Metaphors we die by
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April D Marshall
April D. Marshall (b. 1974). Her research interests include Latin American literature, disease metaphors in literature, AIDS literature, and popular culture and disease. Her recent publications include ‘Portraying Plague: The Possibilities in Puenzo's
La peste ’ (forthcoming).
Abstract
Medicine and language have had a tumultuous relationship at best. The two fields inform and describe each other. The methods of each have been applied to the other at various times in history. The medical symptom and the linguistic sign have much in common and yet are not the same. Nonetheless, literature offers us a perspective on our cultural perceptions of certain realities and disease is unmistakably one of the most ambiguous of those realities. The unique combination of medical thought and linguistic expression present in literary metaphors incorporating or referring to illness reveals a conceptual understanding of health that informs our interpretation of related signifiers. This study is an attempt to identify and explore some of the most prevalent metaphors and metonymies related to disease and through the process, comprehend the way in which culture thinks about the more general concept of health.
About the author
April D. Marshall (b. 1974). Her research interests include Latin American literature, disease metaphors in literature, AIDS literature, and popular culture and disease. Her recent publications include ‘Portraying Plague: The Possibilities in Puenzo's La peste’ (forthcoming).
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction
- The literal, the metaphorical, and the price of semiotics: An essay on philosophy of language and the doctrine of signs
- Meaning, metaphor, and interpretation: Modeling new worlds
- Creation: Algorithmic, organicist, or emergent metaphorical process?
- The stuff metaphor is made on
- The sense implication hypothesis and idealized cognitive models
- Metaphor, concept formation, and esthetic semeiosis in a Peircean perspective
- A review of prominent theories of metaphor and metaphorical reference revisited
- Metaphor and poetic logic in Vico
- Yuri Lotman on metaphors and culture as self-referential semiospheres
- Metaphors we teach by: An embodied cognitive analysis of No Child Left Behind
- Learning theories as metaphorical discourse: Reflections on second language learning and constructivist epistemology
- Basic kinds of iconic metaphor in the theatre and other iconic arts
- Approaches to metaphor: Structure, classifications, cognate phenomena
- Metaphors we die by
- Waterproof fire stations? Conceptual schemata and cognitive operations involved in compound constructions
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction
- The literal, the metaphorical, and the price of semiotics: An essay on philosophy of language and the doctrine of signs
- Meaning, metaphor, and interpretation: Modeling new worlds
- Creation: Algorithmic, organicist, or emergent metaphorical process?
- The stuff metaphor is made on
- The sense implication hypothesis and idealized cognitive models
- Metaphor, concept formation, and esthetic semeiosis in a Peircean perspective
- A review of prominent theories of metaphor and metaphorical reference revisited
- Metaphor and poetic logic in Vico
- Yuri Lotman on metaphors and culture as self-referential semiospheres
- Metaphors we teach by: An embodied cognitive analysis of No Child Left Behind
- Learning theories as metaphorical discourse: Reflections on second language learning and constructivist epistemology
- Basic kinds of iconic metaphor in the theatre and other iconic arts
- Approaches to metaphor: Structure, classifications, cognate phenomena
- Metaphors we die by
- Waterproof fire stations? Conceptual schemata and cognitive operations involved in compound constructions
