Literary Metaphor Research Articles

Animal Metaphors Revisited: New Uses of Art, Literature, and Science in an Environmental Studies Course

Abstract This article describes a team-taught environmental studies course called Animal Metaphors. Focusing on animal metaphors in literature and film, the course emphasizes various cognitive and perceptual biases that lead humans to place ourselves above and beyond nature, making us more likely to engage in practices destructive to the environment. Whereas the first iteration of the course underscored various ways in which humans are less rational or moral than we imagine, the new iteration shifted more of the focus to what inspires and motivates humans, gives us emotional resilience, and best creates conditions for mental well-being as we cooperate and collaborate. This seemed an appropriate tack to take in an age commonly referred to as the “Anthropocene.” We thus continued to examine our status as evolved animals while also calling more attention to spiritual or ecstatic experience, music, humor, and the uniquely human ability for shared intentionality.

Comparison by Metaphor: Archery in Confucius and Aristotle

Metaphor study is a promising trend in present-day academia. Scholars of antiquity are already profiting from it in their study of early texts. We have yet, however, to harness the potentials of metaphor in East-West comparison. The article discusses what literary metaphors are, in particular how they generate images and perspectives that call into play a broad range of extra-textual information about the speaker and his milieu. Shared metaphors are doubly advantageous: they serve as hermeneutic tools for reading early texts and are fulcrums for comparing views of different traditions. Archery is an example of a shared metaphor in the Confucian Analects and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. It seems that while both texts employ images that are close together, their meanings are far apart.

Literary Territories: Cartographical Thinking in Late Antiquity

In the introduction and five chapters of this book Johnson presents an interesting journey through various kinds of writing in Greek, Latin, and Syriac on a spectrum between geography and travel accounts, with the intention of showing how texts from late antiquity often display what he calls ‘an aesthetic of accumulation’, ‘cartographical thinking’, and ‘archival practice’, whereby ‘the shape of the physical world became a fundamental literary metaphor for the organization of knowledge itself’ (p. 29). This seems to mean that the authors under consideration shared a desire to produce works of an encyclopedic nature which would provide readers with information about places usually connected with the Old or New Testament or with later holy people living in the Holy Land and Middle East. However, the title and introduction are perhaps slightly misleading, for the book gives the reader both more and less than these lead one to expect. Despite the supposed focus on late antiquity, the book covers much more ground, ranging from Homer and Herodotus to Syriac writers of the ninth century, and concluding with an appendix of original works on not only geographical but also astronomical, cosmographical, and topographical themes from the first to the seventh century ce. In the final paragraphs the author appears to admit a sense that the book is not only wide ranging but somewhat ‘all over the place’ when he refers to it as a ‘series of studies’ rather than a comprehensive history of geography or of travel writing. Although the book serves to provide a sort of archive of writings with similar themes, in particular those of pilgrimage and sacred topography, and may inspire the reader to explore further some less familiar works, in places it appears to lose direction and itself to reflect the description Johnson gives of Theodosius’ Topography of the Holy Land as ‘a jumble of information culled from different sources’ (p. 41) or of Egeria who ‘often stops to zigzag across her previous path’ (p. 91).

Literature Incorporated: The Cultural Unconscious of the Business Corporation, 1650–1850 by John O’Brien

