Reclaiming a unified American narrative

IF 0.9 Q2 LINGUISTICS

Metaphor and the Social World Pub Date : 2019-11-05 DOI:10.1075/msw.18019.rit

L. Ritchie

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引用次数: 1

Abstract

As part of an on-going project to apply metaphor analysis to understanding the cultural polarization that has recently obstructed discourse about political and cultural issues in both the United States and Europe, this essay examines the lexical, grammatical, and story metaphors in a recent editorial column, by conservative columnist Ross Douthat, that also focuses on this topic. In a key section of the essay, Douthat uses a blend of complex grammatical and lexical metaphors to highlight the contrast between the traditional American identity narrative of settlement and conquest and a recently emerged liberal counter-narrative, which Douthat epitomizes by quoting former President Obama’s repeated insistence that “That’s not who we are.” Douthat’s argument is contextualized by the reproduction of an image with the title “Engraving of a massacre of Indian women and children in Idaho by 19th century white settlers,” which strengthens the contrasts and implied ironies embedded in his complex combination of grammatical and lexical metaphors. These relationships are brought into sharp focus through the metaphor-led analysis of the text and its interaction with the image, demonstrating the value of this approach to discourse analysis.

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重塑统一的美国叙事

作为一个正在进行的项目的一部分，运用隐喻分析来理解最近阻碍了美国和欧洲关于政治和文化问题的讨论的文化两极分化，本文在保守派专栏作家罗斯·杜特最近的一篇评论专栏中研究了词汇、语法和故事隐喻，该专栏也关注这一主题。在文章的一个关键部分，杜特使用了复杂的语法和词汇隐喻来强调传统的美国定居和征服的身份叙事与最近出现的自由主义反叙事之间的对比，杜特通过引用前总统奥巴马反复坚持的“那不是我们是谁”来概括这种反叙事。杜特的论点是通过复制一幅题为“19世纪白人定居者在爱达荷州屠杀印第安妇女和儿童的版画”的图像来进行背景化的，这加强了他在语法和词汇隐喻的复杂组合中嵌入的对比和隐含的讽刺。通过以隐喻为主导的文本分析及其与形象的互动，这些关系得到了清晰的关注，展示了这种方法在话语分析中的价值。

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来源期刊

Metaphor and the Social World LINGUISTICS-

CiteScore

2.20

自引率

11.10%

发文量

期刊介绍： The journal Metaphor and the Social World aims to provide a forum for researchers to share with each other, and with potential research users, work that explores aspects of metaphor and the social world. The term “social world” signals the importance given to context (of metaphor use), to connections (e.g. across social, cognitive and discourse dimensions of metaphor use), and to communication (between individuals or across social groups). The journal is not restricted to a single disciplinary or theoretical framework but welcomes papers based in a range of theoretical approaches to metaphor, including discourse and cognitive linguistic approaches, provided that the theory adequately supports the empirical work. Metaphor may be dealt with as either a matter of language or of thought, or of both; what matters is that consideration is given to the social and discourse contexts in which metaphor is found. Furthermore, “metaphor” is broadly interpreted and articles are welcomed on metonymy and other types of figurative language. A further aim is to encourage the development of high-quality research methodology using metaphor as an investigative tool, and for investigating the nature of metaphor use, for example multi-modal discourse analytic or corpus linguistic approaches to metaphor data. The journal publishes various types of articles, including reports of empirical studies, key articles accompanied by short responses, reviews and meta-analyses with commentaries. The Forum section publishes short responses to papers or current issues.