Motives for Metaphor: Literacy, Curriculum Reform, and the Teaching of English

The study of English has become ever more balkanized as the twentieth century comes to a close. Motives for Metaphor imagines ways in which the three English camps -- composition, literature, and creative writing -- can reconnect through a reconception of that most common figure of speech, the metaphor.

Though metaphor has gradually lost much of the attention it once received in literary and writing instruction, James Seitz contends that the study of metaphor can advance curriculum reform precisely because of its unusual institutional position within the teaching of English. For metaphor is a subject that "belongs" to each of the diverse subfields that comprise English studies; yet none can claim it entirely as its own.

Unlike simile, which merely asserts the resemblance between one thing and another, metaphor goes so far as to equate them -- a fact that textbooks have long acknowledged but whose importance they have tellingly ignored. By pronouncing equivalence in the very face of difference, metaphor performs an apparently irrational discursive act that takes us directly to the nexus of textual, social, and ideological questions that have stirred such contentious debate in recent years over the function of English studies itself. As perhaps the most radical (yet also quotidian) means by which language negotiates difference, metaphor can help us to think further about the politics of identification and the curricular movements such a politics has inspired.

Drawing upon a wide variety of resources -- from literary criticism, composition theory, and analytic philosophy, to rhetorical textbooks, student papers, and postmodern metafictions -- Seitz suggests that teachers ofcomposition, literature, and creative writing can still build a shared pedagogical project, but only through transforming the very structure and purpose of the English department curriculum. Motives for Metaphor proposes what such a transformation might consist of in the years ahead.