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Literary Reality: Rhetoricizing Literature and English Studies

Williams, Erin Ann
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Abstract
Drawing on conceptual metaphor theory and John Bender and David E. Wellbery's description of rhetoricality, I offer a reconceptualization of literature as a conceptual metaphorization of the experience of the cognitive concept of LIFE. I demonstrate the value of such a rhetoricized reconceptualization of literature and literary study by applying them to four American autobiographies written after 1970: Bill Clinton's My Life, James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, Audre Lorde's Zami, and Walter Dean Myers' Autobiography of my Dead Brother. I also speculate about what a rhetoricized English studies in contemporary American higher education - one that sees (what Pierre Bourdieu describes as) heteronomy rather than autonomy as its primary organizing principle - might entail.
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Date
2011-05-31
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Publisher
University of Kansas
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Keywords
Language, Linguistics, Autobiography, Conceptual metaphor theory, Life writing, Metaphor, Rhetoric, Rhetoric and composition
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