Robert J. Fogelin
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199739998
- eISBN:
- 9780199895045
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199739998.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
Figuratively Speaking (1986) examines figures of speech that concern meaning—irony, hyperbole, understatement, similes, metaphors, and others—to show how they work and to explain their ...
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Figuratively Speaking (1986) examines figures of speech that concern meaning—irony, hyperbole, understatement, similes, metaphors, and others—to show how they work and to explain their attraction. Building on the ideas of Paul Grice and Amos Tversky, this work shows how figurative language derives its power from its insistence that the reader participate in the text, looking beyond the literal meaning of the figurative language to the meanings that are implied. With examples ranging from Shakespeare, John Donne, and Jane Austen to e.e. cummings, Bessie Smith, and Monty Python, this work shows that the intellectual and aesthetic force of figurative language is not derived from inherent magical power, but instead from the opportunity it provides for unlimited elaboration in the hands of those gifted in its use. A distinctive feature of this work is that it presents a modern restatement of the view, first put forward by Aristotle, that metaphors are to be treated as elliptical similes. In a generalized form, this restatement of the Aristotelian view treats both metaphors and similes (and a number of other tropes) as figurative comparisons. The book then offers a detailed defense of this “comparativist” view of metaphors in response to the almost universal rejection of it by eminent philosophers. This new edition has extended the notion of figurative comparisons to cover synecdoche. It also ventures into new territory by considering two genres, fables and satires.Less
Figuratively Speaking (1986) examines figures of speech that concern meaning—irony, hyperbole, understatement, similes, metaphors, and others—to show how they work and to explain their attraction. Building on the ideas of Paul Grice and Amos Tversky, this work shows how figurative language derives its power from its insistence that the reader participate in the text, looking beyond the literal meaning of the figurative language to the meanings that are implied. With examples ranging from Shakespeare, John Donne, and Jane Austen to e.e. cummings, Bessie Smith, and Monty Python, this work shows that the intellectual and aesthetic force of figurative language is not derived from inherent magical power, but instead from the opportunity it provides for unlimited elaboration in the hands of those gifted in its use. A distinctive feature of this work is that it presents a modern restatement of the view, first put forward by Aristotle, that metaphors are to be treated as elliptical similes. In a generalized form, this restatement of the Aristotelian view treats both metaphors and similes (and a number of other tropes) as figurative comparisons. The book then offers a detailed defense of this “comparativist” view of metaphors in response to the almost universal rejection of it by eminent philosophers. This new edition has extended the notion of figurative comparisons to cover synecdoche. It also ventures into new territory by considering two genres, fables and satires.
William A Donohue
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199791743
- eISBN:
- 9780199919222
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199791743.003.0003
- Subject:
- Psychology, Social Psychology
The purpose of this chapter is to create a framework for thinking about how language themes start to degenerate into the reification of a culture that tolerates and even encourages classification and ...
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The purpose of this chapter is to create a framework for thinking about how language themes start to degenerate into the reification of a culture that tolerates and even encourages classification and dehumanization. Understanding these language themes becomes an early warning system that signals the beginning of a genocidal spiral. This framework is termed the Identity Trap, and it demonstrates how various rhetorical conventions combine to establish a social context that builds up the speaker’s social identity while denigrating the “enemy’s” social identity, which provides the rationale for escalating conflict against that enemy. The prospects for negotiation under these circumstances require that parties avoid falling into such rhetorical Identity Traps.Less
The purpose of this chapter is to create a framework for thinking about how language themes start to degenerate into the reification of a culture that tolerates and even encourages classification and dehumanization. Understanding these language themes becomes an early warning system that signals the beginning of a genocidal spiral. This framework is termed the Identity Trap, and it demonstrates how various rhetorical conventions combine to establish a social context that builds up the speaker’s social identity while denigrating the “enemy’s” social identity, which provides the rationale for escalating conflict against that enemy. The prospects for negotiation under these circumstances require that parties avoid falling into such rhetorical Identity Traps.
Wolfgang Hübner
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199586462
- eISBN:
- 9780191724961
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199586462.003.0009
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
Poetry and astrology are both essentially metaphorical. The starry firmament as a whole can be understood as a sum of metaphors, since the human mind first transposes its surrounding real world up to ...
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Poetry and astrology are both essentially metaphorical. The starry firmament as a whole can be understood as a sum of metaphors, since the human mind first transposes its surrounding real world up to the sky, and then this transfer from earth up to heaven is followed by a reverse movement from heaven down to earth, in which the figures and movements of the constellations are related back to human life by prognostication. Thus, subject matter and poetry are more closely related to one another in the Astronomica than in other didatic poems: figures may have astrological meaning, including mythical examples, comparison, repetition, verbal oxymoron, and nominal polyptoton, as do such tropes as—beside metaphor and its special case, hyperbole—metonymy, ambiguity, and polysemy. It is thus all the more dangerous to try to interpret Manilius without taking account of the astrological tradition that underlies his poem.Less
Poetry and astrology are both essentially metaphorical. The starry firmament as a whole can be understood as a sum of metaphors, since the human mind first transposes its surrounding real world up to the sky, and then this transfer from earth up to heaven is followed by a reverse movement from heaven down to earth, in which the figures and movements of the constellations are related back to human life by prognostication. Thus, subject matter and poetry are more closely related to one another in the Astronomica than in other didatic poems: figures may have astrological meaning, including mythical examples, comparison, repetition, verbal oxymoron, and nominal polyptoton, as do such tropes as—beside metaphor and its special case, hyperbole—metonymy, ambiguity, and polysemy. It is thus all the more dangerous to try to interpret Manilius without taking account of the astrological tradition that underlies his poem.
Yifen T. Beus
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231163378
- eISBN:
- 9780231850254
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231163378.003.0008
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter argues that one of the most effective strategies of resisting the Western centre is through the ‘writing of Otherness’ — namely, by using adaptations of Western texts as a method of ...
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This chapter argues that one of the most effective strategies of resisting the Western centre is through the ‘writing of Otherness’ — namely, by using adaptations of Western texts as a method of writing back. The African cinematic adaptations of the Romantic novella and opera, Carmen (1845), show how such films utilise the motif of Carmen and intertextuality as rhetorical tropes, navigating between the colonial and postcolonial story spaces in an act of returning the gaze while displaying a self-reflexivity about the politics of storytelling and representation. By appropriating and thus re-writing a famous Western story about a non-Western, exotic femme fatale, the African Carmen is able to use the same cultural specificity as portrayed in colonial writing to deconstruct the whole myth of this ‘primitive’ dance and to construct a new story that is African in its very essence, while recognising the obvious hybrid nature of the medium itself.Less
This chapter argues that one of the most effective strategies of resisting the Western centre is through the ‘writing of Otherness’ — namely, by using adaptations of Western texts as a method of writing back. The African cinematic adaptations of the Romantic novella and opera, Carmen (1845), show how such films utilise the motif of Carmen and intertextuality as rhetorical tropes, navigating between the colonial and postcolonial story spaces in an act of returning the gaze while displaying a self-reflexivity about the politics of storytelling and representation. By appropriating and thus re-writing a famous Western story about a non-Western, exotic femme fatale, the African Carmen is able to use the same cultural specificity as portrayed in colonial writing to deconstruct the whole myth of this ‘primitive’ dance and to construct a new story that is African in its very essence, while recognising the obvious hybrid nature of the medium itself.
