First Days 3

Sunday, August 21, 2011

I just spent some time looking through thumb drives, desktop, etc. for previously written texts. I have written stuff and not followed up on it. For example, fall of 2010, I spent some time reading and synthesizing on proposition analysis. I wrote a paper for NRC and there it stopped. Now that I again need to perform knowledge, I am motivated to resurrect these docs and try to get them into some kind of shape. This is a powerful motivator for me. I can benefit from scheduling papers that I then have to write. This is not news. The new stuff is that I need to keep my own writing agenda going. Recently, I have been doing group writing exclusively. It doesn’t have the same impact of the solving the writing problems on my own. I started writing when I got here in SA. I have a 23 page paper ready for presentation. When I finally get Internet, these projects are first going to Jenifer.

I want to write on sideways development and delay, the use of metaphor as a fattening device that delays the completion of an idea, metaphor as a form of semantic categorization, the role of category prototypes, vs. constituative semantic features. How does this way of understanding semantics influence the development of meaning when reading? How does reading metaphor, as a categorical meaning shift from one object to its comparative other, cause the reader to fatten interpretation? What does this do to the ongoing semantic process that are formulating meaning for the evolving text? The intrusion of the extra meaning via metaphor delay the processing in order to take on more, lateral meaning. Lakoff and Johnson speculate that most understanding is through metaphor.

Metaphor’s lateral meaning and the delay of understanding.