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Identifying and appreciating poetic metaphor

Identifying and appreciating poetic metaphor Abstract This article concerns subjects' appreciation of metaphors in poems. It reports the findings of two empirical studies on the role and effect of an intervening directed metaphor-identification task (compared and contrasted with the effect of verbidentification and read-again tasks) in the subsequent appreciation of poetic metaphor. These studies demonstrate that consciously identifying poetic metaphors enhances people's aesthetic appreciation of and emotional reaction to these phrases, contrary to the widespread intuition that "picking apart texts" to classify different tropes interferes with one's pleasure in reading metaphors. Any explanation of why metaphor identification enhances appreciation of and emotional reaction to poetic statements must be speculative, but one hypothesis worth pursuing is that actually recognizing a statement as a metaphor (as a linguistic type) alerts readers to the very possibility of rich cross-domain mappings, which immediately leads readers to seek out some of these rich metaphoric meanings. A further interesting finding from these studies is that metaphor identification appears to enhance both appreciation of poetic metaphors, and emotional reactions to them, to the same degree. This correlation in the data suggests that readers' judgements of aesthetic appreciation of metaphors may be shaped, at least to some significant degree, by their http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of Literary Semantics de Gruyter

Identifying and appreciating poetic metaphor

Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr.
Journal of Literary Semantics , Volume 31 (2) – Sep 17, 2002
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References (8)

Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
Copyright © 2002 by the
ISSN
0341-7638
eISSN
1613-3838
DOI
10.1515/jlse.2002.011
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Abstract This article concerns subjects' appreciation of metaphors in poems. It reports the findings of two empirical studies on the role and effect of an intervening directed metaphor-identification task (compared and contrasted with the effect of verbidentification and read-again tasks) in the subsequent appreciation of poetic metaphor. These studies demonstrate that consciously identifying poetic metaphors enhances people's aesthetic appreciation of and emotional reaction to these phrases, contrary to the widespread intuition that "picking apart texts" to classify different tropes interferes with one's pleasure in reading metaphors. Any explanation of why metaphor identification enhances appreciation of and emotional reaction to poetic statements must be speculative, but one hypothesis worth pursuing is that actually recognizing a statement as a metaphor (as a linguistic type) alerts readers to the very possibility of rich cross-domain mappings, which immediately leads readers to seek out some of these rich metaphoric meanings. A further interesting finding from these studies is that metaphor identification appears to enhance both appreciation of poetic metaphors, and emotional reactions to them, to the same degree. This correlation in the data suggests that readers' judgements of aesthetic appreciation of metaphors may be shaped, at least to some significant degree, by their

Journal

Journal of Literary Semantics – de Gruyter

Published: Sep 17, 2002

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