Literary Metaphor Research Articles

Literary and Nonliterary Aspects of Metaphor

The difference between literary and nonliterary metaphor, from a psychological point of view, has received more attention since the early 1980s. In particular, Dedre Gentner's structure-mapping theory of metaphor has been the basis for a number of stimulating insights in this matter. The present contribution aims to develop these views in light of the newly advanced empirical study of literature. In particular, a systematic distinction is made among linguistic, psychological, and social aspects of metaphor in order to identify a number of issues pertaining to literary metaphor more clearly than was possible before the advent of such empirical studies. An encompassing discourse view of these aspects is presented, which facilitates a discussion of the relations between metaphor and analogy, between the cognitive structure and the function of metaphors, and between metaphor and various types of discourse.

Voices of Greek Women: Two Introductory Comments

Voices of Greek Women Two Introductory Comments The conference "Voices of Greek Women" organized by Gail HolstWarhaft and hosted by Cornell University on 9-10 March 1990 was a remarkable event for many reasons, but perhaps above all because it linked so many discourses. Conferences by definition bring together scholars to dissect disciplines, texts . .., and each other. This one was, in my experience, unique in drawing not just scholars and critics from the United States, Australia, Denmark, and Greece, but also poets, novelists, and singers. Women artists, invited to such occasions (if at all) only to divert and entertain over banquets when the "serious" discussion is over, were given back their voice in the interpretation and analysis of their own craft. The result was a lively and constructive dialogue on production and performance, as well as on diverse academic approaches. Certain schools of post-structuralist criticism (including some feminist ones) create such a distance between "author" and "text" that the producer—let alone the performer—is excluded, misinterpreted, discarded. That imbalance was redressed, as Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, Mariza Koch, Olga Broumas, and Alki Zei each demonstrated through performance the emotive power of word and song (image as sound), yet at the same time contributed generously throughout to debates on questions like: Is there such a thing as "women's writing"? What is the role of experience in the creation, reception, and interpretation of literature and music? Can folk song still be creatively exploited in our technologized, postmodernist world? Another unusual feature of the conference was the wide generic representation of "Greek women's voices": lamenting voices from Homeric epic, Akritic song, modern poetry and song; protesting and heroic voices of suffering and endurance during the Resistance, informally narrated; voices from contemporary fiction, bio-mythography , poetry and song relating personal and historical experiences, questioning conventional boundaries of gender, ethnicity, and language . But perhaps our most important contribution was to bring together , from new and diverse perspectives, the many generations of Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Volume 9, 1991. 141 142 Introductory Comments Greek culture and scholarship. Pat Easterling reminded us of the formidable power of woman's voice of lamentation in the Iliad; Nancy Sultan eloquently illustrated the interaction between κλÎ-ος and γόος in heroic song; Gail Holst-Warhaft bridged the gap between antiquity and the present, the literary and the oral/popular, the male and the female, in her treatment of the lament in modern prose, poetry, and song. Theirs are the three papers selected for inclusion in this issue of JMGS because they form a provocative introduction to articles on modern literary texts that, it is hoped, will appear in future issues. MARGARET ALEXIOU Harvard University What prompted the conference held at Cornell University was the long overdue need to recognize women as creative voices in modern Greek culture—and not only as poets and prose writers but also as song writers and composers. Although it is doubtful that anyone involved in modern Greek studies can be unaware of the contribution that women have made to modern Greek letters, there is still a lag between our appreciation of individual writers' works and our willingness to consider those works in terms of Greece's broader sociopolitical context. The voices that Greek women employ are no less affected by their cultural background than are men's voices; but since Greek society expects different things from women, it also expects them to speak a unique language meant to be evaluated in specific ways. In the small circles of Greek criticism where new theoretical models are being proposed and old ones discarded, it seemed timely to consider the forms, traditional as well as novel, used by Greek women to speak, sing, and write, and how the voices that women have adopted are related to the roles they are expected to play—and do play—in Greek society. Like all conferences, "Voices of Greek Women" reflected the personal prejudice of its organizer. To me, Greece is still a nation dominated by its oral tradition. In Greece, "voice" is not simply a literary metaphor. To discuss Greek poetry without hearing that poetry declaimed, intoned, or sung seems to me to deprive it of an essential element. Unlike...

