Title: Catching Lightning in a Jar: The Craft of Metaphor in Children's Literature
Abstract: This issue's column of Unfettered Imaginations highlights children's books in which metaphors play a central role.AS CHILDREN EXPERIENCE their world, they grapple to integrate their new experiences into concepts they already understand. A small child who has a pet dog will often call the first cow she sees, Doggie! Young children entering school routinely create descriptions that include physical links between objects, He's tall like a giraffe! These early forays into metaphorical thinking predate conventional literacy, yet there is evidence that formal schooling results in diminished, rather than increased, expression of metaphor in children (Wilson, 2000/2001).This issue's column of Unfettered Imaginations looks at models of metaphor in writing for children. Metaphor is often difficult to define; some have even likened it to pinning air to the wall (Wilson, 2000/2001, p. 96). Linguistically, metaphor (or more specifically, conceptual metaphor) is a process of using analogies to understand our life experiences (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Colloquially, a metaphor is a figurative rather than literal description, as echoed in the common phrase, metaphorically speaking. In the writer's craft, metaphor refers to figurative language that contrasts two unlike concepts or objects in order to further the reader's understanding of one of those objects.Metaphor as a class of figurative literary comparisons includes simple metaphor, simile, metonymy, synecdoche, and extended metaphor, or conceit.1 Although simple metaphor and simile are commonly taught as separate entities, both are actually subsets of metaphor. Both are comparisons of two objects or concepts, but one merges the comparison, and the other divides. Simple metaphors blend the objects of comparison into a single concept: Uptown is jazz (Collier, 2000, n.p.). include the words like or as (or sometimes than), allowing the objects of comparison to remain separate, for example, My heart is like a zoo (Hall, 2010, n.p.). In a conceit, or extended metaphor, a comparison is made throughout the text, and extended through additional details. In the film Shrek (Warner, Williams, Adamson, & Jenson, 2001), when Shrek suggests that ogres are onions because they have many layers, other details such as ogres stink and not everyone likes them serve to extend the onion metaphor. Extended metaphors that serve as a symbol for an entire work are often referred to as a conceit. In Robert Frost's poem Road Less Traveled, the road serves as a metaphor for life.Teaching students about metaphorical writing can be challenging, but it is possible (Jakobson & Wickman, 2007; Wolf, 2006). Students use metaphor spontaneously, but it is not often a metacognitive practice. What teachers must do is to encourage, and extend, students' use of metaphorical language to describe what they are learning (Whitin, 2005). To help scaffold students' ongoing development of metaphorical thought, teachers can provide students an explicit definition of metaphor and its elements and examples of metaphor in writing, models for their craft. The following picture books can serve as support in explicit instruction and as mentor texts, providing examples of metaphorical language at work. I have chosen not to include pedagogical stories such as Crazy Like a Fox: A Simile Story (Leedy, 2009), preferring to focus on books where metaphor serves as the structure for, or is pertinent to, a story that moves beyond specific didactic objectives.Explicit Definitions of MetaphorSkin Like Milk, Hair of Silk: What Are and Metaphors? by Brian P. Cleary, illustrated by Brian Gable Minneapolis, MN: Millbrook Press, 2011This recent publication not only defines the terms simile and metaphor, but also offers examples of both. The first half of the book focuses on similes, Similes are phrases that compare two unlike things. As in Her hair is soft as silk. …
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-04-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 2
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