AN3029MAAmerican Culture Through Language:
Metaphor and Ideology in America
MA in North American Studies, Autumn2014
Time: Thursday14.00-15.40
Place: 55
Instructor: Cserép Attila
Office hours:Monday 15.00-16.00 and Tuesday 15.00-16.00
Office: 1/3
Course aim and material
The course explores the role of language in forming assumptions about what the world is and should be like. Figurative language use, especially metaphorical expressions, lexical and grammatical patterns, recurrent phrases all reveal underlying assumptions of the text producer (and target audience) in terms of socio-cultural values and ideology. Assuming that the language we speak yields important insights into our identity and thinking, English will be scrutinized with a focus on the typical metaphors and metonyms, turns of phrase, lexical items that help conceptualize key issues and topics in cultural, political and social fields. Conceptual metaphor theory will be used to identify major domains that figurative language draws on, such as war, games, organism, family, and to reveal what the application of the given figurative device tells us about the issue at hand and, in a wider context, about Americans’ view of their institutions and culture. Ideology is interpreted in a broad sense, something like ‘perspective’ or ‘evaluation’. Viewed broadly, the course addresses the issue of the relationship between language and reality/thought, more narrowly, it examines the conscious and subconscious effect of figurative language on thinking and the ideological function of metaphor in areas such as war, race, business, globalization, etc.
Textbooks
The course packet (available electronically in PDF format in the library)
Requirements and procedures
You are expected to read the assigned material and discuss the reading in class.
Assessment
Assessment will be based on a take-home essay on a course-related topic (70%) and students’ participation in seminar discussions (30%), but if any one of these is elégtelen, then the final gradeis also elégtelen.At the end of the course you are expected to write an approximately 1500-1800 word long take-home essay on a topic previously discussed with the tutor. The same style guidance applies as for the thesis. Deadline for submitting the essay: one week (7 days) after the end of teaching. Missing the deadline means that the final grade of the course is elégtelen. The essay can be submitted in electronic form. The essay must contain your own contribution in the form of an analysis of texts, cartoons, videos, etc., it should not simply be a summary of what you have read (in or outsideclass).
Week 1 / 18 Sept / Introductionno reading
Week 2 / 25 Sept / Metaphors and American culture
Chapter 8 Metaphor in social-physical reality pp 163–211
Kövecses, Zoltán. 2005. Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.
Week 3 / 2 Oct / cancelled: Canadian studies celebrations
Week 4 / 9 Oct / Metaphors and ideology
Chapter 2 Metaphors of power pp 35–87
Goatly, Andrew. 2007. Washing the Brain: Metaphor and Hidden Ideology. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Week 5 / 16 Oct / Metaphors in politics
Chapter 5 Metaphor in American presidential speeches pp 87–110
Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2004. Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Week 6 / 23 Oct / HOLIDAY
Week 7 / 30 Oct /
CONSULTATION WEEK
Week 8 / 6 Nov / Metaphors and war1. Lakoff, George. 1991. Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf.
2. Sandikcioglu, Esra. 2001. The otherness of the orient: Politico-cultural implications of ideological categorisations. In: Dirven, René, Roslyn Frank and Cornelia Ilie. (eds.) Language and Ideology. Vol II:Descriptive Cognitive Approaches. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 161–188
Week 9 / 13 Nov / Metaphors of moral accounting
Chapter 7 George W. Bush and the rhetoric of moral accounting pp 169–196
Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2005. Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Week 10 / 20 Nov / Metaphors and race
Santa Ana, Otto. 2003. Three mandates for anti-minority policy expressed in U.S. public discourse metaphors. In: Dirven, René, Roslyn Frank and Martin Pütz. (eds.) Cognitive Models in Language and Thought: Ideology, Metaphors and Meanings. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 199–227
Week 11 / 27 Nov / Metaphors in business
Koller, Veronika. 2003. Metaphor clusters, metaphor chains: analyzing the multifunctionality of metaphor in text. metaphorik.de 05/2003: 115–134
Week 12 / 4 Dec / Metaphors in globalization
Eubanks, Philip. 2005. Globalization, “corporate rule,” and blended worlds: A conceptual–rhetorical analysis of metaphor, metonymy, and conceptual blending. Metaphor and Symbol 20/3: 173–197
Week 13 / 11 Dec / Preparation for the essay
Lantolf, James P. and Larysa Bobrova. 2012. Happiness is drinking beer: a cross-cultural analysis of multimodal metaphors in American and Ukrainian commercials. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 22/1: 42–66
Week 14 / 18 Dec / Closing
Recommended material:
Ahrens, Kathleen. 2011. Examining conceptual metaphor models through lexical frequency patterns: A case study of U.S. presidential speeches. In: Handl, Sandra and Hans-Jörg Schmid. (Eds.) Windows to the Mind: Metaphor, Metonymy and Conceptual Blending. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. 167–184.
