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The Center for Middle Eastern Studies is pleased to present
Sondes Hamdi
English Associate Professor, Carthage University, Tunis
This event will take place on Zoom; please register in advance here: https://bit.ly/3Z1Xwmg.
Since the publication of Lakoff and Turner’s seminal book More Than Cool Reason (1989), several studies have been done on poetic metaphor in literature, as reflected in the works of Jaberi et al. (2016), Al-Jumaili, (2020), Johansson (2016), Kravets et al. (2021), and Marugina et al. (2014), showing that conceptual metaphor is pervasive in literature. However, to the best of our knowledge, no single study has offered a systematic cognitive analysis of the poems written by the famous Tunisian romantic poet Abulqâsem Echảbỉ. The speaker tries to fill this gap, at least partially, by providing a cognitive semantic analysis of Abulqâsem Echảbỉ’s poem “The Will to Life,” by using the CMT theoretical framework, as propounded by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and Kövecses (2002, 2017). The aim is to identify the conceptual metaphors underlying Abulqâsem Echảbỉ’s “The Will to Life” using the methodological tools proposed by CMT, such as linguistic metaphor, conceptual metaphor, target domain (TD) and source domain (SD). Data analysis identified several conceptual metaphors in which abstract concepts, such as LIFE, HOPE, DIGNITY, BEAUTY, DREAM and FREEDOM were reified or personified. This study corroborates the CMT claim that humans – poets and non poets alike – “live by metaphors” showing that metaphor was pervasive in different languages and in diverse genres, such as poetry.
Sondes Hamdi is an English Associate Professor at Carthage University (Tunis, Tunisia). She studied at Arizona State University (ASU, Arizona) and Laval University (Quebec, Canada). She obtained her MA and PhD in Linguistics at Laval University. She taught at Arizona State University, Laval University, and ISEAHK (Kef, Tunisia). She published a book entitled Conceptual Metaphors for Happiness, Love, Anger, Sadness and Pride in English and Tunisian Arabic : A Comparative Cognitive Study (CPU, 2018) as well as several articles on cognitive linguistics, genre analysis and discourse analysis. In addition to research and teaching, Sondes Hamdi is a short story writer. She published two short story collections: Wanderers and Survivors. She won the prize for the Best Communication at LACUS International Conference in 2008 (Linguistics Association of Canada and the United States). Her forthcoming book is entitled Conceptual Metaphors in the Selected Poems « To the Tyrants », « The Rooster », « In Jerusalem », « Caged Bird » and « I Dream a World » : A Cognitive Semantics Study (CPU, 2023).
Contact: Liz Flanagan