Poetic journeys and other metaphors underlying literary criticism on poetry in English and Russian

Résumé

The paper sets out to examine the metaphoricity of the discourse of literary criticism dealing with poetry. The research carried out in the framework of contemporary metaphor studies relying, first of all, on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and its followers, attempts to uncover metaphors structuring the discourse of literary criticism in two distinct cultures—English and Russian. The methodology of the investigation is based on the key principles of the metaphor identification procedure (MIP) and metaphorical patterns (see Stefanowitsch 2006). The results suggest that the main source domain for conceptualizing poetry in literary criticism in both languages is a person. This domain features much more prominently in English, whereas the domains of sound and music, painting and journey are more relevant in Russian. Many metaphors are inevitably evaluative—employed to express the writer’s positive or negative attitude.