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Metaphors we live by. Lakoff & Johnson

El nostre sistema conceptual es basa en la metàfora

Cassos: metàfores d’orientació, substància.

Nous significats

Epistemologia, objectivisme, subjectivisme, experiencialisme

La importància de les metàfores amb què vivim

Resum

El nostre sistema conceptual es basa en la metàfora

Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish—a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.

exemple: arguments is war

Traslladem l’estructura i propietats d’un domini a un altre. Això n’il·lumina alguns aspectes i n’amaga uns altres.

Les metàfores més bàsiques es basen en la nostra experiència en el món [ com a cos tridimensional sota gravetat ] [ les formes a priori de Kant ] (For example, the concepts OBJECT, SUBSTANCE, and CONTAINER emerge directly. We experience ourselves as entities, separate from the rest of the world—as containers with an inside and an outside. We also experience things external to us as entities—often also as containers with in-sides and outsides.)

(1) orientació. Spatial orientations like up-down, front-back, on-off, center-periphery, and near-far provide an extraordinarily rich basis for understanding concepts in orientational terms.

exemples: happy is up, [ estic enfonsat ]

(2) Metàfores ontològiques de substància i contenidors en l’espai, considerar com una substància coses que no ho són. El nostre cos és un contenidor, l’habitació on som. La nostra experiència és la de moure’ns per diferents contenidors, també de substàncies que entren i surten del nostre cos. El camp visual, activitats i estats mentals també s’entenen com a contenidors o objectes. [ post sobre geografies emocionals ]

  • caminem cap a la pau, augmenta la inflació
  • THE MIND IS AN ENTITY IS elaborated in our culture.
  • THE MIND IS A MACHINE, We’re still trying to grind out the solution to this equation. My mind just isn’t operating today. Boy, the wheels are turning now!
  • THE MIND IS A BRITTLE OBJECT, Her ego is very fragile. You have to handle him with care since his wife’s death. He broke under cross-examination.

(3) personificació

Perhaps the most obvious ontological metaphors are those where the physical object is further specified as being a person. This allows us to comprehend a wide variety of experiences with nonhuman entities in terms of human motivations, characteristics, and activities. Here are some examples:

  • His theory explained to me the behavior of chickens raised in factories.
  • This fact argues against the standard theories.

(4) Metonimia

We are using one entity to refer to another that is related to it. This is a case of what we will call metonymy. Here are some further examples:

He likes to read the Marquis de Sade. (= the writings of the marquis)

(5) Més exemples

  • THEORIES (and ARGUMENTS) ARE BUILDINGS: Is that the foundation for your theory?
  • IDEAS ARE FOOD: What he said left a had taste in my mouth. IDEAS ARE PEOPLE: The theory of relativity gave birth to an enormous number of ideas in physics. IDEAS ARE PLANTS: His ideas have finally come to fruition. IDEAS ARE MONEY: Let me put in my two cents’ worth. IDEAS ARE CUTTING INSTRUMENTS: That’s an incisive idea.
  • UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING
  • LOVE IS A PHYSICAL FORCE (ELECTROMAGNETIC, GRAVITA-TIONAL, etc.)I could feel the electricity between us. LOVE IS A PATIENT: This is a sick relationship. LOVE IS MADNESS: 1’m crazy about her. LOVE. IS MAGIC: She cast her spell over me.
  • THE EYES ARE CONTAINERS FOR THE EMOTIONS: I could see the fear in his eyes. His eyes were filled with anger.
  • EMOTIONAL EFFECT IS PHYSICAL CONTACT: His mother’s death hit him hard.
  • PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL STATES ARE ENTITIES WITHIN A PERSON: He has a pain in his shoulder.
  • LIFE IS A CONTAINER: I’ve had a full life.

La possibilitat de nous significats, la metàfora en la poesia

The metaphors we have discussed so far are conventional metaphors, that is, metaphors that structure the ordinary conceptual system of our culture, which is reflected in our everyday language. We would now like to turn to metaphors that are outside our conventional conceptual system, metaphors that are imaginative and creative. Such metaphors are capable of giving us a new understanding of our experience. Thus, they can give new meaning to our pasts, to our daily activity, and to what we know and believe.

To see how this is possible, let us consider the new metaphor LOVE IS A COLLABORATIVE WORK OF ART. This is a metaphor that we personally find particularly forceful, insightful, and appropriate, given our experiences as mem-bers of our generation and our culture. The reason is that it makes our experiences of love coherent—it makes sense of them. We would like to suggest that new metaphors make sense of our experience in the same way conventional metaphors do: they provide coherent structure, highlighting some things and hiding others.

Metaphors may create realities for us, especially social realities. A metaphor may thus be a guide for future action. Such actions will, of course, fit the metaphor. This will, in turn, reinforce the power of the metaphor to make experience coherent. In this sense metaphors can be self-fulfilling prophecies.

