Body and Metaphor: Narrative-based Metaphor Analysis in Medical Humanities

• Applicant: Dr. Anita Wohlmann
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2017 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 329051690

The research project is situated at the intersection of the humanities and medicine and focuses on metaphors in their capacities as potent epistemological and experiential devices. Metaphors, like narratives, are relevant in science and health contexts as they help explain complex and abstract information. At the same time, metaphors enable individuals to voice disruptive, personal experiences that are difficult to describe otherwise, for example through a coherent narrative. While narrative has been successfully implemented within interdisciplinary approaches, such as Medical Humanities and Narrative Medicine, research on metaphors has remained unsystematic and has emphasized the problematic side of metaphors: Metaphors can be stigmatizing, essentializing or dehumanizing when the meaning of the source domain is substituted with that of the target (e.g., body as machine). What has been deemphasized, however, is that metaphors can also be pluripotent and empowering tools of the imagination, inviting ambiguity and complexity. Metaphors can thus defamiliarize, contest and reimagine reductionist or allegedly set connotations. This research project asks: How can the plurisignifying potential of metaphors be activated and conceptualized so that limiting and harmful metaphors become liberating and productive?The project departs from the hypothesis that the relationship between metaphor and narrative is crucial to the meaning of metaphors, as metaphors are usually embedded in narratives and can project mini-narratives of their own. The aim is to develop an approach to metaphors, in which - on a theoretical and a practical level - metaphor analysis and narrative analysis are joined. More precisely, the project (1) reimports existing scholarship from Medical Humanities to literary studies and addresses a research gap in narrative theory by developing a model of narrative-based metaphor analysis; and it (2) investigates the plurisignifying potential of metaphors and develops a concept that hones metaphorical competence. The object of investigation is a corpus of fictional narratives by female American authors from 1850-1950, in which the writers negotiate, challenge and reimagine problematic metaphors of the female body. The metaphors that are reimagined in these texts are informed by medical and scientific notions about the nature of womanhood. The analysis will exemplify how essentializing metaphors of the female body, such as woman-as-flower or the body-as-a-closed-energy-system, can become spaces of individual agency and rhetorical resistance when their plurisignifying potential is activated.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants