Philologica Wratislaviensia: From Grammar to Discourse – serie

The papers in this volume discuss pivotal issues pertaining to the linguistic approaches to metaphors from theoretical and applied points of view. Some contributions utilize the framework of cognitive linguists to validate their descriptive models, showing that the figurative language is present in the everyday lives of people. Some present the opinion that metaphors may be useful for educational purposes explaining the nature of directly inapproachable objects. There are, however, studies that provide evidence for the reverse processes where the formation of conceptual metaphors reflects personal experiences stipulated by education. Metaphors also used to be studied as persuasive tools which take part in the creative molding of political identities. Furthermore, there are experimental studies in which the figurative thought model is revised by doubting whether conceptual metaphors indeed become automatically activated in the course of processing figurative language, or which suggest that the frequency count of literal senses of dictionary words may serve as a guide for labeling the source domains of conceptual metaphors in the processing of linguistic expression.

The main focus of this volume is on urbanity as a discursive way of human life in the city. Discourse is specified here in terms of semiotic codes and processes that link city dwellers as communicating selves into interpersonal and intersubjective collectivities when they create and interpret similar meanings embodied in material bearers. Accordingly, the unfolding of the semiotic web is understood, firstly, as detecting and evaluating the growth and manifestation of the sphere of meaning-bearers or a sequence of meaning-bearing events, and secondly, as identifying and explaining the constituents and aspects of discourse in the light of signs and/or sign-processes that aggregate individual participants of communication into discursive linkages on a lower level and discursive communities – on a higher level of social grouping. Some contributions deal with the discursive properties of human individuals in urban environments, and some others are devoted either to the meta-discourses on the city or discourses in the city.

This collection of essays deals primarily with the idea of ugliness as represented in a variety of literary narratives in English. Shakespeare’s Caliban and his depiction in The Tempest and its contemporary film adaptations are dealt with, just as Joseph Merrick’s innocence of ugliness and Swinburne’s aesthetic transgressions of the late-Victorian period are discussed. Moreover, D. H. Lawrence’s monstrosity of agedness is examined, as well as postcolonial discourses of ugliness in Patrick White, J. M. Coetzee and the Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah. The volume also contains essays on representations of American Indian captivity narratives, on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s voice in the debate on evil, and on In-yer-face theatre in the Irish context, i.e. Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan and Enda Walsh’s Bedbound.