The Metaphoric Process: Connections Between Language and Life

by Fiumara,Gemma Corradi

• ISBN13: 9780415126243
• ISBN10: 041512624X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1995-12-04
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

In this monumental work of complex and probing proportions, the renowned feminist and psychoanalyst Gemma Corradi Fiumara surveys the vast literature on metaphor. She suggests that metaphorical language communicates via the creation images, pictures and finds in it an irreducible aspect to interpersonal communication and our use of language itself. Combining an intimate knowledge of psychology and and philosophy to produce a masterful work in the function and role of metaphor in language and life, Fiumara contends that metaphors lead to the creation of ever new worlds of experience, to which one could not otherwise gain access. Inventing new ways of thinking about metaphor, Fiumara suggests, generates new ways in which human beings can examin their relationship to hemselves and the language which they inhabit.

Table of Contents

Connections between language and life	1	(12)
An interpersonal approach to metaphoricity	1	(3)
Devaluation and employment of metaphors	4	(1)
Interactive and representational concerns	5	(2)
Metaphor as process	7	(2)
The metaphoric matrix of theories	9	(4)
The life of language	13	(17)
An evolutionary perspective	13	(3)
The life of language	16	(2)
A language for life	18	(4)
The limits of a `lifeless' philosophy	22	(4)
Language as metabolic process	26	(4)
The interdigitation of fields	30	(12)
Propositional and non-propositional factors	30	(3)
The question of boundaries and links	33	(3)
Juvenile and adult cognitive styles	36	(2)
Interepistemic links	38	(4)
The oppositional metaphor	42	(10)
On being right in arguments	42	(4)
Agreement and disagreement	46	(3)
Controversial zeal	49	(3)
The maturation of knowledge	52	(12)
Problems of literality	52	(3)
The pathology of literalness	55	(6)
Cognition and maturity	61	(3)
The relationship between digital and analogic styles	64	(20)
Notes on the difference between digital and analogic styles	64	(3)
Connections between digital and analogic processes	67	(4)
Inquiries into discreteness and continuity	71	(3)
The interaction between metaphoricity and literalness	74	(2)
The heuristic use of metaphors	76	(3)
The quest for accuracy	79	(5)
Detachment and participation	84	(10)
Embodied philosophy	84	(4)
A scrutiny of detachment	88	(2)
Ways of cognitive participation	90	(4)
The awareness of metaphoric projections	94	(10)
Metaphoric projections	94	(2)
Cognitive propensities	96	(2)
Embodied experience	98	(2)
The circulation of metaphors	100	(4)
The metaphoric function	104	(21)
The development of identity	104	(4)
Meaning, conversation and play	108	(3)
Symbolic play and affectual synergies	111	(4)
The generation and use of links	115	(3)
Reciprocity and silencing	118	(2)
Bodily projections	120	(5)
Vicissitudes of self-formation	125	(18)
Life and language synergies	125	(4)
From biological life to dialogic existence	129	(4)
Primal interactions	133	(6)
Reception and transmission of metaphors	139	(4)
Notes	143	(30)
Bibliography	173	(14)
Index	187