Abstract

This dissertation combines a close reading of Heidegger's essay "Language in the Poem" with an analysis of metaphor. Primarily at issue is Heidegger's agency as author. In Chapter One, I examine Heidegger's goal of leading his reader into a thinking dialogue with poetry. I supplement Heidegger's reference to Plato, emphasizing the Platonic soul's philosophical motion as a self-directed ascension in opposition to an other-possessed downward poetic motion. I argue that while Heidegger explicitly and rightly avoids Plato's vertical and hierarchical metaphysical structure, he does not adequately address the issue of the self-direction of the soul. As I show in Chapter Two, Heidegger instead leads his reader into a parabolic identity with a follower, namely the soul discussed in his exposition of Trakl's poetry. ;Chapters Three and Four examine metaphor. I criticize Lakoff and Johnson's experientialist theory for grounding metaphor in the physical. In contrast, Eva Kittay's perspectivalist theory avoids dependence on metaphysical dualism, while supplying a valuable model of metaphor as an interactive, horizontal linguistic motion. I go on from here to discuss parable as extended metaphor. ;In Chapter Five, I return to Heidegger's essay, employing the perspectivalist theory of metaphor to locate a semantic pattern common to Heidegger's metaphors, especially those of following a call, the withdrawal of the holy, and departedness. I schematize this pattern as a motion from X to Y where X is near, present or known, Y is distant, absent or unknown, and Y directs the motion or is its source. I argue that Heidegger's metaphors function as metaphors for metaphor. However, these metaphors are over-extended in placing the origin of motion at the Y-position, which is distant from the reader. The reader is thus precluded from self-direction. Additionally, I show how Heidegger denies his own directing role as author by retreating to the X-position. This gives him a dangerous and inappropriate authority that is all the more forceful in its self-denial