For example, faced with the energy crisis, President Carter declared “the moral equivalent of war.” The WAR metaphor generated a network of entailments. There was an “enemy,” a “threat to national security,” which required “setting targets,” “reorganizing priorities,” “establishing a new chain of command,” “plotting new strategy,” “gathering intelligence,” “marshaling forces,” “imposing sanctions,” “calling for sacrifices,” and on and on. The WAR metaphor highlighted certain realities and hid others. The metaphor was not merely a way of viewing reality; it constituted a license for policy change and political and economic action. [ com quan la dreta qualifica de l’intent de referendum com a cop d’estat]

Metaphors, as we have seen, are conceptual in nature. They are among our principal vehicles for understanding. And they play a central role in the construction of social and political reality. Yet they are typically viewed within philosophy as matters of “mere language,” and philosophical discussions of metaphor have not centered on their conceptual nature, their contribution to understanding, or their function in cultural reality. Instead, philosophers have tended to look at metaphors as out-of-the-ordinary imaginative or poetic linguistic expressions, and their discussions have centered on whether these linguistic expressions can be true. Their concern with truth comes out of a concern with objectivity: truth for them means objective, absolute truth. The typical philosophical conclusion is that metaphors cannot directly state truths, and, if they can state truths at all, it is only indirectly, via some non-metaphorical “literal” paraphrase.

[En quin sentit pot ser veritat una metàfora nova? Ens aporta una nova manera de veure les coses]

Exemple: Let us now ask what is involved in understanding as true the nonconventional metaphor “Life’s . . . a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” This non-conventional metaphor evokes the conventional metaphor LIFE IS A STORY. If we in fact view our lives and the lives of others in this way, then we would take the metaphor as being true. What makes it possible for many of us to see this metaphor as true is that we usually comprehend our life experiences in terms of the LIFE IS A STORY metaphor. We are constantly looking for meaning in our lives by seeking out coherences that will fit some sort of coherent life story. And we constantly tell such stories and live in terms of them. As the circumstances of our lives change, we constantly revise our life stories, seeking new coherence.

 

Epistemologia, objectivisme i subjectivisme

Any adequate theory of the human conceptual system will have to give an account of how concepts are (1) grounded, (2) structured, (3) related to each other, and (4) defined. So far we have given a provisional account of grounding, structuring, and relations among concepts (subcategorization, metaphorical entailment, part, participant, etc.) for what we take to be typical cases. We have argued, moreover, that most of our conceptual system is metaphorically structured and have given a brief account of what that means.

[ la metàfora es basa en l’experiència i les similaritats – encara que ells ho rebutgen ], l’abstracció i l’homonímia no l’expliquen bé.

Concepts are not defined solely in terms of inherent properties; instead, they are defined primarily in terms of interactional properties.

What we are offering in the experientialist account of understanding and truth is an alternative which denies that subjectivity and objectivity are our only choices. We reject the objectivist view that there is absolute and unconditional truth without adopting the subjectivist alternative of truth as obtainable only through the imagination, unconstrained by external circumstances. The reason we have focused so much on metaphor is that it unites reason and imagination. Reason, at the very least, involves categorization, entailment, and inference. Imagination, in one of its many aspects, involves seeing one kind of thing in terms of another kind of thing—what we have called metaphorical thought. Metaphor is thus imaginative rationality. Since the categories of our everyday thought are largely metaphorical and our everyday reasoning involves metaphorical entailments and inferences, ordinary rationality is therefore imaginative by its very nature. Given our understanding of poetic metaphor in terms of metaphorical entailments and inferences, we can see that the products of the poetic imagination are, for the same reason, partially rational in nature.

[ l’objectivisme erra quan atribueix als objectes propietats independents de la nostra interació i experiència amb ells. El subjectivisme erra quan pretén que els conceptes i la imaginació poden ser arbitraris. ] [això no és nou, Piaget ja parlava d’assimilació i acomodació; és el mateix que en l’evolució i , modifiquem l’entorn i som modificats alhora quan ens hi adaptem]

La importància de les metàfores anb què veiem el món i vivim

How we think metaphorically matters. It can determine questions of war and peace, economic policy, and legal decisions, as well as the mundane choices of everyday life. Is a military attack a “rape,” “a threat to our security,” or “the defense of a population against terrorism”? The same attack can be conceptualized in any of these ways with very different military consequences. Is your marriage a partner-ship, a journey through life together, a haven from the out-side world, a means for growth, or a union of two people into a third entity?

The heart of metaphor is inference. Conceptual metaphor allows inferences in sensory-motor domains (e.g., domains of space and objects) to be used to draw inferences about other domains (e.g., domains of subjective judgment, with concepts like intimacy, emotions, justice, and so on). Because we reason in terms of metaphor, the metaphors we use determine a great deal about how we live our lives.

