'The Power of Poetic Metaphor' by Lakoff and Turner (1989)

Elaborating 2

Metaphorical Mapping

 Conventional : death as departure, no return, a journey (in a vehicle)

• Elaboration

o Departure = exile

 Unwanted, banishment, unnatural, prefer to return

o Vehicle = a raft

 Not fast, direct, luxurious, or secure

 Uncontrollable and leaves person exposed

• Other reading

o Raft of Charon (takes dead souls across the Styx to their eternal exile in the underworld)

"Conventional metaphor, of course, also depends on conventional knowledge" (60)

Elaborating

"Because our knowledge of journeys includes options for types of journeys, the metaphorical understanding of life in terms of a journey includes options for a corresponding variety of understandings of life" (61).

• Elaborating schemas by filling in slots in unusual ways

o Unlike extending, where additional slots are mapped

o “Eternal exile of the raft” (Horace)

'The Power of Poetic Metaphor' by Lakoff and Turner (1989)

Metaphorical Mapping 2

Extending

- Mapping the slots in the source-domain schema onto slots in the target domain.

- Relations in the source domain are mapped onto relations in the target domain

- Properties in the source domain are mapped onto properties in the target domain

- Knowledge in the source domain is mapped onto knowledge in the target domain

• Extend a conventionalized metaphor

o DEATH IS SLEEP

 Certain aspects of sleep are mapped onto death such as inactivity, inability to perceive, horizontal position, etc.

o You can extend DEATH IS SLEEP

 To sleep? Perchance to dream! Ay, there’s the rub; for in that sleep of death what dreams may come? (Shakespeare, Hamlet: Act 3, Scene 1)

• Extends the ordinary conventional metaphor by possibility of dreaming

The Power of Metaphor

1) Power of Structure

2) Power of options

3) Power of reason

4) Power of evaluation

5) Power of being there.

When is a metaphor, a metaphor 2

"Metaphoricity has to do with particular aspects of conceptual structure" (58).

Example

'A dog's tail is a flag'

'A dog is loyal'

Questioning

The first will not be directly, unconsciously, understood and is therefore nonmetaphorical.

The second is directly and unconsciously understood and is therefore metaphorical.

Composing 2

Presentation Outline

Source and Target Domains

Composing

"A metaphor with the name A IS B is a mapping of part of the structure of our knowledge of source domain B onto target domain A" (59).

• Call the boundaries of our everyday metaphorical understandings of important concepts into question

o Inadequacy of the conventional metaphor

 LIFETIME IS A DAY

• Suns can set and return again,

But when our brief light goes out,

There’s one perpetual night to be slept through

(Catallus 5)

 LIGHT IS A SUBSTANCE

• (can be taken away)

 EVENTS ARE ACTIONS

• (have an agent, who is identified as the person who takes away the precious possession)

 LIFE IS A PRECIOUS POSSESSION

• (we don’t want life to be taken away)

 A LIFETIME IS DAY

• (life is light, and therefore a substance)

 LIFE IS LIGHT

• (the agents takes the light, which is life)

Example:

"They look sheepish"

• Use of several conventional metaphors for a given target domain

o In me thou seest the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west;

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death;s second self that seals up all in rest.

-When is a metaphor a metaphor?

-Source and target domains

-Metaphorical mapping

-The power of metaphor

-Extending

-Elaborating

-Questioning

-Composing

-Discussion of the examples

-Questions

Examples 2

Examples

When is a metaphor, a metaphor?

“A dream has a power to poison sleep” Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mutability.

"...to the extent that a concept is understoodand structured on its own terms - without making use of structure imparted from a completely different conceptual domain - we will say that it is not metaphorical" (57).

The freedom of the wholly mad

to smear & play with her madness

write with her fingers dipped in it

the length of a room

which is not, of course, the freedom

you have, walking on Broadway

to stop & turn back or go on

10 blocks; 20 blocks

but feels enviable maybe

to the compromised

curled in the placenta of the real

which was to feed & which is strangling her.

“All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players”

William Shakespeare, As You Like It.

"is not conventionally, automatically, and unconsciously understood" (57).

From: The Phenomonology of Anger

Presented by:

Franca van Daalen en Rena Bood

By Adrienne Rich