Visual Metaphors and Aesthetics

"Metaphors have traditionally been understood as a linguistic or conceptual phenomenon. This book challenges existing theories and places a new emphasis on how we experience rather than understand metaphors. It responds to the visual turn that is taking place in literature and the media, demanding that the pictorial become a site of philosophical analysis. This focus on seeing and experiencing allows Michalle Gal to employ visual theories to understand the essence of metaphor. She looks beyond semantic mechanism and broad meaning and draws on analytic aesthetics, concentrating on Roger Fry, Clive Bell and the evolution of ideas about the visual, material and qualitative. Proposing a new theory that takes into account that humans are visual no less than cognitive creatures, Visual Metaphors and Aesthetics lays the foundation for a new vocabulary to talk about metaphors."--