Metaphor in Literature and Creativity
Metaphor in literature and creativity involves more than identifying a comparison. Readers can examine how an image develops, who presents it, what its context supplies and what happens when familiar language is changed. The books and studies below offer several ways of approaching those questions.
Renewing familiar language
Katrin Kohl, Marianna Bolognesi and Ana Werkmann Horvat's chapter in Creative Multilingualism treats metaphor as a meeting point of cognition, culture and language. Its discussion of time imagery shows how an established expression can be extended or reinterpreted as the surrounding vocabulary and cultural setting change.[1]
For close reading, familiarity and creative use need not be opposites. A writer may give a conventional image a new setting, draw out one of its consequences, or make an unnoticed relationship conspicuous. To describe that change, compare the wording of the passage with the conventional expression it appears to develop.
Sensory language and synaesthesia
A sensory metaphor can describe one kind of experience through the vocabulary of another. Magdalena Zawisławska's Metaphor and Senses investigates a corpus of Polish sensory metaphors in naturally occurring discourse. The book treats these as a linguistic phenomenon and explicitly distinguishes its subject from neurological synaesthesia.[2]
Sarah Turner and Jeannette Littlemore approach the relationship from another direction in The Many Faces of Creativity. Their study examines descriptions of sensory experiences by synaesthetes and considers how metaphor, emotion and creativity interact. They also discuss sensory comparisons used by people who do not have synaesthesia.[3]
These sources help keep three questions distinct: what sensory vocabulary occurs, what a speaker says they experience, and how that experience might be explained. Finding a sensory metaphor in a poem does not by itself establish a perceptual condition in its author.
The surrounding text changes the task
Bambini, Resta and Grimaldi assembled 115 Italian literary metaphors and studied a subset of 65 within their original contexts. They collected ratings for properties including familiarity, difficulty and meaningfulness. With context, meaningfulness increased and difficulty decreased, while the relationships among the rated properties also changed.[4]
This provides an empirical reason to preserve a passage's surroundings when discussing its imagery. The reported pattern comes from the study's selected materials and ratings; it is not a rule that every context makes every metaphor easier.
For a wiki entry, identify the work, edition or translation and the relevant passage. Record who speaks and what has already occurred. A character's description, a narrator's description and a reader's interpretation can differ even when they concern the same scene.
Difficulty and pleasure
Errington, Thye and Mirman investigated altered versions of 62 familiar verb-based metaphors. They compared changes to the verb with extensions of the metaphor. The expected pleasure effect appeared for extensions but not for verb changes, and individual differences complicated the relationship between difficulty and pleasure.[5]
The result gives a useful question for literary discussion: what kind of change has been made? Replacing a word and developing an image over a longer expression are different operations. Unfamiliar wording should not automatically be equated with either difficulty or artistic success.
Metaphor in a particular telling
A narrator's image can do more than describe an object. It can disclose a judgement, invite agreement, or be called into question by later events. Phelan's rhetorical account of narrative distinguishes the narrator and the audience addressed within the telling from the authorial audience for whom the work is designed. His account of progression examines how understanding and judgement develop as a narrative unfolds.[6]
Narrative and Interpretation develops these distinctions with worked examples. Sensory Metaphor looks more closely at cross-sensory descriptions and the difference between studying wording and studying perceptual experience.
A worked comparison
The sentences below are invented examples, not quotations from a literary work.
| Wording | Features available for comparison |
|---|---|
| “The proposal opened a door.” | A new possibility is represented through an opening. |
| “The proposal opened a door, but the committee stayed in the corridor.” | The image is extended to include agents, a position and an unused possibility. |
| “The proposal locked a door.” | A changed action reverses the relationship to access. |
The comparison identifies differences in the sentences. It does not report measured reader reactions. A close reading can then ask who controls access, whether a threshold is crossed and what the surrounding narrative makes of the opening.
Related pages
- Stories and literature
- Metaphor Across Languages and Cultures
- Metaphor Categories
- The Hero's Journey
- Metaphor and Reasoning
- Metaphor Research Library
Sources
- ↑ Katrin Kohl, Marianna Bolognesi and Ana Werkmann Horvat (2020), “The Creative Power of Metaphor”, chapter 1 in Creative Multilingualism: A Manifesto, especially pp. 25–29. Open Book Publishers.
- ↑ Magdalena Zawisławska (2019), Metaphor and Senses, Peter Lang, Introduction and chapter 2.
- ↑ Sarah Turner and Jeannette Littlemore (2023), The Many Faces of Creativity: Exploring Synaesthesia through a Metaphorical Lens, Cambridge University Press, especially section 1.
- ↑ Valentina Bambini, Donatella Resta and Mirko Grimaldi (2014), “A Dataset of Metaphors from the Italian Literature: Exploring Psycholinguistic Variables and the Role of Context”, PLOS ONE 9(9):e105634.
- ↑ Patrick J. Errington, Melissa Thye and Daniel Mirman (2022), “Difficulty and pleasure in the comprehension of verb-based metaphor sentences: A behavioral study”, PLOS ONE 17(2):e0263781.
- ↑ James Phelan (1996), Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology, glossary, pp. 215–220. Free complete book in chapter PDFs.