Making Sense of Metaphors and Other Tropes

In Making Sense of Metaphors and Other Tropes, veteran literary scholar David Reid examines figures of speech, arguing that figures of speech in prose and poetry, literature and talk, make sense as turns of rhetoric by means of their energeia (vividness, radiance, éclat). Reid analyzes figures from Homer to literary giants of the twentieth century, mostly drawn from poetry, but also from prose and colloquial turns of phrase. Making Sense of Metaphors will delight all those who enjoy literature and good talk, and make them think about what so takes their fancy.

The book’s case for the centrality of energeia will also command the interest of philosophers, linguists, and theorists of poetry, not least for the objections it raises to some of their favorite lines of thought. The book concludes with an examination of transference of agency, an effect of many tropes. Although transference of agency reorders our ideas, the argument of the book is that agency falls under the rule of rhetoric, a forceful expressing of an idea rather than a means of arriving at one — a process of speech, not a fundamental shape of understanding or trick of mind.