Call for papers for special issue of Style on metonymy (Volume 38, number 2, 2004)
Guest editor Gerard Steen of a special issue of Style on metonymy invites contributions from practitioners of stylistics, linguistics, discourse analysis, poetics, psychology, and rhetoric on the role of metonymy in style, language, text, discourse, and thought, literary or non-literary.
In the wake of the recent cognitive turn in metaphor studies, it has now become metonymy that has been receiving an increased amount of attention from cognitive linguists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists in general. Claims are being made that metonymy is even more basic to thought and language than metaphor, in the sense that there are metonymic motivations for many conceptual metaphors. Apart from these fundamental issues, there are many cases where metaphor and metonymy interact with each other in interesting and intricate ways, both in thought and in linguistic expression. And an exciting related development is the emergence of a general theory of conceptual integration, also known as 'blending theory', which promises to offer a consistent and uniform approach to metonymy, metaphor, and other types of thought and language.
There is hence sufficient reason to publish a sequel special issue of Style on metonymy, after the special issue on metaphor published as volume 36, number 3 (2002).
One aim of the special issue is to make the new research on metonymy available to the readership of Style, in order to redress the balance between metaphor and metonymy. Another aim is to give a decided stylistic and poetic turn to the wheel of the cognitive research into metonymy and metaphor alike. It seems as if many of the claims made in cognitive linguistics were also made in the sixties and seventies by structuralist and semiotic scholars, including Umberto Eco and Jonathan Culler. Contributors are invited in particular to consider the interest of these structuralist and semiotic insights for cognitive linguistics, stylistics, and poetics, or, the other way around, how contemporary cognitive approaches to metonymy can add cognitive quality to mainstream methods of literary text analysis. The special issue is hence hoped to provide a platform for some innovating interdisciplinary discussion.
All submissions should be 5,000 to 9,000 words. The deadline for submissions is 1 August 2003. Please submit three copies (MLA style) accompanied by a 150-word abstract.
Submissions and correspondence should be addressed to Gerard J. Steen, at gj.steen@let.vu.nl , or at Department of English Language and Culture, Vrije Universiteit, DeBoelelaan 1005, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Style is a refereed journal publishing studies in stylistics, literary theory, and literary criticism.