Expressed Silence: A Study of the Metaphorics of Word
in Selected Nineteenth-Century American Texts
This dissertation explores the patterned use of certain
“metaphors of word”——images of reading, writing, listening, and
speaking——in four American texts: Emerson’s Nature, Thoreau’s
Walden, Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, and Melville’s Moby Dick.
Assumed in my discussion is the modern view of metaphor as a
cognitive device used, not for mere stylistic ornament, but for
creating a certain mental perspective. Based on the
perspectival view and on the experiential—gestalt account of
metaphor, the structures of these metaphors of word are examined
in order to discern the systematic nature of their argument and
to determine the cultural and historical reasons why language
imagery, and not some other type of imagery, was chosen to
represent this argument. After surveying the cultural
influences of democracy, mercantilism, Romanticism, and
Calvinism, I characterize the metaphoric systems of each text
and then move on to a closer study of the role of silence within
these systems.
From this analysis, I conclude that these nineteenth—
century texts reflect a shift away from the book toward the
voice as a predominant symbol, and away from writing toward
speaking as a privileged metaphor. Language imagery works to
represent ways of knowing, so that linguistic and epistemic
concerns become inextricably intertwined. The process of using language operates as a metaphor for the process of gaining
knowledge. In this metaphorics of word, silence emerges as a
particularly striking metaphor in the way that it expresses the
coalescence of being and knowing, the realization that we know
what we know. In this scheme, metaphors of word structure ways
of understanding, and the expressed silence metaphor highlights
the way interior speech can function in the discernment of
knowledge. Ultimately, I contend that the perspective provided
by this nineteenth—century metaphorics of word forecasts the
modern view of rhetoric as epistemic. By employing linguistic
action as a
figure for representing epistemic action, a
metaphorics of word promotes an understanding of rhetoric’s
primary purpose as the interrogation of truth.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/6947 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Werder, Carmen Marie |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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