Resum

The theory of metaphor has come a long way from the humble beginnings presented in this slim volume. Yet, most of the key ideas in this book have been either sustained or developed further by recent empirical research in cognitive linguistics and in cognitive science generally. These key ideas are the following:

  • Metaphors are fundamentally conceptual in nature; metaphorical language is secondary.
  • Conceptual metaphors are grounded in everyday experience.
  • Abstract thought is largely, though not entirely, metaphorical.
  • Metaphorical thought is unavoidable, ubiquitous, and mostly unconscious.
  • Abstract concepts have a literal core but are extended by metaphors, often by many mutually inconsistent metaphors.
  • Abstract concepts are not complete without metaphors. For example, love is not love without metaphors of magic, attraction, madness, union, nurturance, and so on.
  • Our conceptual systems are not consistent overall, since the metaphors used to reason about concepts may be inconsistent.
  • We live our lives on the basis of inferences we derive via metaphor.
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426H Crítica literària

Poesies  |   Què és la poesia?  |   Història   |   Poesies per cultura, per tema   |   Crítica literària   |   Significat   |

[esborrany]

https://www.britannica.com/art/literary-criticism

Antiguetat
PLATÓ i la crítica de la poesia a la República, inspiració divina, no ajudaria a guiar-se per la raó.

ARISTÒTIL a la Poètica: El poeta tràgic imita la naturalesa i causa emocions de terror i pietat en el públic que, queden alleujades en el procés de catarsi. The ends of tragedy, as Aristotle conceived them, are best served by the harmonious disposition of six elements: plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, and song. Thanks to Aristotle’s insight into universal aspects of audience psychology, many of his dicta have proved to be adaptable to genres developed long after his time.

[la literatura havia de ser útil o instructiva o beneficiosa]

Longinus sobre el Sublim

EDAT MITJANA

Such Church Fathers as Tertullian, Augustine, and Jerome renewed, in churchly guise, the Platonic argument against poetry.
Even such an original vernacular poet of the 14th century as Dante appears to have expected his Divine Comedy to be interpreted according to the rules of scriptural exegesis.

RENAIXEMENT

Es recupera la Poetica d’Aristòtil. . Classicism, individualism, and national pride joined forces against literary asceticism. Thus, a group of 16th-century French writers known as the Pléiade—notably Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay—were simultaneously classicists, poetic innovators, and advocates of a purified vernacular tongue.

Sidney’s Defence of Poesie (1595) vigorously argued the poet’s superiority to the philosopher and the historian on the grounds that his imagination is chained neither to lifeless abstractions nor to dull actualities.

NEOCLASSICISME
Criticism of the 17th and 18th centuries, particularly in France, was dominated by these Horatian norms. French critics such as Pierre Corneille and Nicolas Boileau urged a strict orthodoxy regarding the dramatic unities and the requirements of each distinct genre, as if to disregard them were to lapse into barbarity.

A Anglaterra es va imposar menys ja que Shakespeare no s s’ajustava a cap regla.

Al s.XVIII Amb l’aparició de la novel·la, els lectors de la burgesia no valoraven el seguiment estricte de normes. El nacionalisme, les arrels de cada país afavorien la diversitat i originalitat.
Historical consciousness produced by turns theories of literary progress and primitivistic theories affirming, as one critic put it, that “barbarous” times are the most favourable to the poetic spirit. The new recognition of strangeness and strong feeling as literary virtues yielded various fashions of taste for misty sublimity, graveyard sentiments, medievalism, Norse epics (and forgeries), Oriental tales, and the verse of plowboys. Perhaps the most eminent foes of Neoclassicism before the 19th century were Denis Diderot in France and, in Germany, Gotthold Lessing, Johann von Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Friedrich Schiller.

EL ROMANTICISME

Romanticism, an amorphous movement that began in Germany and England at the turn of the 19th century, and somewhat later in France, Italy, and the United States, found spokesmen as diverse as Goethe and August and Friedrich von Schlegel in Germany, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England, Madame de Staël and Victor Hugo in France, Alessandro Manzoni in Italy, and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Edgar Allan Poe in the United States. Romantics tended to regard the writing of poetry as a transcendentally important activity, closely related to the creative perception of meaning in the world. The poet was credited with the godlike power that Plato had feared in him; Transcendental philosophy was, indeed, a derivative of Plato’s metaphysical Idealism. In the typical view of Percy Bysshe Shelley, poetry “strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its forms.”
Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), with its definition of poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings and its attack on Neoclassical diction, is regarded as the opening statement of English Romanticism.
Romantic criticism coincided with the emergence of aesthetics as a separate branch of philosophy, and both signalled a weakening in ethical demands upon literature. The lasting achievement of Romantic theory is its recognition that artistic creations are justified, not by their promotion of virtue, but by their own coherence and intensity.

