Literary Metaphor between Cognition and Narration

The introduction of a cognitive perspective to the study of literary metaphors is certainly one of the most striking revolutions in the history of literary studies. Even a superficial comparison of Paul Ricoeur’s detailed and well-documented monograph La métaphore vive (1975), which is now considered the hallmark of traditional metaphor research, and Lakoff and Johnson’s cognitive manifesto (Metaphors We Live By, 1980) will clearly reveal the deep chasm between the quarrelling anciens and modernes. Whereas Ricoeur’s elaborate stock-taking covers all major theoretical approaches, from Aristotle to the contemporary philosophy of language, the pioneers of the cognitive turn seem to have found little inspiration in the rhetorical tradition and, as if ex nihilo, developed their own apparatus in the spirit of a generative model of language and cognition. ¹ Lakoff and Johnson’s conviction that metaphor was much more than a device for producing aesthetic pleasure opened up the perspective that placed metaphor research at the heart of contemporary attempts to understand human cognition in general, yet at the same time leaving many of those scholars who analysed metaphor as a distinguishing feature of artistic communication disgruntled. First and foremost, the cognitive paradigm explained literary metaphor as a special case, an extension of concepts and models inherent in language as such—the obvious example of this approach being Lakoff and Turner’s More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (1989). The next step was the development of an empirical-cognitive paradigm, which released literary metaphor from the insider ethos current in traditional literary circles. Inspired by reader-response-criticism and developments in linguistic pragmatism and (literary) sociology, these empirical proponents turned to actual readers and asked them what they thought or felt when confronted with poetic figurativeness (cf. Steen 1994). Both tendencies— the cognitive and the empirical—have expanded their own line of reasoning and established themselves as versatile models and catalysts for further developments.