Showing, Telling and Seeing. Metaphor and “Poetic” Language

Showing, Telling and Seeing, Metaphor and ``Poetic'' Language

Theorists often associate certain “poetic” qualities with metaphor – most especially, producing an open-ended, holistic perspective which is evocative, imagistic and affectively-laden. I argue that, on the one hand, non-cognitivists are wrong to claim that metaphors only produce such perspectives: like ordinary literal speech, they also serve to undertake claims and other speech acts with propo...

Showing, Telling and Seeing. Metaphor and â•œPoeticâ•š Language

Theorists often associate certain “poetic” qualities with metaphor – most especially, producing an open-ended, holistic perspective which is evocative, imagistic and affectively-laden. I argue that, on the one hand, non-cognitivists are wrong to claim that metaphors only produce such perspectives: like ordinary literal speech, they also serve to undertake claims and other speech acts with propo...

Creativity in Interpreting Poetic Metaphor

What cognitive processes are invoked in understanding the metaphors in a poem, or in any other work of art? Is there any creativity required from the reader? Indeed, as we will show with an example in this paper, some metaphors need creativity on the part of the reader to be interpreted meaningfully. Acknowledging the existence of such metaphor, however, raises a horde of other questions. How i...

Literary halo: ERP correlates of poetic metaphor

Introduction. Most of the existing neurophysiological literature on metaphors comprehension focuses on the processing conventional metaphors (Coulson & Van Petten 2002) or generic novel metaphors (Tartter et al. 2002, Lai et al. 2009). Except for a few studies including poetic metaphors in Hebrew (Arzouan et al. 2007, Faust & Mashal 2007), no extensive neurophysiological investigation on the pr...

Seeing and Believing: Metaphor, Image, and Force