Linguistic Models and Recent Criticism: Transformational-Generative Grammar as Literary Metaphor

Because the stated focus of transformational-generative grammar was on speakers' “knowledge of language,” early reader-oriented critics found this linguistic theory an attractive literary analogy. But as the generative model became a critical metaphor, both its internal, mental interests and its semantic aims were necessarily distorted to suit literary problems. The set-defining apparatus of generative grammar came to be read as a text-processing mechanism, its syntactic claims as a rudimentary theory of discourse. Yet recent critics have attacked, not the limitations of this model as revised for criticism, but the putative authoritarianism of linguistic study itself. This rhetorical strategy defines criticism against an outside field while masking the character of its own interdisciplinary efforts.

How to Do Things with Metaphor in Literature

How to Do Things with Metaphor in Literature

The Visual Elegance of Ts'its'tsi'nako and the Other Invisible Characters in "Ceremony"

In his article Reader's Lessons in Ceremony, James Ruppert makes the observation about Leslie Silko's novel, [Ceremony] is not only a novel that presents a philosophical and cultural viewpoint, but a novel that teaches us how to read it and how to understand its special narrative structures (78). Later in the same article, while discussing the presence of formal constructions and their relationship to the absence of chapter breaks, he continues: This lack of expected breaking of the flow of the prose...discourages the reader from imposing a strict chronological order on the narrative, thus reinforcing the perception that the novel is a simultaneous, moment that circles out like the waves around a rock dropped in a quiet pond, rather than a linear progression of moments. (80) The understanding that Ceremony is circular rather than linear is easy to embrace given the evidence Ruppert presents in his article. However, Ruppert's circular-ring argument against a linear reading of ceremony still implies two-dimensionality; I would argue that the many stories and story-poems told by Silko's narrator and by the characters in the novel imply many more dimensions--of which only two (lack of organized chapter breaks and the unified moment) are explained by Ruppert. In fact, if one were to characterize the novel with visual imagery, the better image might be a collection of fragments from a number of seemingly unrelated objects. Using a more literary metaphor, one might describe the story as nearly coherent shards of stories mixed with fragments of color and light, fractured images, disjointed personalities, dismembered voices, and elements of incompatible realities segmented, then recombined in new juxtapositions; even so, this description only addresses the things in the story that are visible. It is arguable that there is even more happening in Ceremony beyond the visible; invisible characters seem to move through the text, carrying with them totems of goodwill and evil. These invisible characters and their roles in Ceremony are the ultimate purpose of this paper. Silko prefaces her novel with a brief story-poem told in stanzas. It is the story of Ts'its'tsi'nako, Thought Woman, the spider, namer and creator of all things in the universe. It ends with two stanzas that say Spider is thinking a story and the narrator is telling the story she is thinking. By implication, the narrator is saying that by telling the story she is creating a reality, an actual ceremony. The stanzas are an excellent, somewhat selfconscious, introduction into the novel, but they contain an interesting aberration. Silko's third stanza in the Thought-Woman story appears as:

Strategies for Solving Childrens' Problems Understood as Behavioral Metaphors

When a professional's understanding of literary metaphor is used as the basis for understanding behavioral metaphor, a child's symptomatic behavior is viewed as a communication about a problem in the child's social context. Six strategies are presented for solving children's problems and the metaphorical social-context problem.

Metaphor and literary comprehension: Towards a discourse theory of metaphor in literature

This essay presents a discourse-theoretical approach to the understanding of metaphor in literary texts. Three important functions of metaphor are distinguished, the expressive, the transactional and the interactional, which are related to three general dimensions of all discourse. The question is raised in how far the (predominantly transactional) cognitive function of metaphor is influenced by its literary or non-literary discourse status, which is made more specific by discussing the possible effect on the understanding of metaphor of the adoption of a literary attitude of reading. This is defined in terms of the E and P conventions, and the bearing of analogical processing on these conventions is discussed with reference to allegory and metaphor. Analogical processing at the level of language comprehension which is guided by the E and P conventions is thought to be responsible for the specifically literary comprehension of metaphor. The consequences for the identification, comprehension, and appreciation of metaphor are investigated and a proposal is made for a two-way distinction between explicit and implicit variants of these processes. Finally, a number of empirically testable hypotheses are formulated for further experimental study.

