Emotion metaphors in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the artist as a young man

Cognitive stylistics provides a framework for analysis of conceptual metaphors in literature, as a way to approach fictional characters’ mind styles. Here, cognitive linguistic tools are applied to characterize the metaphorical expressions of emotion in James Joyce’s A portrait of the artist as a young man. A number of conceptual metaphors were identified in relation to anger, lust, shame, pride, fear, happiness and sadness, among others. Creative uses of language came to light, both by means of novel conceptual mappings and original linguistic realizations of more conventional metaphors. Original expressions revealed aspects of mind style of the novel’s main character, particularly in relation to his struggle with negative emotions. For example, anger and resentment are conceptualized as a sort of covering that could be effortlessly detached from the body, while shame-related feelings are experienced as threatening floods. From a methodological perspective, this study illustrates the advantages of cognitive stylistic tools for the analysis of literary work.

Pragmatic failure, mind style and characterisation in fiction about autism

This article presents an analysis of different types of pragmatic failure in the interactional behaviour of the ‘autistic’ protagonists of three recent novels. Three main types of pragmatic failure occur across all three novels: problems with informativeness and relevance in conversational contributions; problems with face management resulting in unintentional impolite behaviours; and problems with the interpretation of figurative language. These problems are salient and frequent enough to contribute to the projection of distinctive mind styles, and more generally to the characterisation of the protagonists as individuals with communication and socialisation difficulties that are likely to both reflect and reinforce general perceptions of autism-spectrum disorders. It is also argued that pragmatic failure contributes to the potential defamiliarisation of ‘normal’ communication, which is presented as being fraught with obscurity, ambiguity and insincerity.