Read more
List of contents
- Introduction
- Chapter 1. Re-animating the body in Conceptual Metaphor Theory
- Chapter 2. Dynamic embodiment and the graphic illness narrative genre
- Chapter 3. A tripartite taxonomy of visual metaphor in graphic illness narratives
- Chapter 4. Unseeing eyes: Metaphor in graphic illness narratives about cancer
- Chapter 5. Trapped in spacetime: Metaphor in graphic illness narratives about depression
About the author
Elisabeth (Lisa) El Refaie is Reader in Visual Communication at the School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University (UK). Her main research interests are in visual and multimodal forms of communication. She is the author of Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures (University Press of Mississippi, 2012) and has published widely on metaphor theory, including in the journals Metaphor & Symbol and Metaphor & the Social World.
Summary
Metaphors help us understand abstract concepts, emotions, and social relations through the concrete experience of our own bodies. Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), which dominates the field of contemporary metaphor studies, is centered on this claim. According to this theory, correlations in the way the world is perceived in early childhood (e.g., happy/good is up, understanding is seeing) persist in our conceptual system, influencing our thoughts throughout life at a mostly unconscious level.
What happens, though, when ordinary embodied experience is disrupted by illness? In this book, Elisabeth El Refaie explores how metaphors change according to our body's alteration due to disease. She analyzes visual metaphor in thirty-five graphic illness narratives (book-length stories about disease in the comics medium), re-examining embodiment in traditional CMT and proposing the notion of "dynamic embodiment." Building on recent strands of research within CMT and engaging relevant concepts from phenomenology, psychology, semiotics, and media studies, El Refaie demonstrates how the experience of our own bodies is constantly adjusting to changes in our individual states of health, socio-cultural practices, and the modes and media by which we communicate. This fundamentally interdisciplinary work also proposes a novel classification system of visual metaphor, based on a three-way distinction between pictorial, spatial, and stylistic metaphors. This approach will enable readers to advance knowledge and understanding of phenomena involved in shaping our everyday thoughts, interactions, and behavior.
Additional text
This book absolutely delivers on the radical agenda that the author sets for herself. By focusing on visual metaphors in thirty-five graphic illness narratives, El Refaie challenges current theories of metaphor and embodiment to deal with multiple types of diversity (different bodies, different illnesses, different kinds of multimodal texts). This leads to insights and developments that will be relevant across many disciplines, from cognitive science through multimodal discourse analysis to the medical humanities. A marvelous achievement.
