Literature and Conceptual Metaphor
The Linguistic Society of America has argued that "the most recent linguistic approach to literature is that of cognitive metaphor, which claims that metaphor is not a mode of language, but a mode of thought. Metaphors project structures from source domains of schematized bodily or enculturated experience into abstract target domains. We conceive the abstract idea of life in terms of our experiences of a journey, a year, or a day. We do not understand Robert Frost's 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' to be about a horse-and-wagon journey but about life. We understand Emily Dickinson's 'Because I could not stop for Death' as a poem about the end of the human life span, not a trip in a carriage. This work is redefining the critical notion of imagery. Perhaps for this reason, cognitive metaphor has significant promise for some kind of rapprochement between linguistics and literary study."
Read more about this topic: Conceptual Metaphor
Famous quotes containing the words literature, conceptual and/or metaphor:
“The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.”
—Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930)
“I thought it was a wonderfully conceptual act actually, to fire a replica pistol at a figurehead—the guy could have been working for Andy Warhol!”
—J.G. (James Graham)
“Often in winter the end of the day is like the final metaphor in a poem celebrating death: there is no way out.”
—Agustin Gomez-Arcos (b. 1939)