ABSTRACT
Language scholars have traditionally associated narrative, metaphor, and other figures of speech with literary texts. But in recent decades there has been a shift away from that traditional view. Most scholars now see narrative, metaphor, metonymy, and a host of rhetorical figures not as “devices” for structuring or decorating extraordinary texts but instead as fundamental social and cognitive tools. In other words, a growing number of writing researchers, rhetoricians, literary critics, linguists, and cognitive scientists are studying poetics in order to make sense of wide-ranging social processes and the workings of the mind.