Norms for 204 Literary and 260 Nonliterary Metaphors on 10 Psychological Dimensions

Norms on 464 metaphors are presented for 10 dimensions representing ratings of comprehensibility, some perceived metaphoric qualities, imagery values, familiarity, and tenor-vehicle relatedness. The items were either literary metaphors selected from works of poetry (N = 204) or nonliterary metaphors generated by the experimenters (N = 260). Analyses of the normative data indicated that (a) the mean ratings of the metaphors were reliable (average Cronbach alpha = 0.88); (b) even so, individuals varied in their reactions to the metaphors; (c) the 10 dimensions correlated substantially with one another; and (d) literary and nonliterary metaphors showed similar patterns for the descriptive and relational statistics examined. These data demonstrate the need for metaphor researchers to consider multiple attributes if they are to achieve less confounded or factorial variation of theoretically motivated variables. The normative data provided here exhibit sufficient variation among items and independence among sca...

Metaphor and Historical Understanding

The centrality of metaphor in what and how we know has become widely appreciated in recent decades. Less well recognized, however, is that as a contextually determined phenomenon, metaphor operates in fundamentally different ways in divergent universes of discourse. To understand how metaphor functions in a particular discursive mode presupposes insight into the way that metaphor serves as a structural component of that order of discourse. From an epistemological standpoint, this requires that metaphor be perceived as characteristic of the type of conscious apprehension that gives rise to it. To discern, for example, the essentially depictive efficacy of literary metaphor, some conception is necessary of the role metaphors play in the prediscursive, presentational apprehension that typifies literary (as opposed, say, to hermeneutic) experience.1 Alternatively, grasping the basically heuristic function of metaphor in scientific discourse calls for appreciating the efficacy of figurative imagery in scientific knowledge.2 This same principle holds in the determination of how metaphor works in historical discourse. Determining the function of metaphor in historiography is no simple or straightforward task, however; for as with literary experience and scientific understanding, the nature of the discourse that is unique to the discipline (what it means to speak about something from an historical perspective) has long been an issue of scholarly debate. Yet insofar as the nature of historical discourse remains indeterminate, our understanding of the role that metaphor plays in historiography will likewise remain inconclusive. To assess the merits of competing claims about what it means to write history would far exceed the scope of this brief and schematic exposition. The approach to historical discourse that I have found most helpful in explicating the ways that metaphor operates in historical writing is that of Maurice Mandelbaum.3 Mandelbaum's incisive typology of forms of historical discourse affords a comprehensive conceptual basis for foregrounding what are in my view the three fundamental ways that metaphor functions in historiography: heuristically (as in scientific discourse), depictively (as in literature), and cognitively.

Can Psychology Help Reduce the Risk of Nuclear War?

Nuclear psychology, which began with the very best of intentions is, according to this article, doomed to failure and perpetual irrelevance unless it begins to take what the author refers to as a phenomenological approach to the subject. So far, too much attention has been given to "off-the-shelf' models derived from the psychological clinic and laboratory, and too little attention has been given to the actual perspective of nuclear policy makers, who are the people psychologists must influence if they hope to reduce the risk of a catastrophic nuclear war. The author attributes this trend to positivism, the belief that psychology is a natural science rather than one of the humanities. In his view, if psychologists wish to reduce nuclear risks, they must get more fully inside the viewpoints of policymakers, they must assume policymakers' roles at least in their imaginations, and only then will they come up with proposals that will make sense to the policy-making community. There are two requirements: (1) to obtain a greater understanding of what policymakers' thoughts and feelings are about during nuclear crises-those episodes when nuclear risks have been greatest, and (2) to know what it actually is like to have such thoughts and feelings at moments when the fate of the world is believed to be at stake. Importantly, this leads, or ought to lead, psychologists to the study of the Cuban missile crisis, the closest call by far to nuclear war between the superpowers. There is a great deal to be learned about the psychological reality of that moment of maximum nuclear danger in October, 1962. The author illustrates his argument with a literary metaphor drawn from John LeCarre 's The Little Drummer Girl. "She's panicked," Litvak announced suddenly to Becker's back. Puzzled, Becker turned and glanced at him. "She's gone over to them," Litvak insisted. His voice had a throaty instability. Becker returned to the window. "Part of her has gone over, part has stayed," he replied. "That is what we asked of her." "She's gone over!" Litvak repeated, rising on the swell of his own provocation. "It's happened with agents before. It's happened now... So what's her motivation? She's not Jewish. She's not anything. She's theirs. Forget her..." From the shallows of his sparse camp bed, Kurtz offered drowsy consolation. "Germany makes you jumpy Shimon. Ease off. What does it matter who she belongs to, so long as she keeps showing us the way?" (LeCarre, 1983)

Medicine as interpretation: the uses of literary metaphors and methods.

