Institut Ramon LLull

Metaphors have the capacity to raise and sink horizons of possibility; these rhetorical figures of speech not only put a limit on what we consider to be natural, but also what we imagine to be possible or advisable. We live amongst the ruins of imagery which has long lost its poetic fulgor and now wanders the Earth scoring the ground with the weight of its own literalism. In this essay, Puig combines personal memoires, literary references (Homer, Shakespeare or Charlotte Gilman), pop imagery (from psychophonies to Mickey Mouse), philosophical studies (Freud, Austin and, in particular, Mark Johnson and George Lakoff) to elucidate on how centuries of metaphors have generated coordinates of the senses which direct our experiences and our way of conceiving the world. And, lo and behold, these
are centuries of metaphors which respond to a heteropatriarchal, eurocentric and classist order.

Mar García Puig puts pen to page again with a critical study divulging the interests and arbitrary nature behind poetic conventions all while championing intuitions, sensitivities, and ways of being which the world of metaphors has penalised and relegated to the margins of history.