Persons attempting to find a "text" in this [story] will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a "subtext" in it will be banished; persons attempting to explain, interpret, explicate, analyze, deconstruct, or otherwise "understand" it will be exiled to a desert island in the company only of other explainers.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR - Wendell Berry's introduction to Jayber Crow.
This article was posted to Jayber on 23 January 2008 by to the following categories: Books.
An audio version of this article is also available.
By George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson first published Metaphors We Live By
In MWLB, the authors argue that our metaphorical framework is what allows us to explain the unfamiliar phenomena in terms of more familiar subjects such as our physical orientation and our social experiences.
With examples such as HAPPINESS IS UP / SADNESS IS DOWN, or HEALTH IS UP / SICKNESS IS DOWN, or AN ARGUMENT IS A JOURNEY and A JOURNEY DEFINES A PATH, therefore an ARGUMENT DEFINES A PATH, the authors rattle the roots of the linguistic mechanisms we probably all take for granted.
The book is essentially a sequence of 30 articles written against a common theme. Each chapter is relatively small and well-written. For a more in-depth and formal discussion of the same topic, see their 1999 edition of Philosophy in the Flesh : The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought.