Wallpaper: cognitive linguistic approaches to metaphor and creative writing

White, Thomas (2023). Wallpaper: cognitive linguistic approaches to metaphor and creative writing. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

Aim: Cognitive linguistic approaches to metaphor have been applied to literature, but a gap exists, a lack of engagement, between these approaches and creative writing as a practice. Wallpaper seeks to close that gap.

Methods: \(\textit{Wallpaper's}\) form (creative-critical) and method are one and the same. An overarching narrative has, at its heart, John and Su, whose relationship provides a springboard to discussions about and insights into metaphor, metaphor theory, and models of metaphor. \(\textit{Wallpaper}\) also contains poetry, short stories, flash fiction, and spaces for the reader to collaborate. The creative and critical elements feed off of, react with and bleed into each other, and it is through these interactions that plot and critical discussions and arguments are developed.

Firstly, the findings and implications of contemporary metaphor scholarship are expressed through narrative. Then, it is demonstrated that metaphor theory and its models can be appropriated in the act of writing creatively, that they have fed into the act of writing \(\textit{Wallpaper}\). Lastly, \(\textit{Wallpaper}\) seeks to show that creative writing can be used as a research tool to examine metaphor, deploying itself as an attempt to do just that.

Results: Deployed in this way, \(\textit{Wallpaper}\) (and the creative metaphors it contains) is reframed as an exercise in "data" collection. This "data", combined with a reading of Agustín Fernández Mallo's \(\textit{Nocilla Trilogy}\) that is informed by metaphor theory, serves to demonstrate that existing metaphor models do not fully account for the kinds of metaphoric indeterminacy at play in creative texts, for the processes at play in their production, implementation and reception.

Conclusions: A new class of metaphor is proposed—half-built, half-deliberate metaphor. It is shown that a modified version of Fauconnier and Turner's blending theory can account for and model these metaphors satisfactorily, but also that their existence has implications for blending theory and its modelling of creativity more widely.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):