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Hello again, English majors, my name is Christopher Hanlon,
professor of English here at Eastern Illinois University.
(Dr. Suzie Park). My name is Suzie Park,
I'm also a professor of English at Eastern.
(Dr. Hanlon). And we're here once
again with another installment of the
Close Reading Cooperative, the podcast in literary
studies we produce here at Eastern.
And today, Suzie, I was thinking what we should do is talk to our
students about a subject that I think is fundamental
to the whole issue of literary analysis
and that's the subject of metaphor.
(Dr. Park). Good topic.
(Dr. Hanlon). Good topic because
metaphor is about figurative language and
figurative language is really what makes literary
language different from other kinds of language.
(Dr. Park). Absolutely.
(Dr. Hanlon). As a teacher,
to tell you the truth, often I find myself
thinking if my English majors could just identify the
metaphors and just sort of be able to talk about how metaphors
work and what they convey, they would be miles ahead, they would
find it so easy to control the discussion in class.
So all right, let's go, let's talk about metaphors then.
(Dr. Park). Sure.
(Dr. Hanlon). You know Robert Frost
actually said once that poetry's whole
purpose was to create metaphors.
The way he said it was that every poem is a new metaphor
or it is nothing, something like that.
And I think one way, one valuable way, of thinking about
metaphor is to understand how they're built.
And I.A. Richards, who was a critic from the
first half of the 20th Century, said that every
metaphor consists of two components,
a vehicle and a tenor.
So, what are those things?
The vehicle is the sort of figure of speech that the
metaphor relies upon in order to say something about or convey
an idea about the tenor, which is the thing that
the metaphor helps us to understand.
So in one way it helps to think about the vehicle as literally
something you use to transport meaning.
It's like something that you put the tenor inside
in order to convey it somewhere else.
And metaphors at their best help us to think about things
that we thought we understood in new ways.
So really all I want to do today is sort of emphasize the
usefulness of thinking about vehicles and tenors and my idea
was I was going to give you some actual lines of poetry--we're
dealing with real poetry here, nothing fake about this.
(Dr. Park). Wouldn't want fake.
(Dr. Hanlon). No, there's nothing
contrived about the Close Reading
Cooperative, ever, we're totally real.
I'll give you some lines of poetry and you tell me what the
vehicle and the metaphor is.
I'm sorry, the vehicle and the tenor is.
(Dr. Park). Sure.
(Dr. Hanlon). Okay.
So here's one, a very famous one, by Robert Burns.
[reads line].
He said from inside the red, red room here at the
Doudna Fine Arts Center.
(Dr. Park). "My love is like
a red, red rose."
I've heard this one before.
Love would be the tenor, right, that's the meaning, the kind of
abstract thing that needs to be packaged into the go-cart, which
is rose, the thing, right?
(Dr. Hanlon). That's right because
I guess when you think about it, love is kind of
like a rose, in some ways, right?
(Dr. Park). It is?
(Dr. Hanlon). Well, it's beautiful, it's
temporal, if you don't pick it, it might go away.
(Dr. Park). Oh yes, yes.
Absolutely.
(Dr. Hanlon). It's got thorns
you can hurt yourself on.
Okay, absolutely right, here's another one.
This one's by Emily Dickinson.
[reads line].
What do you think?
(Dr. Park). What does that mean?
"My life had stood".
(Dr. Hanlon). Here at the Close
Reading Cooperative, we don't talk about
what poetry means, we talk about how poetry means.
(Dr. Park). Oh, sorry, sorry.
(Dr. Hanlon). It's okay.
(Dr. Park). Life would be the tenor,
that difficult, big thing packed into the
vehicle of the loaded gun.
Is that right?
(Dr. Hanlon). You do this for
a living don't you?
(Dr. Park). Yes, actually I do.
My bread and butter.
(Dr. Hanlon). Alright, let me
give you another one.
This one I think is a little trickier.
This is by the poet Mark Strand former
Poet Laureate of the United States.
[reads line].
(Dr. Park). "The meat sits".
Hmm, that doesn't make any sense, but meat, no, dish is the
tenor, which is strange because that's not like life or love.
(Dr. Hanlon). No, I guess it's
like something, right?
The dish is like what?
(Dr. Park). Is like the white lake,
which is the vehicle.
That's a tricky one.
(Dr. Hanlon). Exactly, that's exactly right.
(Dr. Parks). Very tricky.
(Dr. Hanlon). Here's one by Wallace Stevens.
[reads line].
We're getting a little more complex here.
(Dr. Park). I would need to be
the tenor and tree, strangely enough,
would be the vehicle.
(Dr. Hanlon). That's right, you are
the tenor and tree is the vehicle.
I'll give you one more.
(Dr. Parks). Okay.
(Dr. Hanlon). Okay, this is by Sylvia Plath
and in her great poem, which is actually called
"Metaphor", and it's about pregnancy.
[reads line].
(Dr. Park). Again, subjectivity, I would
have to be the tenor, right?
(Dr Hanlon). I think you're right.
(Dr. Parks). And then all of those
things you mentioned afterwards would need to be vehicles.
(Dr. Hanlon). An elephant, a house,
a melon, all that stuff.
(Dr. Park). Even riddle.
(Dr. Hanlon). Right.
And actually technically--I mean I suppose it's worth saying--I
guess we could say that strictly speaking not all of these
metaphors are metaphors, are they?
(Dr. Park). No, in fact I heard
"like, like, like" all the way through these
examples and that means simile.
(Dr. Hanlon). Yeah, that means you're
dealing with a simile.
Similes assert of relationship of similarity, whereas a
metaphor, strictly speaking, asserts a relationship of
identity; one thing is another.
But in a larger sense, you know, we use
that word metaphor to encompass.
We often use it to encompass similes and other assertions of
relationship between two different things.
And in fact, I think next time we should talk about some of the
more specific kinds of metaphors, you know,
conceits and tropes, and we'll get into that.
But I think this is good for now, don't you?
(Dr. Park). Yes, very useful.
(Dr. Hanlon). Okay so unpack some
metaphors this week, think about where's
the vehicle, where is the tenor, and of course that's going to
help you to decide how poems mean.
Okay, we'll see you next time.
[no dialogue].