Visual Metaphors and Aesthetics: A Formalist Theory of Metaphor

Description

This book offers a new definition of metaphor-as an ontological and visual construction, whose roots are external visual forms, and its motivation is our attachment to forms. This definition, which Michalle Gal names "visualist," challenges the ruling conceptualist theory of metaphors and places a new emphasis on how we experience rather than understand metaphors. In doing so, she responds to the visual turn that is taking place in literature and the media, demanding that the visual become a site of philosophical analysis. This focus on the external visual world allows Gal to employ visual theories to capture the essence of metaphor. She looks beyond conceptual or semantic mechanism, and returns to theories of Arnheim and Gombrich and the current evolution of ideas about the visual or material and embodied cognition. Proposing to see visual metaphors in their basic form, she uses a new externalist terminology of ontology, visuality, composition, affordance, construction, and emergence. Setting out a new theory that takes into account that humans are visual no less than cognitive creatures, Visual Metaphors and Aesthetics lays the foundation for a new vocabulary to talk about metaphors.

Michalle Gal is a senior faculty member in The Unit of History and Philosophy, Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art, Israel.

Michalle Gal's Visual Metaphors and Aesthetics: A Formalist Theory of Metaphor is a major accomplishment. It takes seriously the imagistic, material, and imaginative dimensions of metaphor, and it shows that language use is shot through with painterly ambitions. This is a theory of metaphor by a philosopher of art for philosophers of art, and it is most welcome. * John Gibson, Professor of Philosophy, University of Louisville, USA * Human thinking is primordially tactile and visual, and on the visual level from the very beginning imbued with metaphors. On the linguistic level the ubiquity of metaphors of course meets the eye, but it is only when looking at their visual origins that an explanation of how they function can be given. Michalle Gal provides this explanation in an outstandingly informed and informative, creative and lucid way. A must read for anyone for whom the iconic turn is more than a metaphor. * Kristof Nyiri, Professor of Philosophy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary * Michalle Gal draws on recent developments in visual culture, and on the work of a number of under-appreciated thinkers-Arnheim, Aldrich, and Gombrich, among them-to offer a resourceful, spirited defense of an ambitious new theory of metaphor. Her rich book promises to unsettle widespread assumptions about metaphor as well as the history of philosophical aesthetics. * James Shelley, Professor of Philosophy, Auburn University, USA *