Metaphors for reading: A study in the rhetoric of reflexive figures

This dissertation is an exploratory study of both metaphor and reading, each through the "lens" of the other. Various approaches to metaphor are examined in light of notable "readings" (interpretations) of metaphor by prominent theorists; and various notions of reading are explored through a range of metaphors used to delineate them. Of particular interest is the intersection of metaphor and reading through a specific kind of reflexive trope which occurs when readers encounter metaphors for reading--that is, metaphors for the very activity in which they are engaged. Ordinarily, a "reflexive" text is one that turns back on itself, one that foregrounds its own written or "constructed" quality. But in the case of metaphors for reading, it is the reader who is troped, who is transferred ("metaphor" itself meaning "transfer") into the text. If metaphor projects, as Paul Ricoeur contends, a double movement of unification and disruption of semantic realms, then metaphors for reading re-double this movement by their coercion of the very process by which texts are received.; The first chapter presents a synthesis of various theories of metaphor which give special importance to how metaphors are received. The second chapter turns to theories of reading, and argues that we need to think of acts of reading along rhetorical lines, just as we do with acts of writing. Chapter Three discusses the metaphorics of reading in the work of Roland Barthes, who indicates the fragmentary nature of any reading or writing and who argued for a reconception of the politics of pleasure in reading. In Chapter Four, the approach to metaphor in composition studies is shown to reflect an approach to discourse in general by this emerging field of inquiry. Also examined are various metaphors for writing in composition studies, and the gradual replacement of "process" by other metaphors. The final chapter explores--primarily in the work of Italo Calvino--the notion of metaphor as incipient narrative, as a seed for fiction.; Drawing on a number of discursive forms, then, this dissertation contends that metaphor, like reading, is best approached as part of a suggestive rhetoric--that is, a figural movement which open the semantic field to extended contemplation even as it brings immediate recognition of resemblance between discrepant terms.