Sathyaraj Venkatesan1 & Sweetha Saji2
1Associate Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Trichy, India. Email: sathya@nitt.edu
2Research Scholar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Trichy, India. Email: sweethasaji@gmail.com
Volume 12, Number 1, January-March, 2020 I Full Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n1.12
Abstract
With changing literary and socio-cultural conventions, theories on metaphor have undergone revision in their conceptualisation and use since Aristotle’s Poetics. Although Aristotle premised his theoretical framework of metaphor on analogy, most contemporary research on metaphor is grounded on its role as a linguistic device and of poetic imagination until the radical exploratory studies made by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, who redefined metaphor as a characteristic of thought and action. However, a systematic reflection on metaphor as a phenomenon of lived experience and conditions for its expression is lacking in different metaphor theories. Therefore, this essay aims to provide an overview of the major theoretical postulates on metaphor, with an emphasis on Lakoff and Johnson’s cognitive metaphor theory (CMT) and its correspondence to expressions of illness experience. Further, the wider implications of using metaphors, especially visual metaphors in graphic pathographies, will be analysed in the essay.
Keywords: metaphors, comics, illness, graphic medical narratives, conceptual metaphor theory
