Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change

Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change
Publication Date
2005
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The title Translating Investments, a manifold pun, refers to metaphor and clothing, authority and interest, and trading and finance. Translation, Latin translatio, is historically a name for metaphor, and investment, etymologically a reference to clothing, participates both in the complex symbolism of early modern dress and in the cloth trade of the period. In this original and wide-ranging book, Judith Anderson studies the functioning of metaphor as a constructive force within language, religious doctrine and politics, literature, rhetoric, and economics during the reigns of the Tudors and early Stuarts. Invoking a provocative metaphorical concept from Andy Clark's version of cognitive science, she construes metaphor itself as a form of scaffolding fundamental to human culture. A more traditional and controversial conception of such scaffolding is known as sublation-Hegel's Aufhebung, or "raising," as the philosophers Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur have understood this term.