Abstract
Fire Metaphors Discourses of Awe and Authority is an important contribution to the field of critical metaphor analysis. The text presents an extensive treatment of the use of the FIRE frame in religious and political texts building upon the author’s previous works in political discourse analysis (e.g. Charteris-Black, 2004, 2005). Fire is documented as a single semantic field which forms the basis of a prototypical metaphorical frame that is recurrent in discursive strategies which seek to legitimate modes of social and cultural authority. Fire ‘offers our earliest experience of contradiction and ambiguity’ (p. 8) providing language users with a rich tapestry of potential metaphorical constructions. The use of fire metaphors is investigated using corpus linguistic methods, particularly frequency, collocation, and concordance patterns.
The text is divided into three parts: the first part defines and contextualises the FIRE frame before illustrating the methodological approach, while the second and third parts investigate the use of the FIRE frame in religious and political texts. The sequential structure of the text makes it accessible to non-specialists, particularly as methodological and technical details are gradually introduced and defined.
Chapter 1 traces the socio-cultural roots of fire to illuminate the relationship between the development of human civilisations and the growing ability to command fire’s properties. From forging tools to combustion and engineering, fire came to play a central role in human survival and progression. Fire is also central to human thought: a sacred power that can both cleanse and punish, create and destroy, it is fundamental to the invention of narratives seeking to explain the human experience.
Chapter 2 defines the approach to corpus analysis, illustrating how using a corpus to identify lexical concordances and associated collocates aids the qualitative analysis of texts in terms of describing semantic properties. Frequency of occurrence, the author argues, is an empirical measure which can evaluate rhetorical effect and impact. Applying this methodological approach to a type-specific corpus is a means of describing and evaluating the frequency and form of semantic collocates related to the use of the FIRE frame.
Approaches to metaphor analysis in Cognitive Linguistics are outlined in Chapter 3. The author identifies the construction and use of metaphor as both fundamental to human cognition and thought, and to the conceptualisation of emotional and affective states. Metaphors underpin and transcribe embodied experience. Fire metaphors are, in turn, vital to this transcription. The author outlines Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) and introduces force dynamics (cf. Talmy, 1988) as a means of accounting for the motional, often agentic constructions generated by the FIRE frame.
In Part 2, consisting of Chapters 4 to 6, the investigation into fire metaphors moves from an assessment of Abrahamic religions to an assessment of Zoroastrianism and Hinduism. By exploring the cultural context and the prominent role of fire in each tradition, the author documents the symbolic use of fire metaphors in a range of canonical religious texts. Part 3, covering Chapters 7 to 10, presents the author’s analyses of political texts. The author samples Foxe’s Book of Martyrs - a 16th-century account of Protestant history, British and American political rhetoric, and British political cartoons. The evidence suggests that fire metaphors are employed to inspire both awe and fear in worshippers, as the title of the book suggests. Similar rhetorical strategies are employed in the construction of political discourse where fire metaphors inspire a similar sense of awe and fear to legitimise political action and authorise political power. There is, however, no concluding chapter in the book thereby missing the opportunity to synthesise the findings outlined in the preceding chapters.
This text ought to be commended as a detailed treatment of a single semantic field. However, there is a gap in terms of the empirical evidence supporting the claim of rhetorical impact and effect. It is sometimes unclear where the division lies between frequency of use and the degree of rhetorical effect, or if it is viable in an empirical manner to draw a correlation. This critical departure is more a general criticism of the limitation of corpus analysis, rather than a criticism of the text’s contribution to the field. As Widdowson (2004) argues, ‘corpus linguists cannot read process from product in an analogous manner: they cannot … directly infer contextual factors from co-textual ones, and use textual data as conclusive evidence of discourse’ (p. 126). The benefit of experimental evidence based on how language users interact with, and are affected by, fire metaphors may have transcended these limitations. While this may have been beyond the scope of this book, it is a salient critical point. For example, Hart (in press) investigates the effect of fire metaphors in press reports. In an experimental set, Hart discovers that fire metaphors and images of fire legitimate frame effects in media representations of civil disorder. Such experimental evidence indicates that claims generated by linguistic description can be supported by experimental evidence, particularly when those claims relate to the propagation of authority and power.
The inclusion of boundary cases, or those terms resting on the periphery of a semantic field is also significant. The examination of the contemporary use of beacon is one example (pp. 169–174). The author identifies that ‘with the declining awareness of the use of actual fire in warning signals, the metaphorical potential of the beacon increased’ (p. 171). Diminished cultural knowledge relating to the role of fire in terms of the historical use of beacons implies that the concept of BEACON is detached at the semantic pole from its etymological root. This suggests that language users might not necessarily associate the term with the notion of fire. While semantic frames ought to be perceived as boundless, situated within an extensive network of conceptual relations, attention ought to be paid to each construction’s scope of predication and resultant salience (see Langacker, 1987: 118–120). If the semantic value of the term has shifted or broadened over time in conjunction with the shift in world-knowledge, then it stands that the conceptual properties of a term should have, in turn, been subject to expansion and suffered a loss of information. If the contemporary understanding of BEACON no longer enters into a direct association with FIRE, then the relationship has undergone a degree of extension. In this case, BEACON may only relate to FIRE through the proxy of LIGHT which, too, may have shifted further away from the notion that FIRE CREATES LIGHT given the advent of electricity, a fact which the author does attest. Again, such peripheral cases may benefit from experimental investigation.
Nevertheless, this book is a substantial, relevant and important contribution, much like the author’s previous works. There can be no reservation in recommending it.