Allison, Graham T. 1969. Conceptual models and the Cuban missile crisis. The American Political Science Review 63/3: 689-718.
Barrett, Del. 2007. “War on Terror” – An Intentional Choice of Words? A Corpus Analysis of war on and war against. In: Davies, Matthew, Paul Rayson, Susan Hunston, Pernilla Danielsson. (eds.) Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics Conference CL2007:University of Birmingham, UK 27-30 July 2007.
Bendl, Regine and Angelika Schmidt. 2010. From ‘glass ceilings’ to ‘firewalls’ – different metaphors for describing discrimination. Gender, Work and Organization 17/5: 612–634.
Bergen, Benjamin. 2004. To awaken a sleeping giant: cognition and culture in September 11 political cartoons. In: Achard, Michel and Suzanne Kemmer. (eds.) Language, Culture and Mind. Stanford, California: Center for the Study of Language and Information. 23–35.
Bhatia, Aditi. 2009. The discourses of terrorism. Journal of Pragmatics 41: 279–289.
Billig, Michael and Katie MacMillan. 2005. Metaphor, idiom and ideology: The search for ‘no smoking guns’ across time.DiscourseandSociety 16/4: 459–480.
Biria, Reza and Azadeh Mohammadi. 2012. The socio pragmatic functions of inaugural speech: A critical discourse analysis approach. Journal of Pragmatics 44: 1290–1302.
Boers, Frank andMurielle Demecheleer. 1997. A few metaphorical models in (western) economic discourse. In: Liebert, Wolf-Andreas, Gisela Redeker and Linda Waugh. (eds.) Discourse and Perspective in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. 115–129.
Bolinger, Dwight. 1980. Language – The Loaded Weapon: The Use and Abuse of Language Today. London andNew York: Longman.
Bonnefille, Stéphanie M. 2008. When green rhetoric and cognitive linguistics meet: President G. W. Bush’s environmental discourse in his State of the Union Addresses (2001-2008). metaphorik.de 15/2008: 27–61.
Boroditsky, Lera. 2000. Metaphoric structuring: understanding time through spatial metaphors. Cognition 75: 1–28.
Boroditsky, Lera, Lauren A. Schmidt and Webb Phillips. 2003. Sex, Syntax, and Semantics. In: Gentner and Goldin-Meadow. (eds.) Language in Mind: Advances in the study of Language and Thought. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA.
Caldas-Coulhard, Carmen Rosa and Malcolm Coulthard. (eds.) 1996. Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis. London and New York: Routledge.
Cardona, Melissa S., Charlene Zietsmab, Patrick Saparitoc,Brett P. Matherned and Carolyn Davis. 2005. A tale of passion: New insights into entrepreneurshipfrom a parenthood metaphor. Journal of Business Venturing 20: 23–45.
Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2004. Why “an angel rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm”: A corpus-based comparative study of metaphor in British and American political discourse. In: Aijmer, Karin and Bengt Altenberg. (eds.) Advances in Corpus Linguistics: Papers from the 23rd International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 23), Göteborg 22-26 May 2002. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 133–150.
Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2004. Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2005. Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Christensen, Wendy M. andMyra Marx Ferree. 2008. Cowboy of the world? Gender discourse and the Iraq war debate. Qualitative Sociology 31: 287–306.
Cienki, Alan. 2005. Metaphor in the ‘‘Strict Father’’ and ‘‘Nurturant Parent’’ cognitive models: Theoretical issues raised in an empirical study. Cognitive Linguistics 16/2: 279–312
Cresswell Tim. 1997. Weeds, plagues, and bodily secretions: a geographical interpretation of metaphors of displacement. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87/2: 330–345.
Deignan, Alice. 2005. Metaphor and Corpus Linguistics. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
del-Teso-Carviotto, Marisol. 2006. Words that matter: Lexical choice and gender ideologies in women’s magazines. Journal of Pragmatics 38: 2003–2021.
Dirven, René, Roslyn Frank and Cornelia Ilie. (eds.) 2001. Language and Ideology. Vol II:Descriptive Cognitive Approaches. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Dirven, René, Frank Polzenhagen and Hans-Georg Wolf. 2007. Cognitive linguistics, ideology, and critical discourse analysis. In: Geeraerts, Dirk and Hubert Cuyckens. (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.
Dodd, Sarah Drakopoulou. 2002. Metaphors and meaning: a grounded cultural model of US entrepreneurship. Journal of Business Venturing 17: 519–535.
Ellis, Mark and Richard Wright. 1998. The balkanization metaphor in the analysis of U.S. immigration. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88/4: 686–698.
