Literary Critics

What are the best ways for literary critics to consider literary metaphors?

After first recognizing how metaphoric transference works as a mental process, one can then read metaphors as part of a work's ongoing progress within its total structure and not have to study metaphors as language roadblocks which delay one's appreciation of the work's meaning. Becoming conscious of one's own metaphoricity and receptivity to metaphors generally first will enable one to read literary metaphors both speedily and as part of the progress of literary discourses which improve them by their NEWNESS and TENSIONING EFFECTS (Bartel, 54), as well as by their contributions of structure to both INCHOATE STATES (Modell, 17) and VERBALIZED PERSONAL SENSIBILITY. In describing the "bias" of metaphor (162).Fauconnier and Turner present valuable critical criteria for assessing the creativity of metaphors and other discourses which also share structure with metaphors.

The two most useful analytical models for metaphor study are, first, the rhetorical terminology of I. A. Richards (1936, PHILOSOPHY OF RHETORIC): TENOR (either abstract or literal reference) and VEHICLE (concrete word). and , second, the terminology of CIN Theory, which describes SOURCE and TARGET DOMAIN and EMERGENT STRUCTURE. Fauconnier and Turner's work with BLENDING ("composition, completion, and elaboration leading to emergent structure in the blend" (144) is nowadays found in critical articles along with the Richards' model (See Angela H. Becker's "Emergent and Common Features Influence Metaphor Interpretation" in METAPHOR AND SYMBOLIC ACTIVITY, 12(4) 243.

METAPHOR MAPPING often appears with detailed graphics. Try to do schematic/ graphic renderings of metaphors as part of literary analysis to see better both directional influences and emergent structure.