Visual Metaphor and Embodiment in Graphic Illness Narratives
Elisabeth El Refaie
Reviews and Awards
"In short, El Refaie... excellently demonstrates the medium's specific affordances to create metaphorical meaning....My estimate is that El Refaie's book will resonate in all three fields." -- Charles Forceville, University of Amsterdam, Journal of Pragmatics
"Increasingly, the graphic novel, or comic book, is regarded as a form of communication that offers powerful, and unique, ways of commu-nicating our understanding of the world. El Refaie shows us the unique power of graphic narrative in the area of illness and offers insight into the ways in which this medium allows us to understand, and manage, our own and others' experiences. By introducing a version of dynamic embodi-ment, the book has the potential of stimulating a large number of research questions for researchers in basic perception." -- Heath Matheson, Department of Psychology, University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George, British Columbia, Canada, Perception
"I am in awe of Elisabeth El Refaie's work. Her interests take her to fascinating areas of enquiry âmetaphor and embodiment - while the clarity of her writing renders these subjects accessible to the rest of us. This is a hugely important volume which helps to explain what we may intuitively know but find hard to articulate: that graphic narratives of illness can be powerful creations that speak of the body and mind in deeply complex ways." --Ian Williams, Doctor, Comics Artist, Editor of graphicmedicine.org, and author of The Bad Doctor (Myriad Editions, 2015)
"Elisabeth El Refaie asks important questions about conceptual metaphor theory, chiefly among them how people interpret their physical experience. She challenges the idea of universal embodiment, proposing instead that the experience of our body varies in accordance with our state of health and our moment-to-moment activities, including the modes and media used to communicate. This leads to significant differences between metaphors representing distinct diseases, as well as between verbal and visual metaphors. This is a theoretically and methodologically innovative book." --Zoltán Kövecses, Professor of Linguistics, Eötvös Loránd University
"This book absolutely delivers on the âradical agendaâ that the author sets for herself. By focusing on visual metaphors in thirty-five graphic illness narratives, El Refaie challenges current theories of metaphor and embodiment to deal with multiple types of diversity (different bodies, different illnesses, different kinds of multimodal texts). This leads to insights and developments that will be relevant across many disciplines, from cognitive science through multimodal discourse analysis to the medical humanities. A marvelous achievement." --Professor Elena Semino, Professor of Linguistics, Lancaster University
