Im only in my first year and i dont feel as comftable as you do on the issues regarding the importance of metaphor but if you think it can help me then thanks.
How do you think i should start my essay?
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Im only in my first year and i dont feel as comftable as you do on the issues regarding the importance of metaphor but if you think it can help me then thanks.
How do you think i should start my essay?
I shall have to give some thought.... but meanwhile... try to do the reading and exercises with google that I suggested... your short range goal is the paper on Friday, but you LONG range goal is to learn how to think about these matters, and research, and compose your thoughts....
It is ok to be first year, and uncertain.... we have all been there in our lives...
but at least read the links i mentioned... and i shall re-read them myself
Here are a few important things (my time is limited until tonight):
http://toosmallforsupernova.org/page019.htm
Life appears to us as an endless collection of unstructured images and events. We pick and choose and impose some narrative structure, theme and plot upon this cacophonous, kaleidoscopic confusion.
The self is a work in progress. As we construct our identity, we come to know our self through an emerging self awareness. Each of us is an author with respect to our autobiographical narrative sense of self. We define our selves.
http://toosmallforsupernova.org/page023.htm
Frost states that (paraphrased):
Education by poetry is education by metaphor…
I have wanted … to make metaphor the whole of thinking…
Best and most fruitful was Pythagoras’ comparison of the universe with number.
Everything is an event…
Bohr said that the individual atom has its freedom but the mass is under necessity.
We have been lead into our present moral position by metaphor by using all the good words which virtue has invented to maintain virtue such as honesty, frankness, sincerity, joy, health.
All metaphor breaks down somewhere. That is the beauty of it! It is a very living thing. It is life itself.
The greatest of all attempts to say one thing in terms of another is the philosophical attempt to say matter in terms of spirit, or spirit in terms of matter, to make a final unity. That is the greatest attempt that ever failed.
All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.
I will do so.
As i was saying. I do need a bibliography and a text to refer to .
Are u suggesting that i use " A necessary angel"?
thanks for this.
"A Necessary Angel" is a collection of essays by Wallace Stevens (straight from the horses mouth) about the use of imagination (which he calls "the necessary angel") and metaphor in art and literature, to more or less reconstruct reality,., or take us out of it... do some google.com searches on : stevens "the necessary angel"
"Poetry is a satisfying of the desire for resemblances", as the metaphor of the theorist carries on. It is the poet's metaphor that ironically and most refreshingly turns the former upside down (or is this rather a "nicety", a subtler manner to reinforce it?):
"It can never be satisfied, the mind, never."("The Well Dressed Man with a Beard")
"The brilliance of earth is the brilliance of every paradise"
and that:"…poetry is a part of the structure of reality",
and, moreover, that "…poetry and metaphor are one", may enable one to deduce that poetry (therefore, metaphor) must ultimately share the heavenly brilliance (or purity) as their august source of life.
"I think that his [i.e. the poet's] function is to make his imagination theirs [i.e. the readers'] and that he fulfills himself only as he sees his imagination become the light in the minds of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives."
"The Good Man Has No Shape, as if they knew."
The trouble is that the poet's mind is always younger than the minds of his would-be contemporary readers, as it happens in any true illustration of the Faustian myth. Hence, it is he who teaches them what to expect (and later require) from the modern poetry he is the very maker of. Thus, the actual performance of the poet's role turns into a live metaphor, exhausting all the infinite possibilities of the mind it is being produced by. All that matters is that the live metaphor keep on living for the readers' sake.
The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice"
suggests not only the requirement that modern poetry be intellectual, abstract, but also that the way the mind functions is in itself a poem. "The act of finding/What will suffice" is the pattern of any mental project of an ingenious solution to the obscure metaphor of a live problem.
matters are starting to make sense and i can only thank you for that sitaram but i still dont know how i should structure my essay because 1500 words isnt that much and i dont want to waffle.
Plus i need references to back my opinions so its quite hard to fit it all in.
for today.... concentrate on searching, reading, cutting and pasting stuff together,.... understanding, becoming comfortable with what metaphor means for people like Stevens and Frost and Milan Kundera and Kurt Vonnegut.....
Worry about the form, footnotes, bibliograpy later..... maybe for a starter..... do this... ask WHAT IS METAPHOR.... collect definitions from search engines... put in your own words.... check out the stuff on metonymy in Kurt Vonnegut post in this forum
check out the stuff on metonymy in Kurt Vonnegut post in this forum
i cant find it
Kurt Vonnegut post.... also READ SOME OF THE ESSAYS AT THE KURT VONNEGUT ESSAY SITE... they are excellent, and will give you a feeling for how to write.....
http://www.online-literature.com/for...ead.php?t=3887
Here is an interesting collection of students essays on Vonnegut:
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/4953/kv_essays.html
Cat's Cradle and Postmodernism
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/...tmodernism.html
The first sentence of "Cat's Cradle" is itself a nuclear device packed with power : "Call me Jonah." This name could be
easily connected with the biblical Jonah, who was swallowed
by a giant whale on the way to Ninive. The name Jonah does
not have only biblical connotations though; it refers also
to the Melville's Moby Dick. Peter Reed in his book about
Vonnegut writes about this point: "It is characteristic
that Vonnegut's speaker should be a Jonah, who… gets
swallowed by the whale, rather than a whale-hunting
Ishmael." This opinion is understandable, when we take into
consideration, that Jonah from Cat's Cradle was not hunting
any whale, which could be represented by Bokononism. On the
contrary, he readily accepted this religion and in the end
was completely swallowed by these "harmful lies", just like
Jonah by the whale in the biblical story.
