Conducting Metaphoric Criticism
In Rhetorical Criticism, Sonja K. Foss outlines a four-step procedure for applying metaphoric criticism to texts:
1. First, the critic reads or views the entire artifact with specific attention to its context.
2. Second, to the critic isolates the metaphor(s) within the text, both obvious and more subtle substitutions of meaning. Here Foss invokes Max Black’s interaction theory of "tenor" (the principal subject or focus) and "vehicle" (secondary subject or frame for the metaphor), a method to analyze ways in which the related dissimilar objects actually share similar characteristics.
3. Third, the critic sorts the metaphors and look for patterns of use within the text. The more comprehensive the text, the longer this step will take.
4. The critic analyzes the metaphor(s) or groups of metaphors in the artifact to reveal how their structure may affect the intended audience. Foss writes, "Here, the critic suggests what effects the use of the various metaphors may have on the audience and how the metaphors function to argue for a particular attitude toward the ideas presented."
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)