Eubanks, Philip. 1999. The story of conceptual metaphor: What motivates metaphoric mappings? Poetics Today 20/3: 419–442
Eubanks, Philip. 2005. Globalization, “corporate rule,” and blended worlds: A conceptual–rhetorical analysis of metaphor, metonymy, and conceptual blending. Metaphor and Symbol 20/3: 173–197.
Fairclough, Norman. 1989. Language and Power. London and New York: Longman.
Fairclough, Norman. 1995. Critical Discourse Analysis : Papers in the Critical Study of Language.London and New York: Longman.
Fairclough, Norman. 2003. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London and New York: Routledge.
Ferrari, Federica. 2007. Metaphor at work in the analysis of political discourse: Investigating a ‘preventive war’ persuasion strategy. Discourse and Society 18/5: 603–625.
Goatly, Andrew. 1996. Green grammar and grammatical metaphor, or Language and the myth of power,or Metaphors we die by. Journal of Pragmatics 25: 537–560.
Goatly, Andrew. 2006. Ideology and metaphor: Power is high, sex is violence, disease is invasion. English Today 22/3: 25–38, 50.
Goatly, Andrew. 2007. Washing the Brain: Metaphor and Hidden Ideology. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Hamington, Maurice. 2009. Business is not a game: The metaphoric fallacy. Journal of Business Ethics 86: 473–484. ProQuest Central
Hardaway, Francine. 1976. Foul play: Sports metaphors as public doublespeak. College English 38/1: 78–82.
Hodge, Robert and Gunther Kress. 1993. Language as Ideology. London and New York: Routledge.
Ivie, Robert L. 1999. Fire, flood, and red fever: motivating metaphors of global emergency in the Truman Doctrine speech. Presidential Studies Quarterly29/3: 570–591.
Kimmel, Michael. 2004. Metaphor variation in cultural context:perspectives from anthropology. European Journal of English Studies 8/3: 275–294.
Koehn, Drayl. 1997. Business and game-playing: The false analogy. Journal of Business Ethics 16: 1447–1452.
Koller, Veronika. 2003. Metaphor clusters, metaphor chains: analyzing the multifunctionality of metaphor in text. metaphorik.de 05/2003: 115–134.
Koller, Veronika. 2005. Critical discourse analysis and social cognition: evidence from business media discourse. Discourse & Society 16/2: 199–224.
Koller, Veronika. 2006. Of critical importance: Using electronic text corpora to study metaphor in business and media discourse. In: Stefanowitsch, Anatol and Stefan Th. Gries. (eds.) Corpus-Based Approaches to Metaphor and Metonymy. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 237–266.
Koller, Veronika. 2008. Brothers in arms: contradictory metaphors in contemporary marketing discourse. In: In: Zanotto, Maria Sophia, Lynne Cameron and Marilda C. Cavalcanti. (Eds.)Confronting Metaphor in Use: An Applied Linguistic Approach. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. 149–162.
Kövecses, Zoltán. 2002. Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. New York: OxfordUniversity Press.
Kövecses, Zoltán. 2005.Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation.Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.
Kövecses, Zoltán. 2006. Language, Mind, and Culture: A Practical Introduction. Oxford and New York: OxfordUniversity Press.
Kövecses, Zoltán. 2007. Studying American culture through its metaphors: Dimensions of variation and frames of experience. Americana 3/1.
Lakoff, George. 1991. Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf. Also available online at
Lakoff, George. 1995. Metaphor, Morality, and Politics, Or, Why Conservatives Have Left Liberals In the Dust.
Lakoff, George. 2001. Metaphors of Terror.
Lakoff, George. 2003. Metaphor and War, Again.
Lakoff, George. 2004. Don’t Think of An Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green.
Lakoff, George. 2005. A cognitive scientist looks at Daubert. American Journal of Public Health 95/S1: S114-S120
Lakoff, George. 2008. The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain. New York: Viking.
Lakoff, George and Evan Frisch. 2006. Five Years After 9/11: Drop the War Metaphor.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh. New York: Basic Books.
Lantolf, James P. and Larysa Bobrova. 2012. Happiness is drinking beer: a cross-cultural analysis of multimodal metaphors in American and Ukrainian commercials. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 22/1: 42–66.
Lee, David. 1992. Competing Discourses: Perspective and Ideology in Language. London and New York: Longman.
Leonard, Pauline. 2002. Organizing gender? Looking at metaphors as frames of meaning in gender/organizational texts. Gender, Work and Organization 9/1: 60–80.
