Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T11:56:20.924Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Literally: How to Speak like an Absolute Knave

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Stephen Hequembourg
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Ayer, Alfred Jules. Language, Truth, and Logic. Dover, 1952.Google Scholar
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Bergen, Benjamin. Louder Than Words: he New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning. Basic Books, 2012.Google Scholar
Bloom, Harold. Dramatists and Drama. Chelsea House Publishers, 2005.Google Scholar
Bunyan, John. Grace Abounding. edited by Stach-niewski, John, Oxford UP, 2008.Google Scholar
Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Oxford UP, 2011.Google Scholar
Cohen, Ted. “Notes on Metaphor.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 34, no. 3, 1976, pp. 249–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cook, Amy. Shakespearean Neuroplay: Reinvigorating the Study of Dramatic Texts and Performance through Cognitive Science. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crane, Mary. Shakespeare's Brain: Reading with Cognitive heory. Princeton UP, 2001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davidson, Donald. “What Metaphors Mean.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 5, no. 1, Autumn 1978, pp. 31–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davis, Philip. Shakespeare hinking. Continuum, 2007.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy.” Translated by F. C. T. Moore. On Metaphor, special issue of New Literary History, vol. 6, no. 1, Autumn 1974, pp. 5–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flood, Alison. “‘Literally’ Figuratively Destroyed by Program to Remove the Word's Misuse.” he Guardian, 22 Apr. 2014, www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/apr/22/literally-figurative-program-misuse-plugin-browser.Google Scholar
Freeman, Donald. “Catch[ing] the Nearest Way.” Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 24, no. 6, Dec. 1995, pp. 689–708.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gallagher, Shaun. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford UP, 2005.Google Scholar
Gibbs, Raymond. “Metaphor Interpretation as Embodied Simulation.” Mind and Language, vol. 21, no. 3, June 2006, pp. 434–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibbs, Raymond. The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding. Cambridge UP, 1994.Google Scholar
Grady, Joseph. Foundations of Meaning: Primary Metaphors and Primary Scenes. 1997. U of California, Berkeley, PhD dissertation.Google Scholar
Grady, Joseph. “A Typology of Motivation for Conceptual Metaphor: Correlation vs. Resemblance.” Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics: Selected Papers from the Fifth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Amsterdam 1997, edited by Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr., and Gerard J. Steen, John Benjamins Publishing, 1999, pp. 79–100.Google Scholar
Hart, F. Elizabeth. “Cognitive Linguistics: he Experiential Dynamics of Metaphor.” Mosaic, vol. 28, no. 1, Mar. 1995, pp. 1–23.Google Scholar
Heidegger, Martin. he Principle of Reason. Translated by Lilly, Reginald, Indiana UP, 1991.Google Scholar
Johnson, Mark. he Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. U of Chicago P, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jostmann, Nils, et al. “Weight as an Embodiment of Importance.” Psychological Science, vol. 20, Sept. 2009, pp. 1169–74.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. edited by Guyer, Paul, Translated by Guyer and Eric Matthews, Cambridge UP, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kittredge, George Lyman, editor. he Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, by Shakespeare, William, Ginn, 1967.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George, and Johnson, Mark. Metaphors We Live By. U of Chicago P, 1980.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George, and Johnson, Mark. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic Books, 1999.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George, and Turner, Mark. More han Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. U of Chicago P, 1989.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Landes, Donald. Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression. Bloomsbury, 2013.Google Scholar
“Literally, Adv.” he American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th ed., Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014.Google Scholar
Lyne, Raphael. Shakespeare, Rhetoric, and Cognition. Cambridge UP, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Eye and Mind.” he Primacy of Perception, edited by Edie, James M., Northwestern UP, 1964, pp. 159–90.Google Scholar
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Landes, Donald A., Routledge, 2012.Google Scholar
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. he Visible and the Invisible. Northwestern UP, 1968.Google Scholar
Müller, Cornelia. Metaphors Dead and Alive, Sleeping and Waking: A Dynamic View. U of Chicago P, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lying in a Nonmoral Sense.” he Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, edited by Geuss, Raymond and Spiers, Ronald, Cambridge UP, 1999, pp. 141–53.Google Scholar
Nutall, A. D. Shakespeare the hinker. Yale UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Paster, Gail Kern. Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. U of Chicago P, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pope, Alexander. he Rape of the Lock. he Poems of Alexander Pope, edited by Butt, John, Yale UP, 1963, pp. 217–42.Google Scholar
Richards, I. A. he Philosophy of Rhetoric. Oxford UP, 1965.Google Scholar
Ricoeur, Paul. he Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language. Translated by Czerny, Robert, U of Toronto P, 1977.Google Scholar
Rokotnitz, Naomi. Trusting Performance: A Cognitive Approach to Embodiment in Drama. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Searle, John. Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge UP, 1979.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shakespeare, William. All's Well hat Ends Well. Shakespeare, Norton Shakespeare, pp. 2175–244.Google Scholar
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Shakespeare, Norton Shakespeare, pp. 1659–759.Google Scholar
Shakespeare, William. Love's Labour's Lost. Shakespeare, Norton Shakespeare, pp. 733–802.Google Scholar
Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare, Norton Shakespeare, pp. 1090–145.Google Scholar
Shakespeare, William. he Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition. edited by Greenblatt, Stephen et al., W. W. Norton and Company, 1997.Google Scholar
Shakespeare, William. Sonnet 147. Shakespeare, Norton Shakespeare, p. 1973.Google Scholar
Shakespeare, William. Titus Andronicus. Shakespeare, Norton Shakespeare, pp. 371–434.Google Scholar
Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night. Shakespeare, Norton Shakespeare, pp. 1761–821.Google Scholar
Sheets-Johnston, Maxine. The Primacy of Movement. John Benjamins Publishing, 1999.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sheidlower, Jesse. “he Word We Love to Hate: Literally.” Slate, 1 Nov. 2005, www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2005/11/the_word_we_love_to_hate.html.Google Scholar
Sweetser, Eve. From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure. Cambridge UP, 1990.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams, Lawrence, and Bargh, John. “Experiencing Physical Warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth.” Science, vol. 322, no. 5901, 24 Oct. 2008, pp. 606–07.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed