Essay On The Transformative Power Of Metaphors

The transformative capacity of metaphors should therefore not be underestimated. Metaphors “do not merely actualize a potential connotation, but establish it ‘as a staple one’; and further, ‘some of the (the object’s) relevant properties can be given a new status as elements of verbal meaning” (ibid). The transformative power of the metaphor lies in the acceptance of its role of ‘logical absurdity’ that helps us recognize the genuinely creative character of the metaphorical meaning. “Logical absurdity creates a situation in which we have the choice of either preserving the literal meaning of the subject and the modifier and hence concluding that the entire sentence is absurd or attributing a new meaning to the modifier so that the sentence

This creative viewpoint in itself is made possible when we take the viewpoint of the reader or the hearer. The system of commonplace connotation should, in its sense, be a preparatory step, a domain of explanation that is, in itself, a process that gives us access to creation and enables literary criticism to be reconnected to psychology. It is “then and only then, the ‘metaphorical twist’ is both an event and a meaning, a meaningful event and an emergent meaning in language” (ibid.,

Although they did not elaborate further than this, the breadth of their thoughts is, to a certain extent, valid in the cinematographic discourse and obviously presents the need for additional theories on narratives in this task of defining the sign differential in West African cinema. Of significant importance in supplementing the contributions of Gadamer and Ricoeur, in the course of this work, will be film theories of Metz and also the literary theories of scholars like Roman Ingarden, Genette and Iser on the place of the implied reader in the