Overview

Figures of a Changing World offers a dramatic new account of cultural change, an account based on the distinction between two familiar rhetorical figures, metonymy and metaphor. The book treats metonymy as the basic organizing trope of traditional culture and metaphor as the basic organizing trope of modern culture. On the one hand, metonymies present themselves as analogies that articulate or reaffirm preexisting states of affairs. They are guarantors of facticity, a term that can be translated or defined as fact-like-ness. On the other hand, metaphors challenge the similarity they claim to establish, in order to feature departures from preexisting states of affairs. On the basis of this distinction, the author argues that metaphor and metonymy can be used as instruments both for the large-scale interpretation of tensions in cultural change and for the micro-interpretation of tensions within particular texts. In addressing the functioning of the two terms, the author draws upon and critiques the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Roman Jakobson, Christian Metz, Paul Ricoeur, Umberto Eco, Edmund Leach, and Paul de Man.

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Figures of a Changing World is the twelfth in a remarkable series of literary and visual studies over the past quarter century that comprise Harry Berger's extraordinarily wide-ranging critical oeuvre. This new book articulates the larger linguistic context and cultural change that undergird Berger's heroic acts of brilliantly detailed close reading of early modern texts and images. -Peter Erickson, Northwestern University Berger presents a fresh and stimulating account of the rhetorical and critical histories of metaphor and metonymy. The dialectical procedure of the book carries real drama: it depicts a mind in the process of thinking through the problem of how to gauge the ideological force of these quasi-shibboleth terms, not as a semiotician or linguist but as a scholar of literary and cultural history. Berger's handling of the often vexed relation between metaphoric and metonymic figuration gives new insights into the mechanisms of perceived cultural change. The writing is elegant and lucid, and the argument is gracefully organized. -Lowell Gallagher, University of California, Los Angeles In Figures of a Changing World, Harry Berger, Jr. distills into brief scope a masterful review and critique of a major topic in twentieth century critical theory: the post-Nietszchean theory of tropes. Berger's work is always welcomed by scholars in his fields (plural), but this little book on a big topic has the potential to be among the most widely read and appreciated of his many volumes because the subject is of interest to so many academic practitioners, because his treatment of it is as trenchant and pointed as it is wide-ranging, and because his style is so appealingly distinctive. -David Lee Miller, University of South Carolina

Author Information

Harry Berger, Jr., is Professor Emeritus of Literature and Art History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His most recent books include The Perils of Uglytown: Studies in Structural Misanthropology from Plato to Rembrandt and A Fury in the Words: Love and Embarrassment in Shakespeare's Venice (both Fordham).

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