I Need Help

BINGO! Look what I just found in google. See anything familiar?

http://www.willamette.edu/~blong/Eve.../Metaphor.html

Metaphor et al.
Bill Long 12/03/04

Sorting out Some Terms

"Reality is a cliche from which we escape by metaphor"--WALLACE STEVENS

One of the reasons that literary criticism never appealed to me is as an academic discipline that I quickly became confused by all the verbiage of the critics and didn't understand what they were saying. Perhaps I was immature at the time, however, and didn't have the self-confidence to ask them what they meant by their terms. Perhaps I wasn't able or willing to hold them down until they had actually made themselves clear. But, in any case, I find myself returning to literary/rhetorical terms much later in life, with a desire to try to sort out what is meant by metaphor, metonomy, metalepsis, irony, synecdoche and other words.

What you find, at first glance, is that no one seems to know what any of the terms mean with any precision. The purpose of this and the next mini-essay is to try to massage these terms, especially with the help of Puttenham, to see if we can come up with a satisfactory language to describe some of the wonderful ways that we might use language.

Major Classificatory Schemes

Quintilian, the 1st century (CE) Roman orator divides words into tropes and schemes, the former having to do with "turns" (derived from the Greek trophos--turning) of phrases while latter has to do with the "forms" (schema is the Greek word for form) of individual words.

Petrus Ramus, the 16th century grammarian and teacher of rhetoric, then divides words into four categories: irony, metonomy, metaphor and synecdoche. The words are meant to suggest a graded degree of likeness to what one might term a literal similarity with the term compared. That is, irony expresses a relationship between concepts that are unrelated; metaphor is used to connect concepts that are apparently unrelated but have some similarities; metonomy suggests words that are "adjuncts" or closely associated to each other; and synecdoche speaks of words that are "contained in" other words.

Roman Jakobson, the 20th century literary critic, is indebted to Ramus and divides words into the two broad categories of metaphor and metonomy, with the former stressing the apparent unrelatedness of terms ("similarity despite difference") while the latter asserts a direct connection ("contiguity") between words.

wooohoo.

I never thought theory would get me this excited!

u really are a magician of the net

Its really just simple common sense, and lots of practice

Now my problem is how to relate this all to shakespears the tempest

alot of reading i guess.

Im gonna have to pick out some references from the tempest which will be quite a bother.

Sparknotes doesnt have much in relation to metaphor buts its pretty darn useful

I was thinking about sparknotes in relation to SHAKESPEARE, more than "metaphor"

There is tons of stuff in the search engines on metaphor, just like all that metonymy stuff I found in the Vonnegut post

Ask and ye shall receive,
Seek and ye shall find,
Knock and it shall be opened unto you... (or something like that)

I guess you have read it in class? Otherwise your teacher wouldn't insist on these two texts especially?

ok thanks for your helps guys.

before i go can you help me on how i shall structure my essay?

Introductions and conclusions have always bothered me.

Go here:

http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/4953/kv_essays.html

read a bunch of essays.....

notice the structure...

===============================

"Then Judas went and hanged himself"

"Therefore, go thou and do likewise" (two unrealted Biblical verses..... its a JOKE guys)

thanks for your help sitaram.

u are a legend

Nice verses, Sitaram...
I like my new signature a lot too... I remembered it last night while trying to sleep and had to get up and google to find the exact proverb.

There is a non-Arabic proverb I once read:

"Wisdom diminishes arrogance." (but it never caught on in the Emirates)

LOL!
Probably because it has not proved correct so far! ;)

Scheherazade- can i ask you..why do you think the metaphor is siginificant?