More Than Cool Reason: Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor

A classic account of how metaphor works in literature--and what we can draw from that for everyday life--from two of the leading scholars of language We usually think of the language of poetry, the metaphors that poets use to express their intentions, as far removed from ordinary life. But in More than Cool Reason, George Lakoff and Mark Turner show how understanding how metaphor works in poetry, the tasks it takes on and the ways it shapes our patterns of thought, can be hugely helpful to seeing and understanding how we think in all manner of other fields and areas of life. Metaphor, they show, is a tool so familiar, so everyday, that we fail to notice it. Lakoff and Turner correct that failure here, helping us see how richly metaphorical our language and thought are, and what that means for not only reading and enjoying poetry and literature, but also for linguistics, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, cognitive science, and more.

About the Author :
George Lakoff is professor emeritus of cognitive science and linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for his discovery of the detailed workings of metaphorical thought and how it structures our understanding of the world. He is the author or coauthor of numerous books, including Metaphors We Live By, also published by the University of Chicago Press. Mark Turner is Institute Professor and professor of cognitive science at Case Western Reserve University and the founding director of the Cognitive Science Network.

Review :
"In this bold and powerful book, Lakoff and Turner continue their use of metaphor to show how our minds get hold of the world. They have achieved nothing less than a postmodern Understanding Poetry, a new way of reading and teaching that makes poetry again important."--Norman Holland, University of Florida "The authors restore metaphor to our lives by showing us that it's never gone away. We've merely been taught to talk as if it had: as though weather maps were more 'real' than the breath of autumn; as though, for that matter, Reason was really 'cool.' What we're saying whenever we say is a theme this book illumines for anyone attentive." --Hugh Kenner "More than Cool Reason holds itself out with deceptive modesty as a little book about metaphor. It is far more than that. George Lakoff and Mark Turner have written a compelling study of how we read poetry, embedded in an account of how our aesthetic sense functions in its intellectual, cultural, and historical contexts. Rich in insight and scholarship, clear in exposition, rigorous in argumentation, More than Cool Reason demonstrates that our processes of literary construal are rooted in metaphor and presents an elegant theory of these processes. The book offers paradigms of both micro-analysis, in a brilliant reading of metaphorical structure in William Carlos Williams's 'To a Solitary Disciple, ' and macroanalysis, in a wide-ranging and learned account of a dominant metaphor in all cultures and periods: the Great Chain of Being."--Donald C. Freeman, University of Southern California "The intellectual adventure begun in Metaphors We Live By is here extended with the verve and resourcefulness we'd hoped for. . . . Literary metaphor has never seemed less cut off from the wider world."--Ann Thompson and John O. Thompson, University of Liverpool