FINALS DEL S XIX

Les esperances de canvi de la il·lustració i la revolució francesa es van veure frustrades per la política i la realitat del capitalisme industrial. L’escriptor ja no era serà missatger de l’absolut. O bé serà un notari de la realitat, denunciant-la, o un creador de l’art per l’art. [ja que el món no evoluciona per si sol cap a l’utopia, o el descrivim i denunciem, o bé mirem de refugiar-nos en la bellesa].

In some hands the idea of creative freedom dwindled to a bohemianism pitting “art for its own sake” against commerce and respectability. Aestheticism characterized both the Symbolist criticism of Charles Baudelaire in France and the self-conscious decadence of Algernon Swinburne, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde in England. At an opposite extreme, realistic and naturalistic views of literature as an exact record of social truth were developed by Vissarion Belinsky in Russia, Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola in France, and William Dean Howells in the United States. Zola’s program, however, was no less anti-bourgeois than that of the Symbolists; he wanted novels to document conditions so as to expose their injustice.
Post-Romantic disillusion was epitomized in Britain in the criticism of Matthew Arnold, who thought of critical taste as a substitute for religion and for the unsatisfactory values embodied in every social class.

Hermenèutica i l’explicació del text com a ciència
Comença a partir dels estudis bíblics [ja no postulem què ah de ser sinó que expliquem perquè és com és]
Primitivism and Medievalism had awakened interest in neglected early texts; scientific Positivism encouraged a scrupulous regard for facts; and the German idea that each country’s literature had sprung from a unique national consciousness provided a conceptual framework. The French critic Hippolyte Taine’s History of English Literature (published in French, 1863–69) reflected the prevailing determinism of scientific thought; for him a work could be explained in terms of the race, milieu, and moment that produced it. For other critics of comparable stature, such as Charles Sainte-Beuve in France, Benedetto Croce in Italy, and George Saintsbury in England, historical learning only threw into relief the expressive uniqueness of each artistic temperament.

SEGLE XX

Bibliographic procedures have been revolutionized; historical scholars, biographers, and historians of theory have placed criticism on a sounder basis of factuality. Important contributions to literary understanding have meanwhile been drawn from anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.

Debats: Most of the issues debated in 20th-century criticism appear to be strictly empirical, even technical, in nature. By what means can the most precise and complete knowledge of a literary work be arrived at? Should its social and biographical context be studied or only the words themselves as an aesthetic structure? Should the author’s avowed intention be trusted, or merely taken into account, or disregarded as irrelevant? How is conscious irony to be distinguished from mere ambivalence, or allusiveness from allegory? Which among many approaches—linguistic, generic, formal, sociological, psychoanalytic, and so forth—is best adapted to making full sense of a text?

Ens interssa la psicologia de l’autor? En podem prescindir i limitar-nos a les paraules? (Umberto Eco Opera Aperta, Roland Barthes)

Hi ha hagut escoles que llegeixen el text en funció de paràmetres de fora la literatura, la psicologia sexual de l’autor o personatges, la presència d’arquetipus, l’acceptació o denúncia d’injústicies socials, de desigualtat envers la dona …
The sociology of Marx, Max Weber, and Karl Mannheim, the mythological investigations of Sir James George Frazer and his followers, Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, Claude Levi-Strauss’s anthropological structuralism, and the psychological models proposed by Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung have all found their way into criticism. The result has been not simply an abundance of technical terms and rules, but a widespread belief that literature’s governing principles can be located outside literature.

Per a uns la literatura ja no ens diu res sobre el món, aquest discurs pertocaria a la ciència. Ens limitarem a estudiar com actúa sobre la psique humana [com si fos una Penfield] Some of the most influential modern critics, notably I.A. Richards in his early works, have accepted this value order and have confined themselves to behavioristic study of how literature stimulates the reader’s feelings. A work of literature, for them, is no longer something that captures an external or internal reality, but is merely a locus for psychological operations; it can only be judged as eliciting or failing to elicit a desired response.

Other critics, however, have renewed the Shelleyan and Coleridgean contention that literary experience involves a complex and profound form of knowing. In order to do so they have had to challenge Positivism in general. Such a challenge cannot be convincingly mounted within the province of criticism itself and must depend rather on the authority of antipositivist epistemologists such as Alfred North Whitehead, Ernst Cassirer, and Michael Polanyi. If it is now respectable to maintain, with Wallace Stevens and others, that the world is known through imaginative apprehensions of the sort that poetry celebrates and employs, this is attributable to developments far outside the normal competence of critics.

As literary scholarship has acquired an ever-larger arsenal of weapons for attacking problems of meaning, it has met with increasing resentment from people who wish to be nourished by whatever is elemental and mysterious in literary experience.

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Valéry. Prosa i poesia. Dansa. Ammons. Caminar.

