Metaphor and Historical Understanding
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4495883 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Phillip Stambovsky (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1988 |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 125 |
| Publication date | 1988-05-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | History and Theory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0018-2656 • E-ISSN: 1468-2303 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2505137 |
| OpenAlex | W2325982924 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
The centrality of metaphor in what and how we know has become widely appreciated in recent decades. Less well recognized, however, is that as a contextually determined phenomenon, metaphor operates in fundamentally different ways in divergent universes of discourse. To understand how metaphor functions in a particular discursive mode presupposes insight into the way that metaphor serves as a structural component of that order of discourse. From an epistemological standpoint, this requires that metaphor be perceived as characteristic of the type of conscious apprehension that gives rise to it. To discern, for example, the essentially depictive efficacy of literary metaphor, some conception is necessary of the role metaphors play in the prediscursive, presentational apprehension that typifies literary (as opposed, say, to hermeneutic) experience.1 Alternatively, grasping the basically heuristic function of metaphor in scientific discourse calls for appreciating the efficacy of figurative imagery in scientific knowledge.2 This same principle holds in the determination of how metaphor works in historical discourse. Determining the function of metaphor in historiography is no simple or straightforward task, however; for as with literary experience and scientific understanding, the nature of the discourse that is unique to the discipline (what it means to speak about something from an historical perspective) has long been an issue of scholarly debate. Yet insofar as the nature of historical discourse remains indeterminate, our understanding of the role that metaphor plays in historiography will likewise remain inconclusive. To assess the merits of competing claims about what it means to write history would far exceed the scope of this brief and schematic exposition. The approach to historical discourse that I have found most helpful in explicating the ways that metaphor operates in historical writing is that of Maurice Mandelbaum.3 Mandelbaum's incisive typology of forms of historical discourse affords a comprehensive conceptual basis for foregrounding what are in my view the three fundamental ways that metaphor functions in historiography: heuristically (as in scientific discourse), depictively (as in literature), and cognitively
Art · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Metaphor · Sociology · History · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Philosophy
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,24 |
| Citation span | 2009 - 2023 (15) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |