Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor by George Lakoff, Mark Turner ISBN: 0-226-46812-7 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: April, 1989 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.67 (3 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: The "Aha!" Factor
Comment: Reading "More Than Cool Reason" will be a breath of fresh air to anyone who has not yet encountered the "Lakoff-Johnson-Turner" bibliography on metaphor human thought. I found this more helpful than "Metaphors We Live By" (Lakoff & Johnson), since it deals with specific texts (e.g., "Because I could not stop for Death", "Sonnet 73" (Shakespeare), "By the Light of the Jasmine Moon"), which anchors their discussion, which might otherwise veer into the rather abstract.
Reading this book changed my thinking about metaphor, and has drastically affected--for the better--my teaching on metaphor in my courses on poetry. Students have also found it extremely helpful. There is some rather tiresome repetition, but much of the authors' reiteration of points is necessary to understanding what they are saying. The indices are very helpful, although I found it necessary to extend their topical index with my own "speed index".
Rating: 4
Summary: five for the idea, three for its handling
Comment: The important claim this book makes is that literary language does not differ from common everyday language. Poets make use of the same linguistic resources and cognitive mechanisms we all use in everyday situations. They just do it better, in innovative ways. The discussion of poems the authors provide to support their argument should perhaps be more articulate and systematic in order to be truly persuasive. At times one gets the impression that this book was conceived as a kind of divertissement in wait of future, more carefully planned incursions on the subject.
However, this does not diminish the importance of a book which urges literary critics and all those who like books to consider the cognitive basis of both everyday and literary communication. Also, More than Cool Reason can be read as an accessible introduction to Lakoff and Turner (and Johnson)'s theory of conceptual metaphor. For a much more articulate discussion, I would recommend Lakoff and Johnson's "Philosophy in the Flesh", but then you will have to draw the implications of their theories for literature by yourself.
Rating: 3
Summary: So-so
Comment: This IS an important contribution to literary theory. The points that Lakoff and Turner make are very good, very logical, and will make you go "Of course! Why didn't I think of that?" It will not only change the way you read poetry, but will impact the way you watch t.v., listen to people speak, read the newspaper - any endeavor involving language. Why the low rating, then? Lakoff and Turner are structuralists, and they repeat everything over and over again, breaking things down to their minute building blocks. They made a very convincing argument in the first chapter, I thought, and didn't need to keep going the way they did. The third chapter, in which they apply their theory to a William Carlos Williams poem is also very good. Those two chapters would have sufficed. Again, an important book, but rather boring at times.
 |
Title: Metaphors We Live by by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson ISBN: 0226468011 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
 |
Title: Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind by George Lakoff ISBN: 0226468046 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: January, 1990 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
 |
Title: Philosophy in the Flesh : The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson ISBN: 0465056741 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 01 December, 1999 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
 |
Title: Moral Politics : How Liberals and Conservatives Think by George Lakoff ISBN: 0226467716 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: May, 2002 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
 |
Title: Metaphor: A Practical Introduction by Zoltan Kovecses ISBN: 0195145119 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: January, 2002 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
