Metaphor, Nation and Discourse: (82 Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture)

This edited volume examines how metaphors and related phenomena (metonymies, symbols, cultural models, stereotypes) lead to the discursive construal of a common element that brings the nation together. The central idea is that metaphor use must be questioned to lay bare the processes and the discursive power behind them. The chapters examine a range of contemporary and historical, monomodal and multimodal discourses, including politicians’ discourse, presidential speeches, newspapers, TV series, Catholic homilies, colonialist discourse, and various online sources. The approaches taken include political science, international relations, cultural studies, and linguistics. All contributions feature discursive constructivist views of metaphor, with clear sociocultural grounding, and the notion of metaphor as a framing device in constructing various aspects of nations and national identity. The volume will appeal to scholars in discourse analysis, metaphor studies, media studies, nationalism studies, and political science.

Review :
The twelve chapters in the current volume provide a rich and varied palette of critical-cultural discourse analysis on the intersection between metaphor and nations. This edited volume will undoubtedly be of great interest to all metaphor scholars working on (political) discourse as it connects to current trends within the field of metaphor studies and opens up avenues for future research in linguistics and political science. Every chapter of this edited volume provides strong arguments for broadening CMT by including both the diachronic perspective (in Musolff ’s words, metaphors are historically situated) and the discursive context as a whole. While the strength of some chapters is in their content-based approach, relevant for many researchers beyond linguistics, some other chapters display a significant amount of initiative towards enriching theoretical and methodological approaches to metaphor and metonymies. They all interact with the reader in a very dynamic way and stimulate further research questions. Die interdisziplinäre Herangehensweise mit einer Mischung aus Politikwissenschaft, internationalen Beziehungen, Kulturstudien und Linguistik erlaubt den Lesenden einen kritischen und umfassenden Einblick, der sich dabei doch immer wieder auf den konstruktivistischen Diskurs der Metaphern sowie auch soziokulturell begründet. Ferner finden sich auch die Frametheorie in einigen der Untersuchungen sowie eine Reihe an quantitativen und qualitativen Evaluationen von Korpora. Mit der Ansprache an Forschende auf verschiedenen Ebenen und der Analyse der Länderspezifika, beispielsweise Kroatiens und Serbiens, abseits der einschlägigen Beispiele, erfüllt dieser Band eine wichtige Funktion, die Studierende, aber auch etablierte Forschende anspricht.