Motives For Metaphor: Literacy, Curriculum Reform, and the Teaching of English

Acknowledgements

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS T , like many books, was a long time in the making, and there are numerous people who provided intellectual and emotional sustenance as my project evolved over the years. For their encouragement and perceptive response when I first began to investigate theories of metaphor as a graduate student at New York University, I am indebted to David DeVries, Claire Gleitman, David Hicks, Ron Kasdorf, and James Schiff. These friends made graduate school not merely tolerable but actually enjoyable. I am also grateful to the faculty at Long Island University, Brooklyn, especially Barbara Henning, Seymour Kleinberg, and Deborah Mutnick, whose provocative visions of education gave me much to consider as an impulsive young teacher in a complicated urban environment . Many of my colleagues in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh have contributed to my thinking in recent years, particularly Stephen Carr, Nicholas Coles, William E. Coles, Jr., and Mariolina Salvatori, each of whom has offered invaluable guidance and support. Paul Kameen, who responded both generously and incisively to several versions of this book, helped me to recognize that any conception of metaphor implies a conception of literalism—an insight that led me just where (I now believe) I needed to go. My editors, Jean Ferguson Carr and David Bartholomae, deserve thanks for their careful scrutiny and patient accommodation of a book whose final form retained so little of its initial configuration. I also wish to acknowledge Steve Sutherland, Gwen Gorzelski, and Juli Parrish for their care and good cheer in providing research assistance; Kathy Meyer for her expert assistance in preparing the final manuscript; and College English for granting permission to draw upon my article, “Roland Barthes, Reading, and Roleplay: Composition’s Misguided Rejection of Fragmentary Texts” (vol. , November ), for the revised and expanded essay that is now chapter . xi Special thanks to John Twyning, Judith Summerfield, and Steve Parks for their friendship, acumen, and countless hours of edifying dialogue. As for Geoffrey Summerfield, reader and teacher par excellence—no words can express my gratitude. Finally, this book could not have been written without the forbearance and understanding of my wife, Annette, and “my main man,” Kieran. They kept me going, through thick and thin. xii •  M OT I V E S F O R M E TA PH O R ...