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Part of
Figurativity and Human Ecology
Edited by Alexandra Bagasheva, Bozhil Hristov and Nelly Tincheva
[Figurative Thought and Language 17] 2022
► pp. 63–84

Metaphor meets narrative

Audiovisual meaning-making as embodied artistic production

| Europa-Universität Viadrina

Prevalent cognitive readings of narrative in film have generally described it as a causal-logical re-organization of audiovisually represented agents, actions and spaces that is achieved through mental processing. Suggesting that such a perspective fundamentally disregards the media mode of perception that distinguishes film-viewing from other media experiences, the chapter proposes an alternative view. It presents an analysis of a TV news feature in order to demonstrate that metaphor and film share a coupling of two distinct realms of experience that provides the grounds for a fictional world and a narrative to emerge. The chapter concludes with an understanding of narrative as a dynamic embodied process of “narrativizing” instead of a product being reconstructed from given representations.

Keywords: narrative, metaphor, embodied experience, meaning-making, mediality
Article outline
  • 1.Narrative and metaphor: Intertwining meaning-making principles in film
  • 2.Filmic storytelling and understanding: As easy as it is?
  • 3.Coupled realms of experience: How film and metaphor create fictional worlds
  • 4.A feeling of standstill and a story of a controversial (trading) project
    • 4.1A feeling of complete standstill
    • 4.2The flotation of Deutsche Bahn in terms of a stopped train
    • 4.3Being shunted aside by controversies
  • 5.Narrativizing as embodied process: Creating stories from and through felt experience
  • Notes
  • Audiovisual sources
  • References
Published online: 10 November 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ftl.17.03hor
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