Reviewed by: Literature Incorporated: The Cultural Unconscious of the Business Corporation, 1650–1850 by John O’Brien Richard R. John (bio) Literature Incorporated: The Cultural Unconscious of the Business Corporation, 1650–1850 john o’brien Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016 268pp. In Literature Incorporated, John O’Brien surveys the rise of the corporation in Britain and early America in the period between 1650 and 1850 from an unfamiliar angle. Most historical writing on the corporation in this period treats it as a legal entity. O’Brien shifts our attention to the realm of cultural artifacts. His goal—as he observes in a gloss of John Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689), whose writings he explores in his first substantive chapter—is to translate the “unconscious political-economic ideology” of the age into the realm of the conscious “‘idea’” so as to “render it available for critique” (11). Though O’Brien is not unmindful of cultural artifacts that originated in colonial America and the United States, and while he professes to be conversant with recent Anglo-American historical writing on the law, he is primarily concerned with literary texts and cultural icons that originated in late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century Britain. Admirers of John Seelye, Leo Marx, John Kasson, and Judith A. McGaw, be forewarned. If you are looking for an analysis of the corporation in early American literature, as it is defined by the editors of this journal, Literature Incorporated does not fit the bill. Indeed, the almost exclusive focus on late seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century Britain makes one wonder if a project that had been originally confined to this topic had been recast at the behest of the editors at a university press to increase its likely readership. Joseph Addison’s tragic drama Cato (1712) and the notorious South Sea Bubble of 1720 receive prominent treatment; John Jacob Astor’s fur-trading empire, as described by Washington Irving in Astoria, and Andrew [End Page 491] Jackson’s veto of the Second Bank of the United States in 1832, as analyzed by generations of historians, do not. Though land speculation fired the imagination of countless Americans while highly speculative ventures to buy and sell the national domain generated a large and often emphatically rhetorical literature, land companies go unmentioned; equally absent is any discussion of the literary response of anyone in Britain or America to canals, railroads, or factories. Specialists in American economic history who are interested in the literary dimension of the economic ideas of John Smith, Benjamin Franklin, or Alexander Hamilton will not find what they are looking for here either. Indeed, the only American figure to receive an extended treatment is Edgar Allan Poe—an unusual choice, given the theme. William Leggett is not in the index, and neither is Herman Melville. Following the lead of the literary critics Marc Shell and Mary Poovey and the economic historian Deidre McCloskey, O’Brien explores the relationship between cultural artifacts and economic phenomena. His primary target is neoclassical economics—with a second, implicit target being the economic history that neoclassicism has inspired. Sympathetic to Louis Menand’s critique of interdisciplinarity as a valorization of the existing disciplines as the only legitimate ways of knowing, he strives for a supradisciplinarity that deploys the methods of the literary critic to expose the metaphorical bedrock on which the discipline of economics has come to rest: “This book sees economics as a way of modeling the world that is more like literature than it is willing to let on” (8). McCloskey’s critique of the mathematization of economics is a particular inspiration: “Literary scholars take economic concepts to be in the first instance imaginative constructs, figures of speech that lend themselves to the same kinds of analysis as all other modes of discourse. That is the goal here” (9). The organization of Literature Incorporated is primarily chronological. Following an introduction that makes the case for the corporation as a literary metaphor, it consists of four substantive chapters that explore, respectively, the ideological significance of John Locke’s late seventeenth-century essays on money; the cultural ramifications of the South Sea Company’s collapse in 1720; the “problem of...

Literary Territories: Cartographical Thinking in Late Antiquity by Scott Fitzgerald Johnson

