Feminist Art and the Maternal by liss, andrea (original) (raw)

2010, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Ted Cohen's work on metaphor is well known in the profession, so it comes as no surprise to us that he has now written a splendid book on the subject. It is a very short book. But as was famously said by someone who did not practice what he preached, "Brevity is the soul of wit," a metaphor, for sure, and one indeed admirably suited to describe Ted Cohen himself, who, without preaching, practices the virtue in question. Having said that Cohen's book is on metaphor, however, and that is certainly how it will be "shelved," it is a book on why metaphor is so important to us, what its significance is, and, as the subtitle of the book tells us, it is on the talent for metaphor too, as well as on our ability to identify with and understand others. That being said, now on to business. I first give the reader a general survey of Cohen's book, and then, in the end, try to raise two issues for the future discussion which, I am certain, Thinking of Others will inevitably motivate. Cohen begins by narrowing his topic down to metaphors of the form "A is B," perhaps the most frequently adduced example being "Juliet is the sun." "It seems obviously true," he avers, "that a metaphor 'A is B' induces one to think of A as B. How this happens," Cohen goes on to say, "is a wonderful mystery, and the ability to do it, to 'see' A as B is an indispensible human ability I am calling the talent for metaphor" (p. 3). Furthermore, Cohen suggests that "a leading aim of many metaphor-makers is the communication of some feelings they have about the subject of their metaphors, and the often hoped-for inducement of similar feelings in those who grasp their metaphors" (p. 6). Cohen further narrows his subject down to what he calls the "metaphor of personal identification," in which "a person is said to be either another person or a person of a different kind." "I will be concentrating on cases," he says, "in which the person is oneself,