Saghi Farahmandpour; Mohammad Ziar
Abstract
Paul Ricoeur’s The Living Metaphor is a fundamental book on metaphors. Ricoeur believes that metaphors occur, especially in the unique character of poetic language. Therefore, the main question of the present article is how, from Ricoeur's point of view, metaphors create meaning in poetic discourse. ...
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Paul Ricoeur’s The Living Metaphor is a fundamental book on metaphors. Ricoeur believes that metaphors occur, especially in the unique character of poetic language. Therefore, the main question of the present article is how, from Ricoeur's point of view, metaphors create meaning in poetic discourse. The hypothesis of this article is that in order to answer this question, the three categories of comparison, iconicity of meaning, and poetic imagery as substitution theory and the two categories of polysemy and reference as the interaction theory must be defined. Accordingly, the main purpose of this study is the exposition of the two theories of substitution and interaction based on the Misfortune by Alfred de Vigny. The exposition of these two theories shows that meaning in poetic language is iconic. Iconicity of meaning in poetic language is the result of neutralization of reality and provoking imagination, indicating that imagination suspends reality. Here the metaphor unites with the icon; in other words, the metaphor separates the words from their straightforward meaning in everyday use, and then expands the use of words by opening up the imaginary aspect of meaning so that the expression of poetic reality becomes possible. In this poem, the words’ reference is suspended because of the presence of all the possible implicit meanings. The metaphor, by comparing different ideas, not only reveals the hidden semantic relations between them, but also creates new relationships. The driving force behind this creation of meaning is replication. This unifying process is based on a sudden intuition that manipulates the previous configuration of language and creates a new structure.
