Rhetorics of Becoming: Between Metamorphosis and Metaphor

Abstract:In a series of essays, Paul Ricœur and Jacques Derrida described the work of metaphor as a cognitive operation requiring readers to apprehend simultaneously the continuity and difference of tenor and vehicle: Juliet is and is not the sun; a book is and is not a chariot. In this paper, I show how the cognitive features required of a reader in thinking through metaphor are the same as those necessary to imagine literary metamorphosis, a trope that can be understood as the actualization of metaphor within the diegetic frame, that is, as a metaphor that is no longer figurative, but descriptive. Drawing on the work of W. T. Mitchell, this paper explores the relationship between these two literary figures as imaginative processes. In it, I propose that the phenomenological model of metaphor developed by Ricœur and Derrida be redeployed as a much-need critical apparatus with which to account for the cognitive work required in conceiving of metamorphosis in creative literature, focusing on key examples from Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, and Rushdie.