Reviewed by: Literary Territories: Cartographical Thinking in Late Antiquity by Scott Fitzgerald Johnson Adam H. Becker Scott Fitzgerald Johnson. Literary Territories: Cartographical Thinking in Late Antiquity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xiv, 195. $74.00. ISBN 978-0-19-022123-2. Scholars of late antiquity have a double responsibility, an apparently paradoxical task, when they have to explain the relationship of their sources to classical antiquity. As classicists with a long view, we have to demonstrate the difference Christianity did not make, while also clarifying how Christian doctrines developed and what real difference Christianity did in fact make. As Johnson puts it, “in many ways late-antique thought is a challenge to classicists precisely because it uses the same toolkit and yet comes up with very different answers to perennial ancient questions” (137). According to Johnson, “[i]n Late Antiquity, the inhabited world, the oikoumenē, became a thematic metaphor for literary endeavor and was especially prominent in the aesthetic of encyclopedism that characterizes much late-antique writing” (1). Encyclopedism, like the thinking behind cartography, is a way to organize the world: “[L]iterature in Late Antiquity operates in the same way that a map operates. These two intellectual tools are engaged in ‘the same project’: the codification and interpretation of the world.” However, knowledge and its representation are inevitably imprecise despite the semblance of order offered by such tools of organization. This applies to the encyclopedia but also, according to Johnson, to cartography and geographical knowledge. Just as the encyclopedia is an arbitrary construction arranged by the alphabet, so also the map is an order imposed, “and one can see the order, even where not explicitly stated, through its effects on the reader” (10). Chapter 1, “Pilgrimage and Archive,” argues that the works of Pausanias in the second century and the Christian pilgrim Egeria in the fourth have a “shared aesthetic of the ‘archive.’” Despite their similarities, Egeria points to new trends and she “is a linchpin of this project, standing as she does between the ancient tradition of travel literature or ‘sacred tourism’ and the full-fledged Christian pilgrimage genre” (27). Numerous examples of the “archival aesthetic” are then offered in chapter 2, “An Aesthetic of Accumulation,” which provides a classified survey of texts in which “the shape of the physical world became a fundamental literary metaphor for the organization of knowledge itself” (29). According to Johnson, “The world in literary form became a container for the archive of knowledge of the past.” He later underlines the big picture significance of his survey when he claims that “when this aesthetic of accumulation is recognized as a creative force in late-antique, Byzantine, and medieval literature, the old juggernauts of ‘decline’ and literary epigonality lose much of their power” (60). Chapter 3, “Locus Amoenus/Loca Sancta,” examines the late fifth-century Life and Miracles of Thekla. Looking back to Homer and Herodotus, Johnson underlines how geographical knowledge can be “a structural element in the ‘poetic anthropology’ of all literature and thought” (62). In this chapter, he offers “close readings of a series of miracle tales in which the geographical framework of the story is central to how they are written” (63). The rooting of Thekla in Seleukeia, vis-à-vis both the universal and the regional, helps to “orient the reader in relation to the work and allow him or her to enter into the reality of miracles which the author is trying to describe” (66). Chapter 4, “Apostolic Geography,” focuses on Christian topographical literature and the contemporaneous increase in writing on the apostles in the fourth and fifth centuries. In chapter 5, “The Westwardness of Things,” Johnson [End Page 289] discusses the geographical emphases of two ninth-century East Syrian (“Nestorian”) authors. Both Thomas of Marga and Isho‘denaḥ of Basra rooted their histories of monasticism in the movement of monks between East and West. Johnson emphasizes that “the role of geography in the formation of Syriac genres” needs to be better appreciated in its relation to “the assumptions of author and audience about the shape of narrative and the tradition of writing as they are revealed in the text itself” (129). Johnson concludes with a brief discussion...

“Pani z pieskiem” (“Lady with Pooch”)

Ludwik Fleck (1896-1961) was a bilingual academic conversant with the medical and philosophical vocabulary in both Polish and German. This paper pays tribute to Fleck’s academic bilingualism and focuses on his uses of images in the original versions of his epistemological works “Some Specific Features of the Medical Way of Thinking” (1927), “Crisis of Reality” (1929), “Scientific Observation and Perception in General” (1935) and “To Look, To See, To Know” (1947). Images are understood as actual artifacts as well as literary metaphors that structure Fleck’s thinking on epistemology. By examining Fleck’s rhetoric in the original Polish and German versions of these texts this paper unfolds the multifaceted meanings and connotations of the various image metaphors and illuminates the rhetoric impact of Gestalt psychology on Fleck’s ideas on cognition.

Beyond Cognitive Metaphor Theory: Perspectives on Literary Metaphor

This edited volume brings together different approaches to the analysis of literary metaphor, and recognizes that, while cognitive metaphor theory (CMT) has had a huge impact on linguistics, other ...

The Unity of Space in Buildings and Music

<p class="p1"><span class="s1">The phrase “buildings are the essence of music while music is the flow of buildings” is well known but rarely understood by many. If indeed music is repeated in its simplest way, it could not escape its literary metaphor. This is a property that is difficult to define as music and architecture should be examined from all perspectives. This report examines the compatibility between music and buildings from the viewpoint of modern art which improves our understanding and appreciation of architectural features. Therefore, in principle, the relationship to unify buildings and music should be investigated.</span></p>

The Unity of Space in Buildings and Music

<p class="p1"><span class="s1">The phrase “buildings are the essence of music while music is the flow of buildings” is well known but rarely understood by many. If indeed music is repeated in its simplest way, it could not escape its literary metaphor. This is a property that is difficult to define as music and architecture should be examined from all perspectives. This report examines the compatibility between music and buildings from the viewpoint of modern art which improves our understanding and appreciation of architectural features. Therefore, in principle, the relationship to unify buildings and music should be investigated.</span></p>

