>I remember--coming from mathematics--being unable to make head or tail
of
>Louis Althusser because he used the mathematical term
"overdetermination"
>in what struck me as a nonsensical, incoherent, and inconsistent way
that
>had nothing to do with its *real* mathematical definition in meaning.
>
>Hence I put down _Reading Capital_ after 100 pages and never picked it
or
>anything else up again (except when one of my professors assigned an
>absolutely awful book by Hindess and Hurst).
With readers like that, who needs enemies?
>
>Can't say today that my allergic reaction to Althusser was a mistake.
>
>**A basic failure to understand the meaning of the sources from which
you
>draw your *metaphors* [my stress] and concepts *is* in all probability
a sign that the
>rest of your thinking is confused and faulty as well...** [my stress]
>
>
>Brad DeLong
>
>From _The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics_, eds.
Preminger, Brogan et al., Princeton University Press, 1993.
METAPHOR, III. History:
"Four approaches have dominated all attempts to improve on the account of m. provided by the rhetorical trad. Some writers propose more logical classifications of the tropes. Others undertake semantic analysis of the ways in which features of a word's meaning are activated or repressed in figurative language. These two modes of analysis blend into each other, but they can be distinguished from treatments of m. that emphasize its existential entailments--its relation to reality and to hist. rather than to logic and lang. The crudity of this fourfold classification must justify the brevity of the following discussion, which touches on only those treatments of m. that, from a comtemp. perspective, seem crucial.
For Aristotle, m. has two functions and two structures. In the _Poetics_, its function is to lend dignity to style, by creating an enigma that reveals a likeness, or by giving a name to something that had been nameless ("the ship _plowed_ the sea"). But in the _Rhet_, m. appears as a technique of persuasion, used to make a case appear better or worse than it is in fact. Modern critics would say that "kill," "murder," and "execute" have the same denotation but differ in connotation (q.v.); for Aristotle, one of the three words would be proper in relation to a particular act, and the other two would be ms. It is from its rhetorical uses that m. acquires its reputation as a dangerous deviation from the truth, being for that reason castigated by Hobbes, Locke, and other Enlightenment philosophers.
The four kinds of m. distinguished by Aristotle in the _Poetics_ are of two structural types. . . . Here we find the bifurcation that will henceforth characterize discussions of tropes:: one type is based on accepted conceptual relationships (here, genus-species), and the other type includes all tropes that cannot be so defined. Species--genus and species--species relations are part of common knowledge; to cross from genus to genus, we need four terms that create what might be called a hypothetical likeness, one not given by logic or nature."
Etc..
"What need for purists when the demotic is built to last, to outlast us, and no dialect hears us?"
-John Ashbery (sorry I couldn't resist, he's one of my favorite poets!)
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