Aristotle (and his modern critics) on metaphor

Jens Refslund Poulsen, studieadjunkt, Copenhagen Univ. Title: Aristotle (and his modern critics) on metaphor - or: How modern theories of metaphor have been battling self-invented, ancient ghosts

Firstly, you cannot really talk about ancient theory of metaphor, as it is generally integrated more broadly in ancient theories of rhetoric and poetics. That is also the case with Aristotle who treats metaphor alongside with other tropes and figures of speech in the léxis-parts (i.e. in his chapters on “language” and “style”) of his Poetics and Rhetoric.

Secondly, it is quite difficult to establish an honest dialogue between modern and ancient understandings of metaphor, as many modern theorists of metaphor (in this case: cognitive semantics represented by Lakoff and Johnson’s famous Metaphors We Live By, 1989) do not really seem to read the ancient texts (in this case: Aristotle) but prefer to unfold their own cognitive theory of metaphor against a rather dim and distant background of “classical tradition”, which apparently understood metaphor merely as verbal substitution and stylistic ornamentation (cf. my alternative, polemical title given above).

Nevertheless, I shall in my presentation try to give a short comparison of Aristotle’s and Lakoff and Johnson’s understandings of metaphor (respectively). And, finally, I shall present some perspectives on the coherence of Aristotle’s understanding of metaphor and rhetoric and poetics in general. A coherence which, strangely enough, has also been questioned, this time by classical scholars who presumably have been reading Aristotle.