Figures of a Changing World: Metaphor and the Emergence of Modern Culture

175 Pages·2015·1.153 MB·English

by  Harry Berger Jr.

Figures of a Changing World
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harry berger, jr.
Figures of a Changing World
metaphor and the emergence
of modern culture
Fordham University Press
New York 2015
Copyright © 2015 Fordham University Press
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Printed in the United States of America
17 16 15 5 4 3 2 1
First edition
for Helen
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contents
Acknowledgments ix
Part I: Theory and Practice
1. Two Figures: (1) Metaphor 1
2. Two Figures: (2) Metonymy 10
3. Making Metaphors, Seeing Metonymies 14
4. Metonymy, Metaphor, and Perception:
De Man and Nietzsche 25
5. Metaphor, Metonymy, and Redundancy 42
6. The Semiotics of Metaphor and Metonymy: Umberto Eco 54
7. Frost and Roses: The Disenchantment
of a Reluctant Modernist 68
Part II: History
8. Metaphor and the Anxiety of Fictiveness: St. Augustine 75
9. Metaphor and Metonymy in the Middle Ages:
Aquinas and Dante 82
10. Sacramental Anxiety in the Late Middle Ages:
Hugh of St. Victor, the Abbot Suger, and Dante 94
11. Ulysses as Modernist: From Metonymy to Metaphor
in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida 115
Notes 125
Index 153
vii
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acknowledgments
Figures of a Changing World began its existence a long time ago. I moved
from New Haven to Santa Cruz in 1965, and in the next year I was
joined by my former Yale colleague H. Marshall Leicester, now an
eminent Chaucerian and fi lm scholar. During that year Marsh and I
used to get together almost daily to work on an essay on Beowulf. I
remember our sitting in a room that wasn’t yet furnished: no chairs
or tables or couches or books. What we sat on and worked on was the
carpet: a vita nuova in an empty room. It was then that we began wor-
rying about the diff erences among tropes, or fi gures of speech. The
basic distinctions between metaphor and metonymy that structure
the present book thus took root in discussions that occurred almost
a half-century ago. Though both of us have relocated several times,
today we’re neighbors again. Since I’ve been indebted to Marsh for so
many things—things that transcend tropes—during the intervening
years, it gives me the greatest pleasure to thank him for the light he
shone then and continues to shine now on the thinking and writing
and living we’ve done and still do together.
I decided a few years ago to try to fi nish the study of tropes that
was initiated in my meetings with Marsh. This would have been a lot
harder to do if I hadn’t been blessed with other sources of assistance
and support. Once again, as so often before, my wife, Beth Pittenger,
suggested a number of changes that sharpened the interpretive points
ix