Figures of a changing world : metaphor and the emergence of modern culture / Harry Berger, Jr.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Berger, Harry, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Evolution.

Change.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (174 p.)

Edition:

First Edition

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, 2015.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Figures of a Changing World offers a dramatic new account of cultural change, an account based on the distinction between two familiar rhetorical figures, metonymy and metaphor. The book treats metonymy as the basic organizing trope of traditional culture and metaphor as the basic organizing trope of modern culture. On the one hand, metonymies present themselves as analogies that articulate or reaffirm preexisting states of affairs. They are guarantors of facticity, a term that can be translated or defined as fact-like-ness. On the other hand, metaphors challenge the similarity they claim to establish, in order to feature departures from preexisting states of affairs. On the basis of this distinction, the author argues that metaphor and metonymy can be used as instruments both for the large-scale interpretation of tensions in cultural change and for the micro-interpretation of tensions within particular texts. In addressing the functioning of the two terms, the author draws upon and critiques the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Roman Jakobson, Christian Metz, Paul Ricoeur, Umberto Eco, Edmund Leach, and Paul de Man.

Contents:

Front matter

contents

acknowledgments

one. Two Figures: (1) Metaphor

two. Two Figures: (2) Metonymy

three. Making Metaphors, Seeing Metonymies

four. Metonymy, Metaphor, and Perception: De Man and Nietzsche

five. Metaphor, Metonymy, and Redundancy

six. The Semiotics of Metaphor and Metonymy: Umberto Eco

seven. Frost and Roses: The Disenchantment of a Reluctant Modernist

eight. Metaphor and the Anxiety of Fictiveness: St. Augustine

nine. Metaphor and Metonymy in the Middle Ages: Aquinas and Dante

ten. Sacramental Anxiety in the Late Middle Ages: Hugh of St. Victor, the Abbot Suger, and Dante

eleven. Ulysses as Modernist: From Metonymy to Metaphor in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida

notes

index

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (ebrary, viewed January 9, 2014).

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

0-8232-5748-7

0-8232-6155-7

0-8232-5751-7

0-8232-5749-5

OCLC:

900889133