Pasanek, Brad (University of Virginia)

Metaphors of Mind: An Eighteenth-Century Dictionary Pasanek, Brad (University of Virginia)

Commendation Quotes: "Metaphors of Mind" is a genuinely significant book. An exciting and stimulating read, it promises to precipitate and augment important conversations both in eighteenth-century literary studies and in the field of digital humanities more broadly. Biographical Note: Brad Pasanek is an assistant professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the coeditor of "Beyond Liquidity: The Metaphor of Money in Financial Crisis."Marc Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.; Brad Pasanek's unusual work is the written report of a massive digital humanities project that involved searching 18th-century texts for the many ways writers use metaphors to characterize the mind. The book takes a selection of broad metaphorical categories that the author discovered in his digital research - including animals, coinage, metal, rooms, and writing - and examines particular examples within each category. Pasanek also frames the dictionary elements of the project with a more theoretical discussion of what he calls desultory reading, a form of unsystematic perusal of writing exemplified in the way we approach dictionaries. Pasanek not only argues that 18th-century thinkers largely employed desultory reading, but also that his work on this very project is itself an instance of this approach. The project succeeds twofold: in treating 18th-century writing as its topic and in exemplifying its approach. Pasanek maintains an accompanying website (https: //metaphorized.com) that collects the results of his digital searchesCommendation Quotes: Pasanek has produced a kind of distant-reading-by-hand, combining scale and literary sensitivity by dint of hard, thoughtful work. Many scholars use search technology, but few have done it as self-consciously as Pasanek. "Metaphors of Mind" will be important both because of its concrete historical contributions, and because it theorizes a hermeneutic process that humanists already use unreflectively."Commendation Quotes: "Metaphors of Mind "is one of the truly major works of literary historical scholarship of the early 21st century. Not only is the book brilliantly conceived, groundbreaking, and significant, but it is also on the cutting edge of the digital technologies that scholars are so rapidly embracing. Pasanek's book is a work of profoundly engaging erudition, performing all the functions of investigation and criticism apparently effortlessly. The manuscript is beautifully written, extremely lucid and free of jargon, and downright funny. Commendation Quotes: "Metaphors of Mind"is one of the most compelling blends of traditional literary critical methods and the new digital humanities/data mining projects that literary studies has seen to date. With welcome clarity and disarming humor, Pasanek provides an eye-opening survey, peppered with vivid examples, of the countless ways in which eighteenth-century Anglo-American culture imagined perception and personal identity. I feel confident predicting that in the years to come "Metaphors of Mind"will be frequently cited, quarried, and emulated by historians, psychologists, philosophers, as well as literary critics."Commendation Quotes: Self-avowedly experimental, this book both transforms the form of the scholarly monograph and provides its best defense, all in the most understated - almost surreptitious - way. Pasanek's "Metaphors of Mind" constitutes a major intervention in eighteenth-century studies, but it is crucial reading in the field of media studies as well. Publisher Marketing: An encyclopedic dictionary along the lines of Voltaire's classic "Dictionnaire Philosophique," "Metaphors of Mind" provides an in-depth look at the myriad ways in which Enlightenment writers used figures of speech to characterize the mind. Drawn from Brad Pasanek's massive online archive, http: //metaphorized.net, this volume constitutes a veritable treasury of mental metaphorics. Dividing the book into eleven broad metaphorical categories--Animals, Coinage, Court, Empire, Fetters, Impressions, Inhabitants, Metal, Mirror, Rooms, and Writing--Pasanek maps out constellations of metaphors. He frames his collection of literary excerpts in each section with a more descriptive and theoretical discussion of what he calls "desultory reading," a form of unsystematic perusal of writing frequently employed by Enlightenment thinkers. By surveying the printed past alongside the digital present, the book treats eighteenth-century writing as its topic while essentially exemplifying its rhetorical approach. More than an exercise in quotation, this intellectual history offers illuminating readings of fragmentary literary works and confrontations with neoclassical and contemporary theories of metaphor. The book's entries complicate received ideas about Locke's blank slate, question M. H. Abrams' claims about mirrors and lamps, and chart changing frequencies of metal metaphors in a moment of industrial revolution. The book also responds to current anxieties about reading and the mass digitization of literature, touching on recent discussions of "distant reading," "shallow reading," and "surface reading." Promoting critical and creative anachronism, "Metaphors of Mind" redefines the notion of an archive in the age of Amazon and Google Books.