19 Quotes by David Punter

A metaphor then, we might reasonably surmise, is not necessarily a matter of simple one-to-one equivalences (‘this stands for that’), but neither is it a process of ornamentation of something that could have been more clearly said in another, simpler way; rather, in this case at least […] it is the very substance of the discourse.

...it seeks to ‘fix’ our understanding, but at the same time it reveals how any such fixity, and such desire for stability and certainty, is constructed on shifting sands.

…metaphor have something in common with, for example, the paintings of M.C.Esher, or the Rorshach blot, both of which are famously indecipherable or, at least, irreducible to a single interpretation: they can never fully reveal their own meanings because they are perennially on the point of turning into their other.

Certainly metaphor is in some sense the opposite of concrete thing.

The metaphor can be considered in some sense and under some circumstances to be a kind of sleight of hand by means of which meanings can be surreptitiously smuggled into an apparently innocent discourse.

The term ‘metaphor’ itself is seen to identify a verbal process whereby two discrete objects or ideas become linked, but in a very particular way, such that, for the duration of the metaphor, one of the items actually becomes the other, and vice versa.

For metaphor, we may suggest, is not simply a matter of what appears on the printed page or in, for example, the work of visual art; it is rather the bodying-forth [stet] of sets of correspondences of which, in some sense, we have all, in specific interpretative communities, been aware in what we might define as a liminal way, hovering somewhere around the threshold of articulation.

…although metaphor undoubtedly deals in likenesses, similarity, it also deals in unlikeness and dissimilarity.

Metaphor makes us look at the world afresh, but it often does so by challenging our notions of the similarities that exist between things; how alike they are; and in what ways, in fact, they are irreconcilably unalike.