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Part of
Time Representations in the Perspective of Human Creativity
Edited by Anna Piata, Adriana Gordejuela and Daniel Alcaraz Carrión
[Human Cognitive Processing 75] 2022
► pp. 101–124

Chapter 5
Creative visual metaphors of protracted and frozen time in autobiographical comics about depression

| Cardiff University

One common but lesser-known symptom of depression is distorted temporal perception. This chapter analyzes visual metaphors in seven graphic memoirs about depression, revealing the unique opportunities for creativity in the evocation of subjective time offered by this genre. Specifically, the authors of these works use different combinations of “pictorial” and “spatial” metaphors (El Refaie 2019) to convey their sense of time slowing down or freezing, and of being out of sync with other people. These findings are related to Conceptual Metaphor Theory, including Stocker’s (2014) notion of “spacetime”.

Keywords: graphic memoirs, pictorial metaphor, spatial metaphor, subjective time
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The painful experience of “explicit” time in depression
  • 3.Spatial dimensions of time in human understanding and representation
  • 4.Representations of subjective time in comics
  • 5.Creative time metaphors in graphic memoirs
    • 5.1Pictorial metaphors for entrapment in spacetime
    • 5.2Spatial metaphors for entrapment in spacetime
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 10 November 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.75.05elr
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