Metaphor and Beyond: An Introduction

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This special issue of Poetics Today grew out of three consecutive sessions on cognitive approaches to literature organized by Donald and Margaret Freeman at the second international conference of the International Association for Literary Semantics in September 1997, which was hosted by Monika Fludernik. It extends two previous explorations into the theory of metaphor in the same journal, in issues 13:4 (1992) and 14:1 (1993), which were edited by Yeshayahu Shen (Tel Aviv). Whereas in the two previous issues Shen’s major aim was to present recent developments in cognitive linguistics to a wider literary audience and to attempt an integration of cognitive and literary-semiotic parameters in the theory of metaphor, the present issue is concerned with more recent work in metaphor theory as presented in the opening paper, in which Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier introduce their ongoing research about conceptual blending. This issue also illustrates successful applications of cognitive approaches to the analysis of metaphor in literary texts, and the contributions demonstrate in addition that other textual phenomena such as deixis can be discussed within the same parameters.

In the course of the twentieth century, metaphor theory has undergone several sea changes. These can be enumerated as follows:

1. 1. The undermining of the “metaphor-as-lie” thesis. This ancient commonplace of the philosophical tradition, contrasting “literal” or truth-bearing assertions with nonliteral, imaginative, or “literary” discourse, continues to attract a large number of adherents. Weak versions of this thesis can be detected in the proposal of “metaphorical speech acts” which, like John Searle’s “fictional speech acts,” deny metaphorical statements any real assertive illocutionary force, although they may result in perlocutionary effects associated with the literary realm (cf. Searle 1993: 111 and Gibbs 1992 for criticism of the metaphorical speech act position). In the course of the twentieth century the assumed distinction between the literal and the metaphorical has come under increasing attack. This has been the result, mainly, of a close analysis of nonliterary and, particularly, of spoken language. Research along these lines has demonstrated that metaphor is as much a construct of supposedly literal language as it is of literary language and is, therefore, not distinct from truth-bearing assertions. Nevertheless, some scholars still operate with the concept of literality (e.g., Goatly 1997), and Donald Davidson (1978) has even attempted to explain metaphor as a literal statement. The undermining of the “metaphor-as-lie” thesis has led to:

2. 2. The undermining of the literariness of metaphor. Whereas, traditionally, metaphor has been regarded as a purely literary phenomenon, early twentieth-century stylistic work has shown that metaphor (as well as other so-called literary devices such as alliteration) is very much present in nonliterary language. Not only is metaphor by no means restricted to poetry (Goatly 1997, the most recent textbook on metaphor, illustrates extensively this pervasive importance of metaphor in literary narrative); it also occurs quite prominently in advertisements, political prose, philosophical texts (de Man 1978: 13–14; Derrida 1972), and in everyday conversation. Even the “weaker” thesis that extended metaphor in a particularly condensed form tends to occur in poetry, or in literature, is now obsolete. Metaphor clusters can be found in advertisements just as in poems, and the verse writing of realism and modernism in the twentieth century has moved away from traditional conceptions of poetic language as somehow being sublime. The most recent case for the literary status of metaphor argues that in literary language metaphor is handled in a much more complex manner. That assumption may or may not be borne out in Turner’s and Fauconnier’s work on blending; in any case, their orientation has been in quite the opposite direction, namely in the intrinsic linkage between linguistic processes in general and the more specifically literary instances of them (Turner 1996). ¹

3. 3. The cognitively based metaphorization of language. The cognitive paradigm has not only replaced antiliteral and literary conceptions of metaphor; it has actually inverted the evaluation of these binary oppositions. In this view linguistic expression arises from strategic adaptations of...