Metaphor and Disorientation

Abstract

This essay investigates the place of disorientation within the systems of interpretation we employ to experience, understand and act within the world. It takes as its starting point disorientation's status as a metaphor based on the term's etymological meaning as an inability to locate the rising sun. It then proceeds to explore metaphor's capacity to convey, be assailed by and play host to disorientation. Metaphor has, after all, been identified throughout its history as one of the principal devices through which we come to understand, or – what is at least as important – fail to understand, ourselves and our world. For this reason, theories of metaphor tend to double up as theories of human nature, understanding and morality more generally. By exploring the forms and functions disorientation assumes within different conceptions of metaphor, this article aspires to point towards some of the forms and functions disorientation assumes with in the systems of interpretation and evaluation we employ in personal, social, intellectual and moral life.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹I have taken these examples from the Oxford English Dictionary Online (Disorientation, n.d.).

²See, for instance, Derrida and Moore (1974: 31–46), for the argument that every term Aristotle employs in his definition of metaphor was originally metaphorical.

³See also Richards (1936: 24, 29), in which he too expresses the hope that as a result of his own theory of language, ‘the swords of dispute might be turned into plough shares’.

⁴Paul de Man conducts this kind of deconstructive reading in de Man (1996).

⁵The propensity of conceptual theories of metaphor to emphasise the coherence metaphor brings to human experience is exemplified more recently in the survey of those theories offered by Grady (2007). See especially p. 191 where he discusses ‘the invariance principle . . . the requirement that the mapping not violate the basic topological structure of the target domain’ and pp. 198–201 in which he surveys Fauconnier and Turner's notion of ‘conceptual integration’ as a framework for describing the workings of metaphor.

⁶See, for instance, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Lectures on Shakespeare. Also Abrams (1953: 167–77).

⁷For a more detailed and developed critique of these assumptions, see Dougherty (n.d.).

⁸There are many people I would like to thank for help with this article. Michael Schulte (University of Agder, Norway) first prompted me to start thinking about metaphor. Stephen Dougherty and Susan Erdmann (both also University of Agder) kindly shared with me their own outstanding work on metaphor, while Tor Arne Haugen (Volda University College) generously recommended books on cognitive linguistics.

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Notes on contributors

Timothy Saunders

Timothy Saunders is Associate Professor of English Literature at Volda University College in Norway. He is author of Bucolic Ecology: Virgil's Eclogues and the Environmental Literary Tradition (Bloomsbury, 2008) and lead editor of Romans and Romantics (Oxford University Press, 2012). He has also published essays and book chapters on the reception of antiquity in authors such as Dante Alighieri, Joseph Brodsky, Brian Friel and Percy Shelley.