Κωμική Λογοτεχνία και γέλιο τον 12ο αι. Η περίπτωση του Κωνσταντίνου Μανασσή

Comic Literature and laughter in 12 th century: The case of Constantine Manasses SUMMARY The intriguing literary production of the 12th century comprises among others satires, parodies and works that include comic elements. This is due to several reasons, such as the cultural continuum of the past two centuries, the vivid interest of the literati in Aristophanes and Lucian, and the social placing of authors within the highly competitive society of the era. Within this framework, learned men of the Capital often turn to the genres (Lucianic dialogues, ψόγοι and the techniques (offensive language, literary metaphors) of the ancient comic literature and the rhetoric, in order to attack, mock or degrade certain individuals (rival grammarians, oppressive patrons) or specific groups that represent the “Other” (rustics, “Latins”). Occasionally, the reaction of laughter escorts the intention of the authors to ridicule their targets. The present study takes into consideration the abovementioned frame and focuses on the comic elements that are to be traced in the work of orator and poet Constantine Manasses. Essentially, Manasses’ employ of the comic doesn’t deviate from the general practice of his contemporaries, as the author displays the same sense of superiority against other learned men, while showcasing a sentiment of aversion to people outside the capital. However, his attitude is considerably softer in comparison to other authors of this period, whereas his works are surprisingly devoid of any direct attack against learned competitors. In addition, laughter in Manasses, when it occurs, adds a lighthearted tone and doesn’t seem to conceal an intention for rebuke or stinging criticism. The possible reasons for Manasses’ stand are explored in this paper.

War-Games in the Song of Songs: A Reading of Song 2,4 in Light of Cognitive Linguistics

ABSTRACTWhile the Song of Songs is often considered a tender love po-em, it also uses military metaphors to describe the loving relationship of its characters. This suggests that the Song’s concept of love may be more com-plex and perhaps more paradoxical than is usually assumed. Cognitive Lin-guistics, which currently represents the central point of reference for the study both of ordinary and literary metaphors, can shed light on the Song’s concep-tualization of love in terms of war. The present article provides i) a presenta-tion of some insights on metaphorical phenomena coming from Cognitive Linguistics, and ii) a reading of a paradigmatic warlike metaphor, i.e. Song 2,4, in light of this new, pioneering approach.

Literary translation and conceptual metaphors: From movement to performance

ABSTRACTLiterary translators and translation, when noticed at all, have a poor public image inconsistent with the evidence of skill and effort shown in translators’ essays, postscripts and interviews, and with the respect shown to literary translation practice in translation studies in general. This article suggests that much of this negativity results from the entailments, or logical implications, of the dominant conceptual metaphors of translation: movement and replacement. Conceptual metaphors powerfully shape perceptions and expectations, but unlike consciously applied metaphors their effects go largely unnoticed. By comparing the current dominant metaphors of translation to an alternative of “translation as performance” we can see that many of the common concepts of translation are entailments of metaphor rather than intrinsic features of translation. The performance metaphor is used as a contrast because it has very different entailments, thus highlighting the effects of the current metaphors and also providing a possible alternative for translators and students of translation.

Shahrazad’s pharmacy: women’s bodies of knowledge in “The Tale of the Porter and the Three Ladies”

ABSTRACTAt first glance, a group of flowers purchased in “The Tale of the Porter and the Three Ladies,” a story cycle from the The Thousand and One Nights, seems to function merely as a way to establish the tale’s setting. However, a majority of these flowers appear in pharmacological literature contemporaneous with the Nights, where they are medically indicated to facilitate feasting and sexual activity, address symptoms of melancholy, enhance women’s beauty, and regulate reproduction. All of these indications have specific relevance to the narratives presented in the story cycle. This article suggests that the flowers, read in the context of Islamicate medical theory, popular medical tradition, and literary metaphor, enable a new re-reading of the story cycle and its ending. Rather than objects of a patriarchal system, the women of the story can be read as subjects of a gendered discourse of knowledge through which they affect their world in significant ways.

