Multimodalities of Metaphor: A Perspective from the Poetic Arts

In this article the author explores the notion of possible bidirectionality in metaphor through an examination of Black's (1962, 1993) interaction theory, Fauconnier and Turner's (2002) blending theory, and several studies that document cases of interdomain influence in metaphorical expressions. In particular, the author reviews Forceville's (1995) examples of possible bidirectionality in film, advertisement, poetry, and a real-life incident. In further exploring more general notions of metaphorical workings in various genres, the author concludes that not only is metaphorical bidirectionality possible, it explains how the arts enable us to iconically connect with the world through our embodied cognition, not as objective observers in the Western classical sense but as participatory sharers of that world.