Romano, Carlin. "What's a Metaphor For?" CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION July 3, 2011.

Geary, James.  I Is an Other: the Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World.  New York: Harper, 2011.

James Geary's playful, accessible I Is an Other: the Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World (Harper), comes burdened with such an atrocious title. The line is a literal translation of one of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud's most famous lines, better translated by Lydia Davis as "I am someone else." No matter. Ignore the title. Think of Geary, even at his glibbest, as the bridge between the burgeoning field of metaphor studies and the man and woman in the street.Geary announces his high regard for metaphor at his book's outset:

Metaphorical thinking—our instinct not just for describing but for comprehending one thing in terms of another—shapes our view of the world, and is essential to how we communicate, learn, discover and invent. ... Our understanding of metaphor is in the midst of a metamorphosis. For centuries, metaphor has been seen as a kind of cognitive frill, a pleasant but essentially useless embellishment to 'normal' thought. Now, the frill is gone. New research in the social and cognitive sciences makes it increasingly plain that metaphorical thinking influences our attitudes, beliefs, and actions in surprising, hidden, and often oddball ways.

Geary further unpacks metaphor's influence in his foreword:

Metaphor conditions our interpretations of the stock market and, through advertising, it surreptitiously infiltrates our purchasing decisions. In the mouths of politicians, metaphor subtly nudges public opinion; in the minds of businesspeople, it spurs creativity and innovation. In science, metaphor is the preferred nomenclature for new theories and new discoveries; in psychology, it is the natural language of human relationships and emotions.

All true, though Geary occasionally makes it sound as if the importance of metaphor to human language, knowledge, and comprehension is a recent discovery. (At other times, he gives deserved credit to early champions of metaphor such as the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, who was born in the late 17th century.) In fact, many modern thinkers and scholars have agreed that all language is at root metaphorical. Rousseau argued that man's ''first expressions were tropes''; modern analysts such as Nelson Goodman recognized that metaphor still ''permeates all discourse''; and continental theorists like Derrida concurred (''Abstract notions always hide a sensory figure''). Fontanier, the great French theorist of tropes, pointed out that even so abstract an idea as ''idea'' grew from the Greek eido, ''to see.''

http://chronicle.com/article/Whats-a-Metaphor-For-/128079/

2011 Metaphor Festival, Department of English, University of Stockholm, September 8-10, 2011.

The Metaphor Festival is a yearly event at the English Department, Stockholm University, taking place towards the end of September. It started as internal departmental seminars on the character and occurrence of metaphors, but has grown into an international symposium on figurative language. It is also our intention to publish a volume of articles based on talks at each Festival.

The interest in figurative language – in particular metaphor and recently also metonymy – has increased considerably over the last few decades, especially as a result of the development of cognitive science, which includes studies into natural language semantics and the connection between culture, language and cognition. It also connects to the renewed interest in rhetoric and to subject fields such as text and discourse analysis, narratology, and philosophical paradigms such as phenomenology. In short, the inquiry into the nature and importance of figures of speech for human experience, cognition, social structures, culture, production of artefacts and artistic pursuits, including both literature and other art forms, makes this a broad and varied interdisciplinary field. In particular the connection between linguistic and literary research as regards the exploration into figurative language has been stimulating for colleagues in our department and elsewhere.

Though we appreciate the development and insights in cognitive semantics concerning the basic and dynamic role of figurative thinking and expression, we also welcome other approaches into the character and use of figurative language. We include both tropes and schemes in the notion of figures of speech, and in the Festival we do not merely welcome talks on metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche, but also for instance on simile, oxymoron, antithesis, hyperbole, understatement, punning, irony, and on rhyme schemes and other formal rhetorical devices.

Visit: http://www.english.su.se/pub/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=15653.

Bennett, Drake. "Thinking Literally." BOSTON GLOBE September 27, 2009.

WHEN WE SAY someone is a warm person, we do not mean that they are running a fever. When we describe an issue as weighty, we have not actually used a scale to determine this. And when we say a piece of news is hard to swallow, no one assumes we have tried unsuccessfully to eat it. These phrases are metaphorical--they use concrete objects and qualities to describe abstractions like kindness or importance or difficulty--and we use them and their like so often that we hardly notice them. For most people, metaphor, like simile or synecdoche, is a term inflicted upon them in high school English class: “all the world’s a stage,” “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” Gatsby’s fellow dreamers are “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Metaphors are literary creations--good ones help us see the world anew, in fresh and interesting ways, the rest are simply cliches: a test is a piece of cake, a completed task is a load off one’s back, a momentary difficulty is a speed bump. But whether they’re being deployed by poets, politicians, football coaches, or realtors, metaphors are primarily thought of as tools for talking and writing--out of inspiration or out of laziness, we distill emotions and thoughts into the language of the tangible world. We use metaphors to make sense to one another. Now, however, a new group of people has started to take an intense interest in metaphors: psychologists. Drawing on philosophy and linguistics, cognitive scientists have begun to see the basic metaphors that we use all the time not just as turns of phrase, but as keys to the structure of thought. By taking these everyday metaphors as literally as possible, psychologists are upending traditional ideas of how we learn, reason, and make sense of the world around us. The result has been a torrent of research testing the links between metaphors and their physical roots, with many of the papers reading as if they were commissioned by Amelia Bedelia, the implacably literal-minded children’s book hero. Researchers have sought to determine whether the temperature of an object in someone’s hands determines how “warm” or “cold” he considers a person he meets, whether the heft of a held object affects how “weighty” people consider topics they are presented with, or whether people think of the powerful as physically more elevated than the less powerful. What they have found is that, in fact, we do. Metaphors aren’t just how we talk and write, they’re how we think. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/09/27/thinking_literally/?page=full.

"Metaphor and the Domains of Discourse," Researching and Applying Metaphor International Association, Vrije Universiteit, June 30-July 3, 2010.

As an association, RaAM strives to advance the study of metaphor, metonymy and other aspects of figurative language, with a commitment to the application of metaphor research to 'real world' issues. In light of this, the theme of our upcoming 8th conference will be 'metaphor and domains of discourse'. The theme is intended to highlight the socio-cultural as well as the situational diversity of metaphor as manifested in, for example: • government and politics; • religion and ethics; • education; • science and healthcare; • business and organizations; • mass media and journalism; and • literature and the arts. The conference will feature plenary lectures by: •Paul Chilton, Dept. of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, UK •Dedre Gentner, Dept. of Psychology and School of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University, USA •And an address by the outgoing Chair of the RaAM Executive Committee, Lynne Cameron, Faculty of Education and Language Studies, Open University, UK Visit the conference homepage here: http://www.raam.org.uk/Amsterdam_2010.html.