Towards a literary account of mental health from James' Principles of Psychology

Abstract The field of mental health tends to treat its literary metaphors as literal realities with the concomitant loss of vague “feelings of tendency” in “unusual experiences”. I develop this argument through the prism of William James’ (1890) “The Principles of Psychology”. In the first part of the paper, I reflect upon the relevance of James' “The Psychologist's Fallacy” to a literary account of mental health. In the second part of the paper, I develop the argument that “connotations” and “feelings of tendency” are central to resolving some of the more difficult challenges of this fallacy. I proceed to do this in James' spirit of generating imaginative metaphors to understand experience. Curiously, however, mental health presents a strange paradox in William James’ (1890) Principles of Psychology . He constructs an elaborate conception of the “empirical self” and “stream of thought” but chooses not to use these to understand unusual experiences – largely relying instead on the concept of a “secondary self.” In this article, I attempt to make more use of James' central division between the “stream of thought” and the “empirical self” to understand unusual experiences. I suggest that they can be usefully understood using the loose metaphor of a “binary star” where the “secondary self” can be seen as an “accretion disk” around one of the stars. Understood as literary rather the literal, this metaphor is quite different to more unitary models of self-breakdown in mental health, particularly in its separation of “self” from “the stream of thought” and I suggest it has the potential to start a re-imagination of the academic discourse around mental health.

Epilepsy and metaphors in literature.

This topic has two different aspects: seizures and epilepsy used as metaphors and seizures described in metaphors. Whereas some metaphors are unique and have high literary value, others can be categorized in prototypical groups. These include sexual metaphors; metaphors of strong emotions, of life crises and breakdown, and also of exultation; religious metaphors; and metaphors of weakness which mostly belong to older literature. Writers with epilepsy, in their literary texts, rarely talk about seizures in metaphors. Authors who do this sometimes seem to use reports that they have received from afflicted persons. The most common metaphors for seizures belong to the realms of dreams and of strong sensory impressions (visual, auditory). More rarely, storm and whirlwind are used as literary metaphors for seizures. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled "Epilepsy, Art, and Creativity".

Naturalismo e anacronismo. Appunti etnocritici su I Malavoglia di Verga

The article aims to apply anthropological interpretive tools to study literature, to find a new approach for literary critics. In particular, the French ethnocritique method is used to read Giovanni Verga’s masterpiece, I Malavoglia. As a naturalistic work, the novel should maintain a certain distance from the world it describes; actually the radical alternative of mythical and historical time, which characterizes I Malavoglia, can be considered as a translation of the writer’s autobiographical distress. The conflict between mythical past and progressive time, which is the novel’s main theme, coincides with Verga’s existential and cultural otherness: as a Sicilian who escaped his own original world and then came back, he is inside and both outside that world; he can restore his divided self only by the power of literary metaphor. By way of a hermeneutical analysis that combines a close textual reading with constant attention to the social, cultural and symbolical context, the article provides a complete view of the relation between writer’s life and his novel.

The Echo in Vergilian Pastoral

This paper focuses on the echo in Vergil’s Eclogues, which is a significant feature of Vergilian pastoral poetry. More specifically, its aim is to consider not only the physical phenomenon of the echo but also its multiple aspects. In that sense, it suggests that the echo in the Eclogues can be considered as a physical phenomenon, as a literary metaphor and as a textual-echo effect, trying also to explain the role and function of each category, both where it appears and in relation to the whole collection.

