so here's where we are um essentially you are looking at metaphor criticism and we're going to do this in two parts one we're going to define a metaphor and two we're going to talk about how you use metaphors in terms of doing rhetorical criticism so let's open with part one here define metaphor all right essentially when we start talking about a metaphor we're talking about a comparison where ideas are brought together so that um the the sort of stuff we would associate with one of those things is carried over and that's literally what the word metaphor means in greek it means to carry over so the ideas that are associated with one thing those ideas those qualities get carried over to something else and if you look carefully you'll see that those are the three parts of the metaphor there okay the three parts of the metaphor are the the stuff that's going to get associated and then the one thing and the other thing all right so we have names for those if you don't know them let's learn those names the tenor is the thing that we're talking about it's the one that's gonna actually get the quality from the other thing so when we say um you know when we say uh a metaphor is a magic door metaphor is the tenor uh literally the the word metaphor in that sentence is the tenor the thing that is going to lend some assistance is called the vehicle in this case magic door and the ground is that quality that's getting associated a magic door sort of opens new vistas new horizons new ways of seeing and associating things so that's essentially the basics we're going to take a look at a couple of examples here so when we start off with something like randolph is a pig okay so we all know real quickly that randolph is probably not a literal pig because we're talking about metaphors right so when we talk about randolph as a pig randolph is the tenor that's the one who will be receiving what the vehicle is carrying okay so the vehicle is carrying certain qualities over to randolph pig in this case is the vehicle so when we say randolph is a pig we need to know those terms we need to know that randolph is the tenor of the metaphor and pig is the vehicle of the metaphor all right which brings us to the question of okay so what's the ground in this case well it's not complicated right we're talking about pig randolph is a pig we mean randolph is some kind of messy guy right that's that's the point so the quality the ground that's being carried over and dumped on randolph if you want to think about it that way the vehicle carries some ground and dumps it onto randolph okay onto the tenor that's how metaphors work so when we come here and we have this vehicle pig there's our pig right there sweet little piggy piggy is carrying something over to our tenor randolph here's randolph up here too right that's randolph actually that's jean piaget but we won't worry about it this is randolph um the the pig is carrying the idea of being messy over and dumping it on our tenor randolph so there's randolph he's as messy as a pig that's how a metaphor fundamentally works and it's these qualities the vehicle the tenor and the ground that make it functional and that you as a critic those are the three parts of the metaphor there are other parts of metaphors if you want to go deep but those are the three parts of a metaphor that you're going to need if you were to choose metaphoric criticism to write your uh your essay 2 on all right so there they are those are the parts that's basically how they function very straightforward and you've been doing this your whole life so it's not going to be anything right new and new and surprising all right you you have seen this before if we want to take a moment and just sort of work out the tenor and the vehicle a little bit more clearly the tenor is the reality that you're making a point about in our in our example there was randolph okay that's the reality that we are making a point about and the vehicle is the thing that's not really there it's it's the absent thing that's loaning some idea giving some kind of quality making some kind of a point describing as we say carrying a quality over to the tenor so our vehicle carries some kind of a quality over to our tenor that's the basic function of the metaphor so we can have a tenor like road and we can have a vehicle a ribbon of moonlight if you make that association bully for you those it's a line out of the highway man a famous uh song when we put those two things together it's when we mush him up and you can't really make sense out of one without using the other that's when you end up with a metaphor okay so the metaphor is the crunching together of that idea of the tenor and the vehicle bringing them into an association and we bring them into that association basically by linking them up and almost always we say you know it is it was the road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor okay boom there we are that's a metaphor we got it all right the road is our tenor ribbon of moonlight that's our vehicle that's something that's describing something else now the question that remains is okay so where's our ground well it's not hard to figure out if you sit down and you work it through there's our ground that ribbon of moonlight something that shimmers something that's narrow you don't get really really wide ribbons right you don't get an eight foot wide ribbon we're talking about some little narrow shimmering kind of glowing um um something oh road that's what it is it's a road okay so it's that shimmering that narrowness that glowing we pick that up from ribbon of moonlight there it is right there and those qualities that are brought to our mind by ribbon of moonlight we bring over and we associate with the road and that is what makes the metaphor powerful the qualities of one thing in this case the vehicle get associated the quality the ground of one thing the vehicle gets brought over and left with the tenor so there is this moment where we are in our own mind tying it all together making it happen so it's it's one of the reasons metaphors are powerful is that the audience is actually stitching together this metaphoric reality they have to work along with you they have to finish the statement that you i'm speaking to you as if you were the wretter at this point but the artifact that artifact that you're going to be working with that artifact is going to require its audience to work with it in completing ideas and finishing thoughts and making associations that's a really powerful thing for um a rhetorical artifact to be able to pull off all right here's a slide we're not going to go through this because it's basically just the