=============
I became curious about the word "metonymical," which is used several times in the above essay on Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle" and Postmodernism. I like to learn new things.
The following, courtesy of Google, is quite instructive:
a figure of speech in which the poet substitutes a word normally associated with something for the term usually naming that thing (for example, "big-sky country" for western Canada). The association can be cause-and-effect, attribute-of, instrument-for, etc.
www.creativestudios.com/lit/glossary2.html
a figure of speech in which an attribute is substituted for the whole
www.mantex.co.uk/samples/eng.htm
A figure of speech in which one word is substituted for another with which it is closely associated. For example, in the expression The pen is mightier than the sword, the word pen is used for “the written word,” and sword is used for “military power.”
www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0903237.html
A figure of speech in which one word or phrase is substituted for another with which it is closely associated, as in the use of Washington for the United States government or of the sword for military power.
sammelpunkt.philo.at:8080/archive/00000023/01/HTML_Version/text/node83.html
substitution of a word or phrase with another which it suggests. "The pen is mightier than the sword," in which both "pen" and "sword" are substituted for "written prose" and "military." See also: synecdoche.
rinkworks.com/words/linguistics.shtml
a kind of connotation where in one sign is substituted for another with which it is closely associated, as in the use of Washington for the United States government or of the sword for military power.
http://www.uvm.edu/~tstreete/semiot...erminology.html
the use of the name of one thing for something else with which it is associated. Example: Neil reads Shakespeare while driving a Ford.
www.humanities.eku.edu/Glossary.htm
Metonymy from the Greek words [meta] meaning 'change,' and [onoma] meaning 'name.' Thus it is a name or figure of speech which represents something else which is associated with it in some fashion. For example, if we're drinking water, and we ask if we can 'have another glass,' the word glass is a metonymy for more water.
mountainretreat.org/glossary.html
/ substitution of one word for another which it suggests. *He is a man of the cloth. *The pen is mightier than the sword. *By the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat thy bread. (A Glossary of Rhetorical Terms with Examples, Ross Scaife)
www.iprr.org/defs/DEFINMNO.html
Figurative language where one term is used in place of something else that it is related to or often associated with; like saying the White House for the president, or Hollywood for the American film industry.
http://www.viterbo.edu/personalpage...lary%20page.htm
A figure of speech involving the designation of something by means of a related notion, e.g. "wheels" meaning "automobile" (see also synecdoche).
fajardo-acosta.com/worldlit/glossary.htm
Referring to a concept by an attribute of it. For example, the crown referring to a monarch. See also synecdoche.
www2.parc.com/istl/groups/hdi/sensemaking/glossary.htm
- the linking of one sign with another to form a context "the cat is on the mat"; a relation based on combination and contiguity. Or something stands in for the whole: "All hands on deck".
http://www.merz-akademie.de/projekt...sycho/defin.htm
– a type of metaphor in which something closely associated with a subject is substituted for it.
courses.lib.odu.edu/engl/emcavoy/glosslit.htm
a figure of speech that makes a term closely related to something serve as its substitute
www.english.udel.edu/spardee/poterms.html
figure of speech in which an object is described by its function or parts (e.g. "the kettle is boiling" -- it is the water within which boils, not the kettle itself). [top]
schools.brunnet.net/internetucation/gap/glossary.html
the signifying process by which an entity is used to refer to another that is related to it
http://www.oswego.edu/~thoffman/sem...activity_1.html
Describing or naming one thing by something similar. Meaning is inferred. Ex: "The fat lady sings."
faculty.valencia.cc.fl.us/drogers/poetry/ptrygl.html
substituting the name of an attribute or feature for the name of the thing itself (as in `they counted heads')
www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn
================
This essay and its excerpt are worthy of consideration:
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/...chronicity.html
Kurt Vonnegut's universal acclaim and appeal surely comes in no small
part from his gift for connecting, almost unnoticiably, seemingly
unrelated objects and events to give them deeper meaning,
creating a phenomenon known within Jungian circles as
synchronicity. By making his novel so multi-layered by drawing
these comparisons, such as in being transported from a train car
into a POW camp to an extraterrestrial spaceship that hums like
a melodious owl, human beings being trapped within each moment in
time like an insect in amber, and the writer's own repetition of
his current project to a jokey old song, the writer gives us
a deeper insight into the real multi-layeredness of space and
time.
Maljackson,
I am not sure what you are studying although you mention that you are a first year student. Sitaram's advice is invaluable. He is both very experienced and knowledgeble but I will add couple of humble suggestions as well. Before you start:
-Do you really know what metaphor means? Since this is your assignment, you must have done some studying in the class regarding this. What examples your teacher has provided?
-What purpose does it serve? I.e., how could you express something with and without a metaphor and what change does it make?
-Think of this passage:
But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief,
That thou her maid art far more fair than she:
Shakespeare does not say simply "Juliet is beatiful" but by uses metaphors. Why do you think? What sort of effect does this have on reader?
-How long is the text for your assignment supposed to be?
Wish you all the best.
my assigment is meant to be 1500-2000 words long and i must refer to either poetry, drama or prose fiction.
ive just found out that i must refer to either William Shakespear The tempest or Heany's North.
Sitiram ..there has been a new twist in our adventure. which one shall i chose? In relation to the question we have been discussing
sparknotes may help you www.sparknotes.com (with ideas that is).... lots more material on net re: Shakespeare I should Imagine.... google.com on : Shakespeare "Wallace Stevens" metaphor