Theorists at the interface of medicine and the humanities have recently suggested that interpretation as a literary activity can be applied to the practice of clinical medicine. This article reviews such theories and their literary metaphors and methods. In pushing these ideas further, it is proposed that a number of guidelines can be applied to interpretation as a practical activity for clinical medicine.

Sickness as Cultural Performance: Drama, Trajectory, and Pilgrimage Root Metaphors and the Making Social of Disease

This paper examines the use of root metaphors in the description of social activity and especially the performance of sickness. It starts with a critical account of Susan Sontag's examination of the use of illness as metaphor in literature. There then follows a brief analysis of another account of society based on the discussion of creative literature-Kenneth Burke's "Dramatism," itself acknowledged as a source by Erving Goffman. Goffman's own expressed reservations about his supposed use of a dramatic metaphor are then extended to suggest that Goffman was more concerned with "performance" in a broader sense. The discussion of performative metaphors is then shifted by a critical consideration of Anselm Strauss and colleagues' view of sickness as manifold performances of work rather than drama, expressed in their metaphor of "trajectory." Sickness as a process compounded of many performances is further explored using ideas developed by the anthropologist Victor Turner toward the end of his life, in collaboration with his wife, Edith Turner. It is finally suggested that sickness as cultural performance enables us to understand the dialectical relationships between expressive and instrumental activities surrounding sickness. This in turn leaves room for the nonreductionist understanding, within a sociological framework, of individual idiosyncrasy, biological accident, and the discourse of healing.

Post-Holocaust Literature in Brazil: Jewish Resistance and Resurgence as Literary Metaphors for Brazilian Society and Politics

Post-Holocaust Literature in Brazil: Jewish Resistance and Resurgence as Literary Metaphors for Brazilian Society and Politics

Picasso's Visual Metaphors

From time I first saw a photograph of Picasso's Bull's Head (fig. 1), a remarkably realistic portrait made from a bicycle seat and handlebars, I was struck by its wry humor and mongrel nature of its medium. Once I even made up a departmental exam tentatively likening Picasso's sculpture to literary metaphor (the question was later deleted by a more orthodox colleague). But it wasn't until I happened upon an article by V. C. Aldrich on Visual Metaphor' that my bloodhound instincts were aroused. His article began with an intriguing quote from Picasso himself: My sculptures are plastic metaphors. It's same principle in painting.2 There it was! Picasso himself had verified my long-standing suspicion that there was such a thing as visual metaphor, and his Bull's Head was a prime instance. This article will explore definition and function of visual metaphor in selected paintings and sculptures from Picasso's works. Before rushing headlong into quicksand of interarts analogies, however, it would be wise at outset to mention at least three potential problems and my tentative solutions. First, quotation Aldrich draws on comes from a widely used but largely discredited biography of Picasso by his former mistress, Franqoise Gilot, and her art-journalist friend, Carlton Lake.3 Dore Ashton excluded Picasso quotations found in Gilot's biography from her own anthology of Picasso quotations, saying that the mixture of possible authentic statement and artful paraphrase seems to me to be of dubious value.4 Nevertheless, there is a grain of truth even in a self-serving or distorted paraphrase. Even forty-four distinguished artists who lodged public protest and supported Picasso's unsuccessful libel suit did not dismiss

Creativity, articulation, and psychotherapy.

