Final Blog Entry!

This class has taught me alot about films and fantasy. How to view them, and many theories and metaphors I would have never known before taking this class. However keeping up with the texts books has been a challenge for me because it was hard for me to concentrate on the texts. Anyhow here is the last and final blog entry!

The Irregulars: Subverting the Taxonomy..
-The novels that break the rules of the rhetoric's of fantasy.
-There are authors whose novels shift from mode to mode without necessarily taking on the characteristics of each mode of fantasy.
-The Legends of the Land Trilogy.. is liminal in its plot, but uses the rhetoric of immersive fantasy to support the expectation of genre. Its equipoise is built on refusal, its irony on immersion.
-Similar examples are the Iron Chain and the Seagull Drovers
-These novels break boundaries of fantasies, for example they may be immersive but the protagonist will take what they have for granted.

Metaphor and Film: Theories of Cinematic Metaphor
-The purpose of film is not to reproduce mere external features of the world, but to communicate the artists seminal experience of reality and his understanding of its significance.
-To do this the artist must choose his work and the audience
-The key to understanding is the recognition of the link between the inner world of experience and the aesthetic forms employed to communicate that world (Eisenstein)
-montage concerned the juxtaposition of shoot with shot, wether within or between shots.
-Eisenstein assertion that the juxtaposition of two shots could create a whole greater than sum of parts might seem to align montage with the type of metaphor.
-Criticisms of Eisensteins Theories:
1. Because of the representational nature of film, juxtaposition of montage units alone may not be successful in producing viable metaphors.
2. The units have to be suitably stylized through lighting, framing, and so on, for the purpose of metaphor, so that the spectator is guided in his reading and integrating them.
3. The principles governing the selection and stylization of the units should derive from the overall unity of the filmmakers conception.
4. The meaning expressed must not only be an integrated one, but must represent a new quality, an extended dimension of significance-that is, it must be figurative not literal.

N. Roy Clifton:
-1600 examples of  of tropes and schemes. from more than 700 films
-retains as far as possible the distinctions recognized by classical rhetoric in the figures he examines, while bending them where necessary to the specifically cinematic.

Christian Metz:
-The study of metaphor and metonymy- he considers it both hopeless and arbitrary to apply the rules of one system to another, he believes what has to be done is to discover the underlying principles that must apply as much to the film as to verbal texts

The Minds Eye:
The Psychoanalytic Approach
-Many attempts including some by Freud himself to relate psychoanalysis to art.
-Metz adopts the Lacanian reading of Freud
-Freud hovered between two incompatible modes of explanation - the causal and the intentional
-Example: Freuds discussion of condensation and the displacement of stress
*Suppressed forces interact with a filtering process and produce dreams. Dreams constitute wishes which the censoring agency disguises so so as to not wake the dreamer.
*Analysis employs free association enabling the patient to face suppressed memories.
*An imaginative theory of metaphor must start from the premise that is dealing with something quite normal and every day in human behavior
- With Freud comes an unfortunate legacy, he placed great emphasis on the essential irrationality and pleasure seeking nature of the primary process.



Metaphors We Live By:

How Metaphor Can Give Meaning a Form
-We speak in linear form, our writing system conceptualizes language metaphorically with spatial ojects in linear order
-Our spatial concepts naturally apply to linguistic expressions
-More of Form Is More of Content - the conduit metaphor defines a spatial relationship between form and content
-Linguistic expressions are containers and their meanings content of those containers that are small we expect their contents to be small

Truth:
objective, absolute truth, - need not to be tied to the objectivist view. We believe the idea that there is absolute objective truth is not only mistaken but socially and politically dangerous.
-truth is relative to a conceptual system that is defined in large part by metaphor
-