Tell Me How It Hurts: An Intersection of Poetry and Pain in the Iliad

Tell Me How It Hurts:An Intersection of Poetry and Pain in the Iliad Mary Ebbott (bio) In Billy Collins’s poem “Introduction to Poetry,” the speaker—a teacher—relates through a series of enchanting metaphors how he hopes his students will read a poem: “hold it up to the light / like a color slide,” “press an ear against its hive,” “waterski / across the surface.” The students’ reaction, however, is a very different metaphor: “But all they want to do / is tie the poem to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it.” This poem uses one kind of pain—the students begin beating the poem with a hose “to find out what it really means”—to get at another kind of pain, the pain of the students and professor in their conflicting expectations and experiences of poetry. Feeling distress over the students’ lack of pleasure in reading this poem, the teacher projects onto it a physical pain. The poem inhabits a body, only to have pain inflicted upon it. That projection of pain onto something else is one of the metaphorical strategies we use to articulate and understand our own pain, according to David Biro, a physician who became an expert on the difficulty of expressing pain when he himself became a patient with a serious and rare disease. When we are in pain, he observes, we might turn to “external objects that reflect or mirror our pain, enabling us to see it better.” It is in literature in particular that Biro finds this strategy of expressing pain used, offering an example from Tolstoy’s short story “Master and Man,” in which a man freezing to death in the wilderness senses the suffering of the trees around him in the snow and cold they are experiencing together. Similarly, if less directly, imagining the poem being tortured in Collins’s poem helps us understand the emotional states of both the professor and the students. Physical pain can be experienced without the mediation of language. Pain can simply be, can exist without description, without linguistic acknowledgement or shaping. Animals feel pain even though they can’t describe it in words to us. Poetry, by contrast, is pure language; it is language for language’s sake. Yet does poetry (or, as Biro suggests, literary metaphor) offer our best chance for communicating physical pain? When I first had a regular e-mail account back in the ’90s, I received an early digital equivalent to a chain letter that contained a list of similes. This list was called something like “bad metaphors” and its examples were supposedly taken [End Page 31] from student writing. (It now seems that attribution was apocryphal, and that these similes were intentionally bad, written for a newspaper contest.) One was something like “he was as tall as a six-foot tree.” Another was along the lines of “the two of them had never met, like two hummingbirds that had also never met.” That these bad metaphors can be funny reveals something about what we are looking for from our metaphors—the humor comes from the upending of our expectations, of what metaphors usually offer to us. “He was tall like a tree” allows us to imagine all sorts of tree-like qualities the man and his stature evoke. Is he sturdy? Is he majestic? Do you feel small standing next to him? Qualifying him “as tall as a six-foot tree,” though, tells us not much more than “he is six feet tall” does: a mundane datum about the man’s height, a fact that would appear on his driver’s license. His tree-like qualities are lost (not to mention that six feet isn’t very tall for a tree). In the second example, too, we wait for hummingbirdness to emerge: does the pair not meet because they were zig-zagging to and fro so quickly, with their heartbeats so rapid and their taste for nectar so insatiable, that they didn’t notice each other when they had the opportunity to meet? Instead, the hummingbirds are reduced to their human counterparts, having only in common the non-event of not...

Jerome, Vita Malchi. Introduction, Text, Translation, and Commentary by Christa Gray

Reviewed by: Jerome, Vita Malchi. Introduction, Text, Translation, and Commentary by Christa Gray Alison Orlebeke Jerome, Vita Malchi. Introduction, Text, Translation, and Commentary Christa Gray Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xviii + 365. ISBN 978–0-19–872372–1 Silhouetted in darkness, conjoined faces stare from a cave as a lioness mauls a man dressed in high boots and a red robe. This scene on the front cover depicts the final climax of the Vita Malchi (VM), or to use Jerome’s words, de captivo monacho (95). After Jerome provides the circumstances of his encounter with a remarkable old man and woman who were frequent visitors to a village church in Syria, he turns the narrative over to Malchus, a fabulous raconteur who infuses his adventures with lively commentary, rhetorical flourishes, and some realistic details. Curious, Jerome asks the locals about the elderly couple’s relationship. They report both that the pair is holy and “amazing things.” Jerome longs to know if what he hears is true: “Lured by desire, I confronted the man and questioned him more inquisitively about the trustworthiness of the accounts” (VM 2.3). Malchus also raises the problem of credulity. Just at the moment his master has been seized by the lioness, he exclaims, “Who would ever believe this, that in front of our faces a wild beast was fighting for us?” (VM 9.9) As readers explore this unique text, they will frequently consult and greatly appreciate Christa Gray’s valuable contribution to Hieronymian scholarship. The author offers this new edition as a resource for further study: “I have sought to be attentive to the text above all, and to contextualize it as fully as possible in order to facilitate interpretations that go beyond my own conclusions” (3). The single word “contextualize” epitomizes the book’s construction of a rich and detailed framework for comprehending the meaning and significance of its subject. Engaged throughout with modern scholarship, it also provides generous summary and critique of the contributions of experts in a wide range of fields and an extensive bibliography. Three distinct indices, comprising loci, names [End Page 549] and subjects, and Latin words, facilitate searches within the volume. One of the monograph’s aims is “to contribute to an understanding of Jerome’s rhetorical habits” (1), and it succeeds laudably in its assiduous attention to diction, syntax, and grammar. Rhetorical devices, such as alliteration, anaphora, and oxymoron, are frequently noted along with more elaborate verbal patterns. A second aim is “to examine the VM in terms of the information it provides about its historical and literary backgrounds” (3). There is no shortage of material requiring explication in Jerome’s parvum opus (VM 1.2), and again, this volume delivers. Copious citations and quotations from classical and Christian sources provide parallels, echoes and probable direct borrowings. At the same time, frequent juxtaposition of the text’s language with what is found elsewhere illuminates special features, such as when Jerome chooses the adverb firmiter over firme (101), or when Malchus uses the vocative nate instead of fili (133–34), or opts to refer to his master as erus rather than dominus (211). The many compact scholarly essays in the commentary are especially informative and cover a vast range of topics, from the naval exercise as literary metaphor (96–99), pudicitia (141–44), postliminium (177–80), Saracens (167–69), proskynesis (189–92), depictions of ants (250–54), the use of goatskins as floats (269–71), and many more. A thorough introduction doubles as a synopsis of the findings of the commentary. The first six sections, though just one or two pages each, embed the text in time, place, and Jerome’s life and mi-lieu. “Audiences” identifies Jerome and Paula’s acolytes in Bethlehem, the bishop Evagrius and other potential patrons, Christian men and women in Rome, and even regular Roman citizens, for whom “the VM would be an escapist literary adventure” (12). “Purpose” argues that Malchus’ life story promotes monasticism, provides a precedent for Jerome’s platonic friendship with Paula, and permits “the possibility that the benefits of virginity can be regained by a chaste life even after virginity in its literal sense is lost” (13...