El 2007, abans de conèixer aquest text de Valéry, en un post jo comparava la lectura de la poesia amb el passejar per un jardí contraposant-ho a la lectura d’una novel·la que seria com una excursió cap un destí determinat.

La EB recorda que prosus i versus volen dir, originàriament, caminar recte i tornar.

Aquí Valéry fa una comparació molt bonica amb la dansa i el caminar, comparació que a mi m’agrada invertir i dir que la dansa és la poesia del moviment.

La marche, comme la prose, vise un objet précis. Elle est un acte dirigé vers quelque chose que notre but est de joindre. Ce sont des circonstances actuelles, comme le besoin d’un objet, l’impulsion de mon désir, l’état de mon corps, de ma vue, du terrain, etc., qui ordonnent à la marche son allure, lui prescrivent sa direction, sa vitesse, et lui donnent un terme fini. Toutes les caractéristiques de la marche se déduisent de ces conditions instantanées et qui se combinent singulièrement chaque fois. Il n’y a pas de déplacements par la marche qui ne soient des adaptations spéciales, mais qui chaque fois sont abolies et comme absorbées par l’accomplissement de l’acte, par le but atteint.
La danse, c’est tout autre chose. Elle est, sans doute, un système d’actes ; mais qui ont leur fin eux-mêmes. Elle ne va nulle part. Que si elle poursuit quelque objet, ce n’est qu’un objet idéal, un état, un ravissement, un fantôme de fleur, un extrême de vie, un sourire – qui se forme finalement sur le visage de celui qui le demandait à l’espace vide. Il s’agit donc, non point d’effectuer une opération finie, et dont la fin est située quelque part dans le milieu qui nous entoure, mais bien de créer, et d’entretenir en l’exaltant un certain état, par un mouvement périodique qui peut s’exécuter sur place ; mouvement qui se désintéresse presque entièrement de la vue, mais qui s’excite et se règle par les rythmes auditifs.
Mais, si différente que soit cette danse de la marche et des mouvements utilitaires, veuillez noter cette remarque infiniment simple, qu’elle se sert des mêmes organes, des mêmes os, des mêmes muscles que celle-ci, autrement coordonnés et autrement excités.C’est ici que nous rejoignons la prose et la poésie dans leur contraste. Prose et poésie se servent des mêmes mots, de la même syntaxe, des mêmes formes et des mêmes sons ou timbres, mais autrement coordonnés et autrement excités. (…) C’est pourquoi il faut se garder de raisonner de la poésie comme on fait de la prose.
Quand l’homme qui marche a atteint son but, quand il a atteint le lieu qui faisait son désir et dont le désir l’a tiré du repos, aussitôt cette possession annule définitivement tout son acte ; l’effet dévore la cause, la fin a absorbé les moyens ; et quel que fut l’acte, il n’en demeure que le résultat. Il en est tout à fait de même du langage utile : le langage qui vient d e me servir à exprimer mon dessein, mon désir, mon commandement, mon opinion, ce langage qui a rempli son office s’évanouit à peine arrivé ? Je l’ai émis pour qu’il périsse, pour qu’il se transforme radicalement en autre chose dans votre esprit ; et je connaîtrai que je fus compris à ce fait remarquable que mon discours n’existe plus : il est remplacé entièrement par son sens.
Il en résulte que la perfection de cette espèce de langage, dont l’unique destination est d’être compris, consiste évidemment dans la facilité avec laquelle il se transforme en autre chose. Au contraire, le poème ne meurt pas pour avoir vécu : il est fait expressément pour renaître de ses cendres et redevenir indéfiniment ce qu’il vient d’être.La poésie se reconnaît à cette propriété qu’elle tend à se faire reproduire dans sa forme : elle nous excite à la reconstituer identiquement.

Paul Valéry – Poesie et pensée abstraite, Conférence à l’université d’Oxford, in Variété, 1939

[M’agrada pensar que ho podem dir a l’inrevés, la dansa és la poesia del cos en moviment. Expressem, l’alegria per sentir que tenim unes cames i uns braços articulats i que som capaços de moure’ns (l’alegria pura que a vegades veiem en nens a les festes majors o jams de swing); comunicant les emocions de la melodia que es pot elevar, o quedar en suspens, o resoldre una frase. Ajustem els batecs i ritme de les passes als batecs de la música; la relació amb el terra i la gravetat quan saltem, llisquem, o piquem; la relació amb un altre cos amb qui estem interaccionant, la parella de dansa, com dos planetes en òrbita.
(En un comentari a l’Alina li posava: Yes, create and celebrate! Paul Valèry said that “Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking”. I like to invert the metaphor and think of dancing as the poetry of the body, celebrating that we are alive and and being able to move (the pure joy that we can witness in very young kids), communicating the emotions of the melody, the rhythm of our steps adjusting to the rhtyhm of the music being the metre of the verse, using the different ways we can relate to the dancefloor and gravity, that is, stepping, sliding, dragging or jumping, the different ways to interact with a dancing partner like two planets in orbit.  You write beautiful poems when you dance, I like “reading” them).]

