Body and Metaphor: Narrative-based Metaphor Analysis in Medical Humanities

该研究项目位于人文科学和医学的交叉点，重点研究隐喻作为一种强有力的认识论和经验论手段的能力。与叙事一样，隐喻在科学和健康背景下也是相关的，因为它们有助于解释复杂和抽象的信息。与此同时，隐喻使个人能够表达以其他方式难以描述的破坏性的个人经历，例如通过连贯的叙述。虽然叙事已经成功地应用于医学人文和叙事医学等跨学科方法中，但对隐喻的研究仍然缺乏系统性，并强调了隐喻存在问题的一面：当源域的意义被目标域的意义取代(例如，身体作为机器)时，隐喻可能被污名化、本质化或去人性化。然而，没有强调的是，隐喻也可以是多功能的和授权的想象力工具，带来模棱两可和复杂性。因此，隐喻可以陌生、质疑和重新想象还原论者或据称设定的内涵。本研究项目的问题是：如何激活和概念化隐喻的多重意义潜力，使限制和有害的隐喻变得解放和富有成效？该项目偏离了这样的假设，即隐喻和叙事之间的关系对隐喻的意义至关重要，因为隐喻通常嵌入到叙事中，并可以投射出自己的微型叙事。其目的是开发一种研究隐喻的方法，在理论和实践层面上，隐喻分析和叙事分析相结合。更准确地说，该项目(1)将现有的医学人文学科的研究重新引入文学研究，并通过建立基于叙事的隐喻分析模型解决了叙事理论中的研究空白；(2)研究了隐喻的多重象征潜力，并提出了一个磨练隐喻能力的概念。本文的研究对象是1850-1950年间美国女作家虚构叙事的语料库，作者在这些叙事中协商、挑战和重新想象有问题的女性身体隐喻。这些文本中重新想象的隐喻是由关于女性本质的医学和科学概念提供信息的。该分析将举例说明女性身体的本质隐喻，如女性如花或身体作为一个封闭的能量系统，如何在其多重所指潜力被激活时成为个体代理和修辞抵制的空间。

The research project is situated at the intersection of the humanities and medicine and focuses on metaphors in their capacities as potent epistemological and experiential devices. Metaphors, like narratives, are relevant in science and health contexts as they help explain complex and abstract information. At the same time, metaphors enable individuals to voice disruptive, personal experiences that are difficult to describe otherwise, for example through a coherent narrative. While narrative has been successfully implemented within interdisciplinary approaches, such as Medical Humanities and Narrative Medicine, research on metaphors has remained unsystematic and has emphasized the problematic side of metaphors: Metaphors can be stigmatizing, essentializing or dehumanizing when the meaning of the source domain is substituted with that of the target (e.g., body as machine). What has been deemphasized, however, is that metaphors can also be pluripotent and empowering tools of the imagination, inviting ambiguity and complexity. Metaphors can thus defamiliarize, contest and reimagine reductionist or allegedly set connotations. This research project asks: How can the plurisignifying potential of metaphors be activated and conceptualized so that limiting and harmful metaphors become liberating and productive?The project departs from the hypothesis that the relationship between metaphor and narrative is crucial to the meaning of metaphors, as metaphors are usually embedded in narratives and can project mini-narratives of their own. The aim is to develop an approach to metaphors, in which - on a theoretical and a practical level - metaphor analysis and narrative analysis are joined. More precisely, the project (1) reimports existing scholarship from Medical Humanities to literary studies and addresses a research gap in narrative theory by developing a model of narrative-based metaphor analysis; and it (2) investigates the plurisignifying potential of metaphors and develops a concept that hones metaphorical competence. The object of investigation is a corpus of fictional narratives by female American authors from 1850-1950, in which the writers negotiate, challenge and reimagine problematic metaphors of the female body. The metaphors that are reimagined in these texts are informed by medical and scientific notions about the nature of womanhood. The analysis will exemplify how essentializing metaphors of the female body, such as woman-as-flower or the body-as-a-closed-energy-system, can become spaces of individual agency and rhetorical resistance when their plurisignifying potential is activated.