definitions we've been talking about in a very nice quick tight frame right it's just going to highlight the vehicle and the tenor and the ground for you so basically when you uh when you pick this up and you look at this over on there we are and you look at this when you look at the the slides if you look at the slides later when we pick them up this is just a nice slide that will sort of summarize everything up for that first part where we're trying to define the metaphors all right that's going to bring us to the second idea of okay so what do you do with that right how do you use metaphors in rhetorical criticism and the short answer to that is it's really quite straightforward not surprisingly the very first thing you are going to do is you're going to find the metaphors so now if we're doing this if we're doing metaphoric criticism you're going to pick your artifact obviously you want to look for an artifact that has a bunch of metaphors in it right that are important and powerful or perhaps as we'll talk about here in just a second maybe you want to have an artifact where there is one single metaphor that runs through the entire artifact and defines it that's a possibility too but we're going to identify the metaphors that's the first thing we're going to do so find the metaphors now if we're thinking in terms of of our process of define i'm sorry of describe the artifact analyze the artifact and then make a judgment based in your analysis okay if you're doing metaphoric criticism that describe the artifact is pretty much identical to what you have done in your classical description okay when you're doing when you're using your your classical description for essay 1a and 1b you describe the the context you describe the text that's what you do when you're doing a metaphoric criticism you do the same thing but obviously when you describe the text you want to gloss really quickly over its basic structure and you want to highlight the fact that there are lots of comparisons in here because in the end a metaphor is just a special kind of comparison so you want to highlight that and you want to pick out and identify the metaphors that are present in your artifact that's your first step really of moving from description to analysis when we talk about identifying the metaphors it's straightforward there's nothing nothing mysterious here you're going to note the three parts okay those parts we just talked about you're going to call them out for each metaphor now that ground is going to be where you're really going to have to spend a little bit of time okay we want you to explain the grounds fairly carefully in metaphors because those grounds that's going to be the pay dirt when you turn your attention to interpretation and evaluation all right the second thing you do is you sort the metaphors so those are your two steps we're done that's it that's all you do you identify the metaphors note the parts explain the grounds especially and you sort the metaphors now when we talk about sorting metaphors basically we mean we are looking for patterns that emerge that should surely ring some bells for you if you've read your textbook and that's what we do in rhetorical criticism we're all about finding patterns in a text that are going to sort of shepherd an audience along toward a conclusion we look for groups of metaphors types of metaphors patterns in the way the metaphors are used these are things that are really really intriguing to us and we we put them together when we find these groups if we find groups and types we like to to pull them apart and and group them you know under these similarities or differences then we're going to have to explain the metaphors okay so these are our two steps in analysis identify the metaphor note its parts explain the grounds sort the metaphors group the metaphors in your message together in some way that helps um clarify what's actually going on here and then we start talking about explaining the metaphors themselves now this is the part where i said hmm you're probably going to want to get a good drink and sit in a soft chair and think really really hard for a long while because that's what this does when we explain the metaphors we are basically highlighting how the structures that are present by structures we mean you know those groups those types those patterns that we saw above we want to explain how those structures might reasonably affect an audience how will how would an audience you know reasonably respond to those structures those metaphors the workings of the metaphors explain to us what you think the audience might do with that as soon as we do that if you're paying attention you will note pretty quickly that we are moving from analysis into interpretation and evaluation so metaphoric criticism is another one where the boundary between analysis and interpretation it's real it's still there you're doing different tasks but they look a lot alike um well no they don't look a lot alike let me restate that they bleed into each other okay they sort of it's like a watercolor they just kind of wash into each other at this point when you are you know when you're sorting your metaphors and you're beginning to talk about how your metaphors might reasonably affect your audience you're already setting interpretation and evaluation into your discussion that's really basically what you do that's that's the whole of the thing at this point i'll just highlight a couple of other issues that you might run into here alright when you are thinking we mentioned this in in brief a moment ago but when you're thinking about your your artifact and you're going out to gather up your artifact you're identifying metaphors there are two things that are of interest to a metaphoric critic who is out looking for an artifact one is quantity it may be that you are looking for an artifact or you find an artifact that has many many different kinds of uh metaphors in it okay or many just simply many metaphors okay if you find a text that's got a lot of metaphors that's great and that's one way to do good metaphoric criticism a text that has many metaphors in it you can work with however there are also the kinds of messages that have what are called defining metaphors or generalized metaphors or universal metaphors um don't get hung up on the terminology all we mean by this is that the whole message is built around a single metaphor in other words the message itself is a metaphor the whole thing so you will get um one famous example of course that everybody loves everybody who's rhetorical uh who does rhetorical criticism loves that um if you haven't done rhetorical criticism you've probably never