Table Of ContentMetaphors, Narratives,
Emotions
Consciousness
24
Liter& ture
the Arts
General Editor:
Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe
Editorial Board:
Anna Bonshek, Per Brask, John Danvers,
William S. Haney II, Amy Ione,
Michael Mangan, Arthur Versluis,
Christopher Webster, Ralph Yarrow
Metaphors, Narratives,
Emotions
Their Interplay and Impact
Stefán Snævarr
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010
“This is Just to Say”, by William Carlos Williams, from THE COLLECTED
POEMS: VOLUMEI, 1, ©1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp.
Reprinted by permission of the New Direction Publishing Corp.
World rights including Canada, excluding British Commonwealth. For British
Commonwealth (excluding Canada) rights, refer to: Carcanet Press, Conavan
Court, 12-16 Blackfriars St., Manchester M35BQ, England.
Cover illustration: Ólafur Þórðarson, Escargot, clock in black rubber.
Copyright/TM 1997: Olafur Thordarson.
Cover design:
Aart Jan Bergshoeff
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 978-90-420-2779-4
E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-2780-0
ISSN: 1573-2193
© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010
Printed in the Netherlands
Table of Contents
Foreword and Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: A Book of Mosaic 1
I. Metaphors and Masks
1. Introducing Metaphors and Masks 29
2. The Magic of Metaphoric Masques 53
3. Understanding Metaphors: The Alethetic Theory 71
4. Metaphorism, Iconodulism and Ana-logic 89
5. Generative Metaphorics 109
6. The Heresy of Paraphrase Revisited 127
7. Notes on Ana-logic and Summary of Section I 155
II. The Rule of Narratives
1. The Story and the Narrative 167
2. Historical Narratives 177
3. Fictional and Non-Fictional Narratives 193
4. Narratives as ’Factions’ 215
5. The Story and the Metaphor: N-M 233
6. Don Quixote and Narrativism 251
7. Notes on Narra-logic and Summary of Section II 277
III. The Poetic of Emotions
1. Cognitivism, Naturalism, Subjectivism 283
2. Towards Hermeneutic Construalism. 305
3. Emotions and Narrations 321
4. Emotions and Meaning 339
5. The Maieutics of Ana-logic 353
6. Notes on ENAL and emo-logic and Summary of Section III 371
Conclusion of the Book or the (Un)holy Trinity 379
Bibliography 383
Index 395
Foreword and Acknowledgements
The manuscript of what became this book was a rather loose collection of articles
when I sent the book proposal to Rodopi. Much to my surprise, Daniel Meyer-
Dinkgräfe, the editor of this series, accepted my proposal. In the meantime, the
collection of articles has changed into a book with common themes. Whether it has
transformed from an ugly duckling into a beautiful swan I leave to others to decide.
I am indebted to several colleagues for having read earlier versions of some of the
chapters and giving me excellent advice on how to proceed. They include Kristján
Kristjánsson, Richard Eldridge, Albert Rothenberg, Sigríður Þorgeirsdóttir, Peter
Goldie, Paul Knutsen, Robert C. Roberts, Ronnie de Sousa, Mark Johnson, John M.
Kennedy, Kendall Walton, Anstein Gregersen, Harald Grimen, Kjell S. Johannessen,
and Ingmar Meland. Meyer-Dinkgräfe gave me valuable advice on the book as a
whole as did Rodopi’s anonymous referee. Steven Connolley has most ably corrected
my broken (?) English and given me advice on all sorts of things, including the
correct translation of ancient Greek. Rosemary Knutsen has corrected one chapter.
Gro Vasbotten has been of invaluable assistance in preparing the pdf-files of the
manuscript. And thanks to Olafur Þorðarsson for the beautiful picture on the cover.
The foundations for some parts of this book were laid in articles, books and
papers, written and given in Icelandic and Norwegian. Of greatest importance is my
book in Norwegian, Fra Logos til Mytos. Metaforer, mening, erkjennelse (From
Logos to Mythos. Metaphors, Meaning, Cognition). That book was published in 2003.
A year later, I published a volume of essays in Icelandic, some of which discuss the
themes of the book you are now reading.
Some of the chapters of this book have roots in papers I have given at
conferences: “Metaphors and Meaning: The Alethetic Theory”, XV World Congress of
Aesthetics, Makuhari, Japan, August 2001; “The Heresy of Paraphrase Revisited”,
The World Congress of Philosophy, Istanbul, August 2003; “Understanding
Metaphors: The Alethetic Theory”, invited paper, Department of Philosophy,
University of Oslo, May 2004; “The Cogito of Don Quixote”, The Annual Conference
of The Nordic Aesthetic Association, Uppsala, Sweden, May 2004; “Metaphoring and
Emoting”, XVI World Congress for Aesthetics, Rio de Janeiro, July 2004; and
“Emotions as Texts”, a conference on Emotions, Others and the Self, Åbo, Finland,
August 2005. The audiences of these presentations deserve special thanks for their
comments.
I am also grateful for the permissions to reprint material from some of my own
articles: “The Heresy of Paraphrase Revisited”, Contemporary Aesthetics, Vol. 2,
2004, “Emoting and Metaphoring. On the Metaphoric Structure of Emotions”, Sats.
Nordic Journal of Philosophy. Vol. 7, No. 1, 2006; “Don Quixote and the Narrative
Self”, Philosophy Now, Issue 60, March/April, 2007; “Poetics and Maieutics”,
Contemporary Aesthetics, Vol. 6, 2007. Faber&Faber kindly allowed me to reprint
viii
parts of Ezra Pound’s poem Cantos I, Direction Press and Carcanet press have been
kind enough to allow me to reprint William Carlos Williams’ poem This is Just to Say
in its entirety.
Introduction: A Book Of Mosaic
1 Themes of this book
At first glance, this book might seem like an amalgam of ideas and
arguments, but a closer look shows that these ideas and arguments are
like pieces of mosaic that form a picture. It depicts the way metaphors,
narratives, and emotions hang together. But do they really share any
interesting common features? My answer is yes. There are certain fea-
tures that deserve our appreciation and scholarly attention. Until rela-
tively recently, none of the three has usually been regarded as vehicles
for argumentation or cognition. The threesome was traditionnally
banished beyond the pale of reason or even seen as its antithesis, its
Other. While metaphors were thought to be ornaments of speech and
writing, literal language alone was seen as the proper vehicle for
argumentation. Narratives were not considered to be cognitive tools
but rather devices for aesthetic enjoyment or pure entertainment.
Theories, preferably those that are confirmed by experience and that
satisfy the canons of formal logics, were privileged as our main
cognitive devices. Emotions, furthermore, were viewed suspiciously,
as something subjective and irrational, a world away from cool,
objective reason. However, over the last decades, a different picture
has emerged. It has become commonplace to say that emotions have a
cognitive content, that narrations can provide rational explanations
and that metaphors can perform cognitive functions. And yet, as far as
I know, nobody has tried to articulate the implications arising from
this new picture of all three concepts for our conception of reason,
much less whether there are important logical links between them.
Articulating these implications and showing where these logical
links are situated are my main purposes in this book. But I must
emphasise that uncovering these links does not imply an attempt to
find an essential definition of the threesome by locating some features
that all and only narratives, metaphors, and emotions share. Such a
search might prove futile for several reasons, one being the possibility
that all three concepts might be fuzzy concepts, i.e., concepts with
Description:This book argues that there is a complex logical and epistemological interplay between the concepts of metaphor, narrative, and emotions. They share a number of important similarities and connections. In the first place, all three are constituted by aspect-seeing, the seeing-as or perception of Gest