El poeta  A.R. Ammons va escriure un assaig el 1967 A Poem is a walk. Un poema seria com caminar perquè cada cop és nou, perquè demana la implicació de tot el cos, i perquè no serveix per a res: You could ask what walks are good for. Here you would find plenty: to settle the nerves, to improve the circulation, to break in a new pair of shoes, to exercise the muscles, to aid digestion, to prevent heart attacks, to focus the mind, to distract the mind, to get a loaf of bread, to watch birds, to kick stones, to spy on a neighbours wife, to dream. My point is clear. You could go on indefinitely. Out of desperation and exasperation brought on by the failure to define the central use or to exhaust the list of uses of walks, you would surrender, only to recover into victory by saying, Walks are useless. So are poems.

I tampoc ha de voler dir res: Or you could find out what walks mean: do they mean a lot of men have unbearable wives, or that we must by outward and inward motions rehearse the expansion, and contraction of the universe; do walks mean that we need structure – or, at an obsessive level, ritual in our lives? The answer is that a walk doesn’t mean anything, which is a way of saying that to some extent it means anything you can make it mean – and always more than you can make it mean. Walks are meaningless. So are poems.

La poesia ens presenta l’universal en el concret. Second, I would suggest you teach that poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed. Having once experienced the mystery, plenitude, contradiction, and composure of a work of art, we afterward have a built-in resistance to the slogans and propaganda of oversimplification that have often contributed to the destruction of human life. Poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source. It is a motion to no-motion, to the still point of contemplation and deep realization. It’s knowledges are all negative and, therefore, more positive than any knowledge. Nothing that can be said about it in words is worth saying.

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Recursos literaris

TIPUS DE FIGURES

Posició: disposició dels elements lèxics o sintàctics

Repetició: d’elements fonètics o lèxics

Quantitat: el·laboració més detallada del tema, amplificació; Omissió d’elements lèxics o sintàctics

Figures d’apel·lació: alteració de la relació entre l’autor i el públic

Trops: Substitució d’elements lèxics (metàfora, alegoria) o sintàctics

Figures de posició: canvien l’ordre de les paraules

  • Anàstrofe, Inversió de l’ordre normal de les paraules
  • Hipèrbaton, Alteració de l’ordre normal de les paraules dins una frase. «És l’amo un homenàs de bona planta» (Josep Maria de Sagarra, El comte Arnau), en comptes de dir «L’amo és un homenàs de bona planta».

Figures de repetició

  • Geminatio: duplicar paraula
  • Anadiplosi, Repetició d’una paraula al final d’una frase i al principi d’una altra
  • Gradació, clímax
  • Anàfora, Repetició d’una paraula o grup de paraules al començament d’oracions consecutives
  • Epífora, Repetició d’una paraula o grup de paraules al final d’oracions successives. És l’oposat de l’anàfora.
  • Paronomàsia, repetició de dos mots que semblants fonèticament de diferent significat (parònims), “privats de sou i son”
  • Al·literació, Sèrie de paraules amb sons similars
  • Assonància, Repetició de sons vocàlics per crear un ritme intern
  • Pleonasme, Ús de paraules redundants o supèrflues “ho vaig veure amb els meus ulls”

Figures de quantitat

i) amplificació argumentativa

  • Distributio
  • Enumeratio
  • Definitio
  • Distinctio
  • Dilemma
  • Correctio
  • Antítesis
  • Antimetabole
  • Oxímoron, Ús de dos termes junts que sovint es contradiuen l’un a l’altre
  • ii) Amplificació acumulativa
    Acumulació
  • Commoratio
  • Descripció, ilustratio
  • Descriptio personae, descriptio loci, descriptio temporis
  • Perífrasi, circumloqui
  • Digressio
  • Comparatio, similitudo
  • Fabula, exemplum
  • adjectiu, epiteton
  • Epífrasi

iii) figures omissió

  • Elipsi
  • Zeugma, ús d’un verb per a dues accions
  • Asíndeton, omissió de les conjuncions entre dues oracions
  • Percusio (concisa brevitas et extenuatio): enumeració concisa sense detallar, per exemple, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders Who was born in Newgate, and during a life of continu’d Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Years a Whore, five times a Wife Twelve Years a Thief, Eight Years a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv’d Honest and died a Penitent is a novel by Daniel Defoe.

