This will be a dry run of the talk that Elena will give at the 17th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference in Buenos Aires in July. Her project dovetails with both English linguistics and English literature, and she would take this opportunity to welcome feedback from the linguistics colleagues in our section.  Abstract below:

Keywords: metaphor, cognitive poetics, poetic modes, literary metaphor, imagery

Since the landmark publication of Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By (1980), the “paradigm shift” (Fludernik 2011: 5) within linguistic studies has cemented cognitive metaphor theory as the foundation for understanding comparative figurative language. While contemporary conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) has developed, modified, and added to Lakoff and Johnson’s original ideas, the critical work on literary metaphor (that is, metaphor in literary discourse) has remained largely unchanged since Lakoff and Turner outlined four ‘poetic modes’ for literary metaphor in 1989. These modes – extension, elaboration, questioning, composing – were meant to address the perceived “unique” status of literary metaphors (Caracciolo 2017: 209), without compromising the universality of CMT. As early as 1994, Steen’s discussion of the four modes notes both the potential complexity of the poetic metaphor, and the inadequacy of Lakoff and Turner’s typology, yet concludes that “these questions are too intricate to disentangle here” (39). While other critics have, in the last decades, largely agreed with Steen’s assessment, they have either chosen to retain the original four modes as the standard frame for discussing poetic metaphor (Kövecses 2002 & 2010, Semino 2008, Caracciolo 2015), or have sought out other approaches, notably Fauconnier & Turner's conceptual blending theory (2002; for examples see Crisp 2002, Fludernik 2011, and Dancygier 2017). One significant contribution can be noted in that both Caracciolo (2017) and Fludernik (2011) follow Steen in foregrounding contextualisation as a significant aspect of understanding poetic metaphor, to the extent that Fludernik considers it an addition to the list of four – without, however, specifying further what this would functionally constitute (6).

As part of an ongoing PhD project, this paper takes its cue to continue the disentangling and suggest a more nuanced understanding of literary metaphor through a close reading of selected poetry by Elizabeth Bishop, and by investigating the use of ‘questioning’ and ‘composing’ as modes that require further specification.  By this, I mean to suggest new functional categories for each mode, such as ‘doubling’ as a particular and distinct aspect of ‘composing’. The study will make use of an adapted version of the MIPVU developed by Steen et. al. (2010), with modifications following Coll-Florit & Climens (2019) as well as original methodological steps to account for the ‘contextualisation’ that metaphors in literary texts require. My analysis will focus on Bishop’s use of water metaphors (that is, conceptual metaphors where water in any form comprises either the source or target domain) in order to highlight the creative complexity of poetic metaphor that more nuanced definitions of ‘questioning’ and ‘composing’ can make visible. As such, the paper seeks to contribute to the understanding and refinement of one of the fundamental functional typologies of conceptual metaphor theory.

References

Caracciolo, Marco. 2017. Creative metaphor in literature. In Elena Semino & Zsófia Demjén (eds.), Routledge handbook of metaphor and language, 206-218. New York: Routledge.

Coll-Florit, Marta & Salvador Climent. 2019. A new methodology for conceptual metaphor detection and formulation in corpora: A case study on a mental health corpus. SKY Journal of Linguistics 32. 43-74.

Crisp, Peter. 2002. Conceptual metaphor and its expressions. In Joanna Gavins & Gerard Steen (eds.), Cognitive poetics in practice, 99-112. London: Routledge.

Dancygier, Barbara. Figurativeness, conceptual metaphor, and blending. In Elena Semino & Zsófia Demjén (eds.), Routledge handbook of metaphor and language, 28-41. New York: Routledge.

Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner. 2002. The way we think: Conceptual blending and the mind’s hidden complexities. New York: Basic Books.

Fludernik, Monika. 2011. Beyond cognitive metaphor theory: Perspectives on literary metaphor. New York: Routledge. 

Kövecses, Zoltán. 2nd edn. 2010. Metaphor: A practical introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, George & Mark Turner. 1989. More than cool reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Semino, Elena. 2008. Metaphor in Discourse. New York: Cambridge University Press..

Steen, Gerald. 1994. Understanding metaphor in literature. New York: Longman. 

Steen, Gerard J., et al. 2010. Method for Linguistic Metaphor Identification: From MIP to MIPVU. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.