Creativity, Articulation, and PsychotherapyAlbert RothenbergAlbert RothenbergAusten Riggs Center, Stockbridge, Massachusetts 01262.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:July 2017https://doi.org/10.1521/jaap.1.1983.11.1.55PDFPDF PLUS ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations AboutReferencesArieti S. (1976), Creativity: The Magic Synthesis, Basic Books, New York. Google ScholarArieti S. (1980), Man's spirituality and potential for creativity as revealed in mental illness, Comp. Psychiatry, 21, 436–443. Crossref Medline, Google ScholarBeres D. (1957), Communication in psychoanalysis and in the creative process: A parallel, J. Am. Psychoanal Assoc., 5, 408–423. Crossref Medline, Google ScholarBerlyne D. E. (1971), Aesthetics and Psychobiology, Appleton, Century, Crofts, New York. Google ScholarEdelson M. (1975), Language and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn. 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Creativity: Complex and HealthyOnline publication date: Go to citation Crossref Google Scholar6. Creativity in AdolescenceOnline publication date: Go to citation Crossref Google ScholarJames A. Knight7. The Spiritual as a Creative Force in the Person∗Online publication date: 13 July 2017. Go to citation Crossref Google Scholar Volume 11Issue 1Jan 1983 Information© 1983 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.PDF download

An analogical framework for literary interpretation

The ability to interpret literary works, which is essential to the writing of commentary, is treated as a product of analogical thinking. The framework proposed here addresses issues beyond the scope of current psychological models of text processing. This analogical framework is an attempted integration of theoretical ideas derived from models of analogical problem solving with ideas from the field of literary criticism. The use of analogy in problem solving is compared and contrasted with its use in understanding literary metaphors and allegories. A taxonomy of types of literary analogy is proposed as part of a task analysis of the interpretive process. A general model of the process of developing analogical interpretations is sketched. A major direction suggested for empirical research is to examine the types of textual elements that readers use to notice analogies and develop potential interpretations.

Effects of Shortened Exposure Time on the Creation of Literary Metaphors as Stimulated by Superimposed versus Separated Visual Images

In a previous experiment on the creative homospatial process, writers exposed to superimposed images created literary metaphors which were rated higher than those of subjects exposed to the same images projected separately. Shortening the duration of exposure to images produces significantly greater variability in ratings of metaphors for those exposed to the superimposed condition, as predicted from the mental representation in homospatial thinking.

Adaptation and Cognition

In a previously reported experimental study from an ongoing program of research on the creative process, the type of cognition designated as homospatial thinking was shown to function in the creation of literary metaphor. Homospatial thinking consists of actively conceiving two or more discrete entities occupying the same space, a conception leading to the articulation of new identities. Under experimental conditions involving facilitation of homospatial thinking through presentation of superimposed visual images, and control presentation of the same images separated and side by side, the superimposed presentation stimulated significantly more creative literary metaphors. In the currently reported experiment, the effect of such stimuli on creation in the visual arts was assessed. Forty-three artist subjects were randomly assigned either to a control group viewing three sets of slide photographs paired side by side on a projection screen or to an experimental group viewing the identical pairs of slide images superimposed on each other. Each subject created a pastel drawing stimulated by each of the three slide pairs. Resulting drawings were categorized according to the type of composition produced and quality of all drawings were independently rated by two internationally prominent artists. The primary results were that drawings produced in the superimposed slide condition which contained elements from both slides intermingled together were rated significantly more creative than a single element composition and also more creative than similar composition drawings stimulated by the separated slide condition (p less than .05). Production of a final drawing in which individual components are recognizable and intermingled together in response to the superimposed stimulus condition indicates the operation of homospatial thinking involving elements occupying the same space. Consequently, the results indicate a relationship between homospatial thinking and creative visual artistic effects.

Memory for literary metaphors

Three studies used a forced-choice recognition task to compare memory for metaphorical and nonmetaphorical sentences expressing the same idea. Materials were quotations from Shakespeare and adaptations thereof. Results, using both sentence lists and play synopses with quoted excerpts, found that metaphors were correctly recognized more frequently than nonmetaphors and that false alarms tended in a more, rather than less, metaphorical direction. This finding differed both from a naive theory, predicting metaphors to be more difficult, and from results of studies of nonliterary metaphors finding no metaphor-nonmetaphor differences.

Picaresque science and human ecology

Often unwittingly, scientific theory relies heavily upon literary metaphors which influence both the motives and the consequences of scientific endeavor. Human ecologists would do well to assess the implications of conventional metaphors which have been popular in traditional science, and to consider a newer picaresque mode better suited to the complexities of human ecology and to the temperament of modern consciousness.