Figures d’apel·lació

  • Interrogatio, pregunta retòrica
  • Aporia, dubitatio [l’orador fa veure que dubta]
  • Communicatio
  • Sermocinatio: Canvi de perspectiva, parla per boca d’altri, pot ser un personatge històric, un personatge imaginari ex.  Subjectio ( fa veure que demana informació a l’oient, aporta la pregunta i la resposta, és això? sí, em diràs.)
  • Simulatio, Dissimulatio: es fa veure que es defensa la posició contrària
  • Exclamatio
  • Apòstrofe: l’orador es dirigeix, no al públic, sinó al seu adversari o algú altre, com una figura històrica

Trops (figures semàntiques)

  • Perífrasi: substitucio del mot per una descripció
  • Sinècdoque: metonímia en què un mot de significat més restringit substitueix un de més ample, ex. els metalls, pels instruments de vent trompetes, trombons, etc.
  • Antonomàsia: ús d’un epítet, o nom propi “el galileu” per Jesús, “el dels peus lleugers” per Aqil·les
  • Èmfasi
  • Litotes: substitució per la negació del contrari
  • Hipèrbole: substitució per un altre que exagera més enllà del verossímil, (Veus eixa mar que abraça de pol a pol la terra? En altre temps d’alegres Hespèrides fou hort; (Jacint Verdaguer)
  • Metonímia: substitució per un mot amb el qual hi ha una relació, pot ser causa-efecte, tot-part, concret-abstracte: “fem una copa, anem a cardar la tassa, Madrid ens fot”. (en psicoanàlisi, el desplaçament a un mot contigu seria, amb la metàfora, un dels mitjans d’expressió de l’inconscient.
  • Metàfora: substitució per una analogia. És un recurs molt poderós. Se’n poden estudiar els camps semàntics, el paradigma, etc. El tenor: és allò a què es referix la metàfora, el terme literal. “Els llacs del teu rostre”. Es parla de “tenor” (els ulls), el terme literal, “vehicle”, el terme figurat (els llacs), i el “fonament”, la relació entre tenor i vehicle, [l’aspecte líquid, color blau, tranquil]. [la metàfora -> lakoff i Johnson -> arquetipus imaginari] [ Metaphors we live by ] [  Metàfores ]
  • Al·legoria: Metàfora estesa en la qual s’explica una història per il·lustrar un atribut important del subjecte
  • Ironia: es diu el contrari del que es vol dir “m’ha agradat molt; després d’una peli dolenta”, a la Maria al CorteInglés “Apa, digues-ho més fort”.
  • Eufemisme: substitució per una expressió més suau o agradable
  • Arcaisme, neologisme

Fundamentos de retòrica Kurt Spang. Heinrich Plett Einführung in die rethorische textanalyse. Recursos literaris viquipèdia

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Poesia. Condensació (Batya Gur)

La condensació

Un personatge de Batya Gur a “Un assassinat literari”, explica molt bé una característica important de la poesia que és la condensació, la capacitat de concentrar una emoció o significat. Les altres serien el símbol i el desplaçament (metàfora).

—En primer lugar, comprender un buen poema requiere un proceso comparable al de la investigación policial, al que algunos académicos denominan hermenéutica; es decir, un buen poema permite que el lector descubra y descifre sus significados ocultos, que se esclarecen a medida que penetra más profundamente en el texto. Este proceso se hace posible merced a la presencia de determinados elementos básicos en el texto; elementos que no son exclusivos de la poesía, por cierto, sino comunes a todas las obras de arte. El primero es el simbolismo o, lo que es lo mismo, el uso de ideas o imágenes que se intersecan, incorporan o son contiguas a otras ideas o imágenes. ¿Le apetece un café? —preguntó Klein, mojando pan en el aliño de la ensalada. Luego se levantó y llenó la pava eléctrica que reposaba en un extremo del mostrador de mármol—. Ya me entiende —dijo al retomar asiento—, cuando Alterman escribe: «Tus pendientes muertos en su estuche», el lector capta resonancias en esa expresión, que le habla de la desaparición de la alegría de vivir, de la feminidad que existió en su día y hoy está exánime, muerta. Le habla de la soledad, de la larga espera en una casa que se percibe como una cárcel… ¡Le habla de muchísimas cosas! Klein miró a Michael como si lo viera por primera vez. —Y hay otro componente —continuó— que se denomina «condensación». Una gran obra de arte sintetiza diversas ideas, diversas experiencias universales, en una idea. Leah Goldberg definió el poema como una «expresión densa» —dijo moliendo pimienta negra sobre su tortilla—. Y ambos elementos, el simbolismo y la condensación, están relacionados —cortó un trozo de queso curado y le pegó un mordisco—. Una frase como «al caballito de madera Mijael le llegó la muerte», del poema de Natán Zaj, contiene una personificación de la muerte, asociaciones con la niñez a través del caballito de madera y también posee la necesaria condensación merced a la alusión a la famosa cancioncilla infantil sobre un niño llamado Mijael. En virtud del simbolismo y de la condensación se logra la abstracción y la apertura hacia otros ámbitos. Klein respiró hondo. —Preste atención ahora. El tercer elemento básico de toda buena obra de arte se denomina desplazamiento, es la transferencia de la emoción de un área a otra. Gracias a esto, el artista puede generalizar. Tenemos un ejemplo maravilloso de desplazamiento en «Mira el sol» de Ibn Gabirol. ¿Lo conoce? Michael se apresuró a tragar un trozo de tomate empapado en aceite de oliva y asintió. En el semblante del profesor de poesía hebrea medieval apareció un gesto de satisfacción cuando su antiguo alumno recitó el poema de cabo a rabo:

