their metaphorical origins and let them harden into normative measures of reality itself. 33 'As,' or The Limits of Metaphor, New Literary History, VI, i (Autumn, 1974), p.

Novel and Conventional Metaphors: A Matter of Methodology

A central methodological question that any theory of metaphor has to confront is what type of metaphor should serve as its paradigm case. Anyone familiar with the literature has noticed that in general literary critics and rhetoricians are concerned with the so-called 'novel,' 'imaginative' or 'poetic' metaphors, whereas linguists and philosophers of language typically deal with 'conventional,' 'frozen' or even 'dead' metaphors. Those disciplines, like cognitive psychology and anthropology, which have developed an interest in the subject fairly recently, tend to use both living and dead metaphors as their examples, but they rarely present any explicit motivation for having chosen one type rather than another. Actually, the number of authors within any discipline who address this problem at all is very small. One obvious explanation for this phenomenon, as well as for the differences among the disciplines in the type of metaphor they choose to consider, is this: each discipline has asked different questions about metaphor and has thus selected the paradigm cases that most naturally fit its interests, usually without being concerned with the adequacy of these cases for other points of view on metaphor. Since literary critics and rhetoricians concentrate on the poetic or persuasive function of metaphor, their examples tend to be drawn from original poetry and oratory and are thus closer to the 'novel' type; linguists and philosophers of language wish to understand the role of metaphor in the semantics of natural language, and their examples are therefore drawn from conventionalized modes of usage supplied by the lexicon of a native speaker; cognitive psychologists and anthropologists are interested in the way metaphor affects and/or reflects the cognitive and behavioral processes of an individual or a culture, and are therefore preoccupied with metaphor function rather than metaphor type.

Metaphor as Rhetoric: The Problem of Evaluation

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.

Cliches, Trite Sayings, Dead Metaphors, and Stale Figures of Speech in Composition Instruction

Cliches, Trite Sayings, Dead Metaphors, and Stale Figures of Speech in Composition Instruction

LIVING AND DEAD METAPHORS

Journal Article LIVING AND DEAD METAPHORS Get access William Charlton William Charlton Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 15, Issue 2, SPRING 1975, Pages 172–178, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjaesthetics/15.2.172 Published: 01 February 1975

Expression

Whether the word ‘passion’, as indicating the suffering or affection from without of a soul, is by now no more than a dead metaphor, surviving from an antique conception of the mind; whether, indeed, there is any way open to us of determining the passivity or otherwise of our inner life, apart, that is, from how it strikes us, from how we are prompted to describe it, are not questions that I can take up this evening. It is enough for my purpose that for much of the time our feelings, our emotions, our inclinations are as fluctuating or as imperious as if they were not totally under our control. We are elated: we are dejected: we get angry, and then our anger gives place to a feeling of absurdity: we remain in love with someone who is lost to us but whom we cannot renounce: we are interested in something, and suddenly we are bored, or frightened that we will be bored: we see a stranger, someone who is nothing to us, who is poor or crippled, and we feel guilt: someone does something wrong or foolish, and we are unaccountably transported by laughter, by ‘sudden glory’ as Hobbes called it, knowing what it was about, and then, as unaccountably, we are thrown down. Man is, in Montaigne's famous phrase, une chose ondoyante, a creature of inner change and fickleness.