LIFE IS A PLAY: reading David Mamet's sexual perversity in Chicago and Glengarry Glen Ross through Cognitive Poetics

摘要

One of the concerns of Cognitive Poetic critics has been with the issue of how literary authors make meaning byudmeans of metaphor. Building on the Cognitive Linguistic theories of metaphor, the field of Cognitive Poetics hasudbeen concerned, among its many diverse areas, with the studying of metaphor in literary texts. Proposing theudConceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argued inudMetaphors We Live By that our conceptual system is metaphorically shaped. In addition, they claimed that theudmetaphoric linguistic expressions are the manifestation of the fundamental conceptual metaphors formingudindividuals' cognitions. Conceptual metaphors were defined as the underlying structures of these expressions byudmeans of which people comprehend intangible concepts through more tangible ones. Using the ConceptualudMetaphor Theory (CMT), the present essay explores the conceptual metaphor of LIFE IS A PLAY in DavidudMamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago and Glengarry Glen Ross. In these plays, Mamet depicts a world inudwhich performance, in its theatrical sense, becomes the characters' survival strategy and a manner of living. Asudone of the most influential playwrights of his time, Mamet has always been concerned with the issues whichudmost afflict America. He finds the ills of his society manifested in the relation among people. An attempt is madeudto explain the ways in which life-as-play finds expression both linguistically and thematically in the differentudcontexts of these works.