[…]

Mira el sol al atardecer: rojo, como si se vistiera de escarlata. Desviste al norte y al sur, cubre el oeste de púrpura. Y la tierra, despojada, busca refugio en las sombras de la noche y duerme. Se oscurece luego el cielo, bajo un manto de arpillera, doliente por la muerte de Yecutiel. —Incluso recuerdo las diferencias entre rima y ritmo —dijo Michael, alborozado. —Ya ve —dijo Klein— se describe la puesta de sol como un proceso mediante el cual el sol deja huérfana a la tierra, y luego, al final, en pocas palabras, se establece una conexión entre el duelo del mundo y el dolor del poeta…, ¡eso es un desplazamiento! Y eso es lo que otorga unas dimensiones colosales a la experiencia del poeta. Klein rebañó con glotonería los restos de tortilla y se sirvió una generosa

[…]

—Así pues —dijo al cabo, inclinándose hacia delante después de posar el tenedor junto a su plato—, todo está entrelazado. En todas las metáforas acertadas se encuentran estos tres factores, entre los que debe existir un delicado equilibrio. Una metáfora, un símbolo, no debe alejarse en exceso del objeto al que representa; por ejemplo —tosió cavernosamente—: «La mantequilla tiene coloradas las mejillas, robusto es el invierno». Puede que esta expresión encierre algún simbolismo, pero no lo sé interpretar porque es una metáfora demasiado abierta, que permite unas asociaciones casi ilimitadas. Se levantó de la mesa para preparar café. El molinillo hacía un ruido ensordecedor y Klein terminó de moler los granos antes de continuar hablando. —Por otro lado, una metáfora, o un símbolo, siempre deben ser originales, innovadores, para que el lector vea las cosas conocidas bajo una luz nueva, diferente. Al fin y al cabo —empuñó un finyán de cobre— los temas que interesan al artista siempre son los mismos; nunca cambian. ¿Se ha preguntado alguna vez sobre qué giran las obras de arte? Sobre el amor, el sexo, la muerte, el significado de la vida; la lucha del hombre contra su destino, contra la sociedad; la relación del hombre con la naturaleza y con Dios. ¿Qué más? —vació una tacita de agua en el finyán, le añadió cuidadosamente varias cucharadas de café y de azúcar, revolvió la mezcla y colocó el finyán al fuego. Una vez más le daba la espalda a Michael mientras se afanaba en revolver el café—. La grandeza del arte radica en la posibilidad de abordar una vez más, desde un punto de vista distinto, los temas que preocupan a toda la humanidad. Si el artista crea símbolos demasiado alejados del referente, metáforas «abiertas» en exceso, los procesos que he descrito no tendrán lugar. Y lo mismo ocurre en el caso contrario, cuando son banales. Y hablando de metáforas banales, hay que decir que también me estoy refiriendo a las analogías, la rima, la sintaxis, la estructura gramatical, la secuencia de versos, todos los materiales que construyen el poema. El «talento» poético es la habilidad de lograr un delicado equilibrio, tan difícil, entre lo original y lo conocido, lo oculto y lo manifiesto, el símbolo y el objeto simbolizado. Con rápido ademán, Klein retiró el finyán del fuego y lo colocó sobre el mostrador; luego sirvió el café, con pulso seguro, en dos tacitas minúsculas de porcelana blanca ribeteadas con una franja dorada. —Las metáforas empleadas por Yael eran terriblemente banales, «cerradas», comentó Shaul, lo que significa que no dejan espacio a la imaginación, a la asociación. Además de ser expresiones trilladas, carecen del necesario diálogo entre lo concreto y lo abstracto. La poesía de Amijai, por ejemplo, se basa precisamente en ese tipo de juego. Piense en un verso como: «En el lugar donde tenemos razón, no crecerán flores en primavera», o valga como ejemplo particularmente sutil del contrapunto entre lo concreto y lo abstracto la poesía de Dan Pagis, en un verso como: «Y Él en su misericordia no dejó en mí nada perecedero». Aquí no se hace explícita la interrelación de concreto y abstracto, pero es inherente al texto, y le confiere un impacto más poderoso; es una de las afirmaciones poéticas.