Loftus, Elizabeth F and John C. Palmer. 1974. Reconstruction of automobile destruction: an example of the interaction between language and memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 13/5: 585–589. Accessed 22 Jan 2010 Downloaded at
Mason, Oliver and Rhiannon Platt. 2006. Embracing a new creed: lexical patterning and the encoding of ideology. College Literature 33/2: 154–170.
Miller, Steven I. and Marcel Fredericks. 1990. Perceptions of the crisis in American public education: the relationship of metaphors to ideology. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 5/2: 67–81.
Morgan, Pamela S. 2001. The semantics of an impeachment: Meanings andmodels in a political conflict. In: Dirven, René, Roslyn Frank and Cornelia Ilie. (eds.) Language and Ideology. Vol II:Descriptive Cognitive Approaches. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 77–105.
O’Brien, Gerald V. 2003. Indigestible food, conquering hordes, and waste materials: Metaphors of immigrants and the early immigration restriction debate in the United States. Metaphor and Symbol 18/1: 33–47.
Ricoeur, Paul. 2006. Az élő metafora. Budapest: Osiris.
Rohrer, Tim. 1995. The metaphorical logic of (political) rape: The new wor(l)d order. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 10/2: 115–137.
Rohrer, Tim. 1997. Conceptual blending on the information highway: How metaphorical inferences work. In: Liebert, Wolf-Andreas, Gisela Redeker and Linda Waugh. (eds.) Discourse and Perspective in Cognitive Linugistics. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 185–204.
Rohrer, Tim. 2001. Even the interface is for sale: Metaphors, visual blends and the hidden ideology of the internet. In: Dirven, René, Roslyn Frank and Cornelia Ilie. (eds.) Language and Ideology. Vol II:Descriptive Cognitive Approaches. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 189–214.
Rohrer, Tim. 2004. Race-baiting, cartooning and ideology: A conceptual blending analysis of contemporary and WW II war cartoons. In Greschonig, Steffen and Sing, Christine S. Ideologien zwischen Lüge und Wahrheitsanspruch. Wiesbaden, Germany: Deutscher Universitäts-Verlag. 193–216.
Sandikcioglu, Esra. 2001. The otherness of the orient: Politico-cultural implications of ideological categorisations. In: Dirven, René, Roslyn Frank and Cornelia Ilie. (eds.) Language and Ideology. Vol II:Descriptive Cognitive Approaches. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 161–188.
Sandikcioglu, Esra. 2003. More metaphorical warfare in the Gulf: Orientalist frames in news coverage. In: Barcelona, Antonio. (ed.) Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads: A Cognitive Perspective. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 299–320.
Santa Ana, Otto. 1999. ‘Like an animal I was treated’: Anti-immigrant metaphor in US public discourse. Discourse and Society 10/2: 191–224.
Santa Ana, Otto. 2003. Three mandates for anti-minority policy expressed in U.S. public discourse metaphors. In: Dirven, René, Roslyn Frank and Martin Pütz. (eds.) Cognitive Models in Language and Thought: Ideology, Metaphors and Meanings. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 199–227.
Schön, Donald A. 1993. Generative metaphor: A perspective on problem-setting in social policy. In: Ortony, Andrew. (ed.) Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press. 137–163.
Seale, Clive. 2001. Sporting cancer: struggle language in news reports of people with cancer. Sociology of Health & Illness 23/3: 308–329.
Simpson, Paul. 1993. Language, Ideology and Point of View. London and New York: Routledge.
Smith, Paul,Peter Caputi andNadiaCrittenden. 2012. A maze of metaphors around glass ceilings. Gender in Management: An International Journal 27/7: 436–448.
Stubbs, Michael. 1997. Whorf's children: critical comments on critical discourse analysis. In: Wray, A and A Ryan. (eds.) Evolving Models of Language. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. 100-116. [Reprinted in M Toolan ed (2002) Critical Discourse Analysis. Routledge. 202-218.
Stubbs, Michael. 2001. Words and Phrases: Corpus Studies of Lexical Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Thibodeau, Paul H and Lera Boroditsky. 2011. Metaphors we think with: the role of metaphor in reasoning. PLoS ONE 6/2: 1–11.
Wolf, Hans-Georg and Frank Polzenhagen. 2003. Conceptual metaphor as ideological stylistic means: An exemplary analysis. In: Dirven, René, Roslyn Frank and Martin Pütz. (eds.) Cognitive Models in Language and Thought: Ideology, Metaphors and Meanings. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 247–275.
Wyatt, Sally. 2004. Danger! Metaphors at Work in Economics, Geophysiology, and the Internet.Science, Technology, & Human Values 29/2:242–261.
Zhang,Juyan. 2007. Beyond anti-terrorism: Metaphors as message strategy ofpost-September-11 U.S. public diplomacy. Public Relations Review 33: 31–39.
1