Szkice o metaforze językowej i wizualnej

Essays on Linguistic and Visual Metaphor

The joint work Szkice o metaforze językowej i wizualnej by Małgorzata Guławska and Piotr Bolesław Majewski is interdisciplinary in nature, approaching the subject from the perspectives of linguistics and art history. The authors present selected theories of metaphor currently used in both fields of research and highlight their dynamic development after World War II. The publication has specific epistemological, didactic, and historical goals. The argument in the two essays, illustrated with numerous literary and artistic examples, focuses on the significance of the developed theories of metaphor in the perception and interpretation of specific linguistic and visual metaphors. The authors also ask whether language, as a basic tool in thought processes, is also a basic tool in the reception of a painting, and whether the reception of a literary work saturated with imagery presupposes thinking as seeing. In the first essay, the author uses contrastive and translational research in terms of methodology and expands the subject of metaphor research with specific examples of metaphors in the form of phraseological units. In the second essay, the author presents a contextual approach, in which he takes into account cases of using the concept of metaphor in modern Polish art, art criticism, and exhibitions. Each of the theories presented aims to understand the phenomena of linguistic metaphor and, to a limited extent, the phenomenon of visual metaphor, although not all of them are equally well known and widespread among metaphorologists. The two remaining research questions related to the reception of poetic or painterly works require empirical research.

Keywords: linguistic metaphor, visual metaphor, metaphorology, phraseology, painting, art