From the Soul

mian men idean theriou poikilou kai polykephalou1At the heart of the Platonic Republic, amidst the most examined of philosophic spaces, a purloined letter gazes back unconcealed into the inspecting stare; most efficaciously, under the eyes of centuries of interpretation, the letter operates unnoticed. It relates the whole psycho-political project of the Republic to a figure, which overwhelms the project itself, a figure barely contained under the guise of metaphor. This figure shows itself in the simplicity of something outlined (like a sign) and memorable (like an image or a tale),2 which sets discourse in motion. It re-joins the worn-out allegories of the sun (508b-9c), the divided line (509d-13e), the cave (514a-20a), and the closing Myth of Er (614a-21d), which already attest, within the space of the text, a forlorn inner purity and pure interiority of what in the name of logos constitutes itself knowledge.The hyperbolic figure, which articulates and measures the Republic, is that of the therion, a living thing, a certain kind of zoe, which in the Greek of Plato refers on the one hand to both tame animal and wild beast, while designating on the other, all that is monstrous: Typhon, Hydra, the Satyrs. In turn, therion monstrosity, appears both a prodigious, threatening creature, yet also monstrum, teras, sign of excessive signification,3 a sign, which doesn't show itself-in the case of tyranny, the capital monstrosity in the Republic, even a tell-tale symptom of a disease that hides itself in order to take effect. The monster hides and manifests itself, announces its secret, while concealing the violence of its conspicuous presence. It operates in the city and in the soul, it operates across the dialogue and the text that constitute the Republic.Thus, the figure of the therion, beast and monster at once, inscribes itself a purloined letter, articulating a literary metaphor and a literal metamorphosis, the one much the other, the one because of the other. This letter amounts to an open invitation to unfold the theriological figurations in order to examine anew what is truly inceptive at the beginning of political thought. The first insight of this unfolding recognizes in the therion the infinitesimal affinity of beast and monster well their infinite non-coincidence. The commerce of the figurations of beast and monster in the figure of the therion is originary and irreducible.4 Ultimately, the thread that joins these theriological instances in the Platonic corpus will have to be followed through, transforming received notions of metaphor and catalyzing a metamorphosis of the history of Platonic thought in order to assess the occidental fate of the polis.The first to follow upon this path is Aristotle, who will reiterate the Platonic dichotomy of a tamed people (demos) and a monstrous mob (ochlos) into a double origin of the political: the organization of the human community in accordance with the telos of the reasonable being on the one hand and on the other as a remedy for the sheer fact of social division.5 This dichotomy, never singular in its refractions, reiterates itself up until and beyond Agamben's opposition of zoe and bios, in an intricate history, the unraveling of which must wait at present. Still, in order to make meaningful what must here remain allusive, namely the perennial return of bio-politics to zoo-politics, to which the Coda of the text returns, the zoe of polis must be traced in the manifold figurations of the Platonic figure of the therion. Revolving around the Republic, the present essay undertakes this examination of Platonic psycho-political theriology.Theriology is necessarily psycho-political: the grand homology of psyche and polis is no less than the structural force articulating the Republic. The first recipient of this homology is once more Aristotle. His valuation of the political over the personal good is founded upon the identity (tauton) of the supreme human good in both. …