Visual Metaphor and Embodiment in Graphic Illness Narratives

This study uses the analysis of visual metaphor in 35 graphic illness narratives—book-length stories about disease in the comics medium—in order to re-examine embodiment in traditional Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and propose the more nuanced notion of “dynamic embodiment.” Building on recent strands of research within CMT, and drawing on relevant concepts and findings from other disciplines, including psychology, phenomenology, social semiotics, and media theory, the book develops the argument that the experience of one’s own body is constantly adjusting to changes in one’s individual state of health, sociocultural practices, and the activities in which one is engaged at any given moment, including the modes and media that are being used to communicate. This leads to a more fluid and variable relationship between physicality and metaphor use than many CMT scholars assume. For example, representing the experience of cancer through the graphic illness narrative genre draws attention to the unfathomable processes going on beneath the body’s visible surface, particularly now that digital imaging technologies play such a central role in the diagnosis and treatment of the disease. This may lead to a reversal of conventional conceptualizations of knowing and understanding in terms of seeing, so that vision itself becomes the target of metaphorical representations. A novel classification system of visual metaphor, based on a three-way distinction between pictorial, spatial, and stylistic metaphors, is also proposed.