seen this particular commercial but there's a political commercial famous made famous by ronald reagan back in the days when he was running for office and he was accusing the person he was running for of being soft on communism it's a very popular american theme right you you know you don't hate the communists enough okay and reagan released a commercial that was basically this man walking in the woods and he was sort of the all-american man you know the rough uh uh you know independent guy out here walking through the woods and the the narrator who has this rather imposing threatening voice you know sounds like the at any moment they're gonna go and scare you right um the the narrator says what if you're out walking in the woods you're told to be careful and all this you know we see this man walking through the wilderness here there may be bears out there and then he goes on and he talks about how the bears are dangerous now maybe maybe the narrator is going to tell you maybe there's no bear around the next curve but maybe there is a bear around the next curve wouldn't it be best if you were ready to meet a bear if there's a bear okay and that's the commercial it's the whole commercial that's all it does that's the whole thing okay is the guy walking through the woods and this narrator talking about how terrible it would be if he had to meet a bear and if he has to meet a bear it would be good if he was prepared that's it okay well you don't have to be a rhetorical genius to figure out what's going on here um especially if you know incidentally um the uh the uh the fact that under the old soviet empire the bear was their national um their national animal like like we have the bald eagle okay so it's pretty clear what's happening here and it's a statement that says you need to be prepared and some people aren't going to make you prepared and others of us reagan is going to make you prepared okay that stunning fun commercial or imposing commercial uh it was one metaphor that's all it was just a metaphor beginning to end okay well there might have been a couple of different metaphors working in there but overall we could say that when we looked at it we had one defining metaphor in that entire message okay when you get something like that you also have an artifact that's got a real really solid good punch to it if you want to go out and you want to do um rhetorical criticism using this method so that's essentially the the things to look for when you begin to to think about the artifacts that you would work with if this were your method then in that case you wanted to find an artifact that's going to give you a lot of metaphors to work with or you want to find an artifact that is a metaphor just it just is from beginning to end if you find an artifact that's got a lot of metaphors the place most metaphorical critics are going to start is they're going to start with the vehicles and they're going to look for similarities in vehicles now that's not the only thing you can do not by a long shot there's a lot to be done here but on the whole look for similarities in vehicles that's what will will uh will help you out all right so how do you do it you get your text you go through you highlight all the metaphors you figure out the parts all three parts of every metaphor you can find you explain the grounds you write just a paragraph to yourself in your notes explaining the grounds of every single metaphor you've run across those are your basic notes and that's where you start then you start sorting the metaphors you look for groups or types patterns now patterns when you're sorting the metaphors the patterns that you can think about here might also be in relationship to other things we've talked about so for example you might have a pattern where [Music] there's a problem solution and the problem is all very very much statistical and logos and then solutions are full of metaphors or vice versa right you might have a problem solution where you've got tons of metaphors to explain the problem but then we get solutions and it's all like charts and graphs okay that's helpful that tells you something we're thinking about those kinds of things in regard to patterns as well but we're also thinking in terms of patterns we're also thinking about those similarities in vehicles or whether we have one particular um tenor that has a number of vehicles applied from several different directions on it so those those are the kinds of patterns we're looking for and then we come to this point where we start trying to explain those metaphors in terms of especially how those grounds are helping us how they are reasonably affecting the audience and when we do that we're already slipping into interpretation and evaluation and that's what we do in order to conduct the entire critical array this is a quotation from sonja k foss who's um who has herself she's a brilliant scholar has written zillions and zillions of of books in our field she's really worth reading as well pretty clear pretty straightforward um we we teach out of professor foss's text both at the undergraduate and graduate levels so she's got a text that that is written for undergraduates she has one that's written for the graduate level they're good books really good books so if you whatever text whatever method you are thinking about using you might want to write this name down because i bet you sonja k foss has a um has a chapter in one of her books that will explain that method very well with incredible clarity and detail so you might want to write that name down no matter i mean whether you're doing um uh whether you're doing metaphor criticism or any other criticism that we're talking about this year she's a good name to have uh to to have on your reference list all right so this is her description at the end she says the critic suggests effects and she means here especially effects on the audience and how the metaphors function to argue for a particular attitude toward the ideas that are presented a particular attitude okay um metaphors aren't going to give you a whole lot of data that's not what they do what they do is they shape and direct the audience's pathetic qualities their pathos their feelings their emotions they're designed to build emotional appeals so think about metaphors in that kind of a term because that's essentially what you're after you're after setting up a sense in the audience of what matters here what's important what's valuable um it's all the it's all the value stuff and it's all the hierarchy stuff about our feelings that's what metaphors will tap into all right so there we are that in a nutshell is um the world of metaphoric criticism