NARRATIVE AND METAPHOR
IN DIFFERENT FIELDS
other writings BY MICHAEL HANNE
'How We Escape Capture by the “War” Metaphor for
Covid-19' was published in Metaphor and Symbol, 2022, 37, 2: 88-100. |
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‘"Reframing" the Big Issues for a Transformational Government' was published in Whanake: The Pacific Journal of Community Development, 2021, 7, 1: 96–109. It looks at the importance for the Labour Government of ‘framing’ the issues it presents to the public effectively – and I take the example of reframing ‘poverty’ as ‘inequality.’
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'Comparing Covid: How New Zealand Stacks Up' was published on December 18, 2021, in the on-line daily newspaper Newsroom. In it, I argue that many New Zealanders don’t have a clear sense of QUITE how well the NZ government, public health authorities, and the population at large have performed throughout the Covid pandemic. I compare statistics and strategies from several small countries in Europe, in terms not only of overall mortality, but of how each country is faring now. I try to define just what package of policies and social attitudes NZ, more than any comparable nation, has employed to achieve the outstanding result that we have.
‘Crime and Disease: Contagion by Metaphor’ is my latest article and was published as the second chapter of Criminalizing Contagion: Legal and Ethical Challenges of Disease Transmission and the Criminal Law, edited by Catherine Stanton and Hannah Quirk (Cambridge UP: 2016): 35-54. It bridges medical and legal discourse, tracing the close association through history between the concepts and categories ‘illness’ and ‘crime’ and highlights the extent to which public attitudes and policies are shaped by that association. It draws attention to the way in which an uncritical use of metaphor around both crime and disease contributes to a worrisome tendency towards a collapse of the conceptual boundary between the two.
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‘Diagnosis and Metaphor’ is another article examining the role of metaphor in medical discourse, which was published in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Winter 2015, 58, 1: 35-52. Metaphor, it is argued, lies at the heart of the process of diagnosis. Diagnosis is often defined as a process of ordering and classifying, and metaphor is a device for playing with classifications. The medical systems of different cultures depend on different sets of fundamental metaphors. Doctors rely on metaphor not only for communicating medical notions to their patients, but for conceptualizing physiology and pathology themselves. Diagnosticians employ competing metaphors in the early stages of diagnosis to speculate on alternative ways of viewing a puzzling set of symptoms. Metaphor features crucially in the explanations doctors offer to their patients of their condition and may even serve as a treatment device for conditions such as anorexia where patients employ dysfunctional metaphors to describe themselves.
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‘Metaphors for Illness in Contemporary Media’ is an article I co-wrote with Susan J Hawken, for the journal Medical Humanities, 2007, 33: 93-99. This study of feature articles on five diseases – avian flu, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and HIV/AIDS – published over a 6-month period in the New York Times - revealed distinct patterns of metaphor usage around each disease and highlighted the influence these metaphors may exert on public attitudes to the diseases themselves and to those who experience them. (So, the references to ‘the tsunami of type 2 diabetes’ suggest an inevitability about the occurrence of the disease which is quite misleading.) It calls for journalists and medical professionals to become more aware of the impact of the metaphors they use and to develop sets of metaphors which are factually informative and enhance communication between doctors and their patients.
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The Power of the Story: Fiction and Political Change (Berghahn), the book I published in 1995, at the very beginning of my venture into narrative and metaphor studies, examined the grand claims which had been made over the preceding 200 years for the direct social and political effects of certain exceptional novels and other works of narrative fiction, from Ivan Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Notebook (1852) to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988). In their crudest forms, such assertions are obviously naive, oversimplifying the complex ways in which literary texts can be said to “work in the world” and oversimplifying, too, the causal processes required to account for a major social or political change. But I draw on: theories of history-as-narrative from Hayden White and others; on arguments from reception theory about the extent to which the “meaning” of a literary text may be constructed differently in different ways by readers in different contexts; and on close study of the instrumental use made by political activists at moments of acute historical stress, to illustrate the complex mechanisms by which they may have contributed to change.
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