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Literally: How to Speak like an Absolute Knave

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Stephen Hequembourg
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Abstract

A family of Shakespearean characters I call “the perverse literalists” takes the figurative language of their interlocutors in the most literal sense. While they make us laugh, these characters' perversely literal interpretations also highlight the physical and experiential grounds of common figures of speech and prod their interlocutors and the reader into a deeper understanding of the conditions of embodiment. his inventive use of the literal is a trope in its own right, one that has already been useful to cognitive linguists, phenomenologists, and new materialists. Metaphors we consider dead are, as others have suggested, merely sleeping, and the act of waking them up can be not merely funny but profoundly insightful. We should reexamine the widespread aversion to the misuse of literally and think instead about what it can tell us about the physicality of such abstract experiences as love and luck, causality and cognition.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 133 , Issue 1 , January 2018 , pp. 56 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 The Modern Language Association of America

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