Some Comments on the Lakoffean Conception of Spatial Imagery

Abstract

The following comments grew out from two accidental encounters I had in one week with approaches to literature that involve the cognitive-linguistics oriented work developed by Lakoff, Johnson, Turner, Fauconnier and others. Significantly enough, in both instances I faced groups of scholars who presumed to speak in the name of “Literature and Cognitive Science”, while handling merely a small area of the field. A spokesman for one of the groups made a few very intelligent and penetrating comments from the point of view of the Lakoff approach on my paper “Aspects of Cognitive Poetics”, among them the following:
Your paper implies criticism of their work at several points: their redefinition of metaphor as a conceptual rather than a linguistic function, their in-attention to the affective responses elicited by poetry, and their preoccupation with spatial imagery, among others.
Since that paper opens only a small window into my work, I thought I’d better clarify two points with reference to these comments concerning the "redefinition of metaphor”, and the “preoccupation with spatial imagery”. Parts of this analysis were written for this specific answer; but considerable parts were just copied and pasted with the necessary changes from earlier publications of mine.