Breaking Rules: Metaphors, Jokes and
Understanding Others
A Conference on the Work of Ted Cohen
Friday
June 6th to June 8, 2014
at the Metropolitan State
University of Denver
[Draft]
This long-planned conference is in honor of Ted Cohenbs work and has
now, sadly, become a memorial to the man. Increasingly he had centered
his investigations on jokes, metaphors and the related issues of
intimacy and understanding others. In both these forms of linguistic
action, the speaker/writer does not aim directly to contravene the
dimension of the words as making a statement The goal of jokes and
metaphor rather entails subverting this dimension or expanding it
beyond normal limits. In short: the speaker breaks the rules. To break
them is not to annihilate them but to show us what can occur beyond or
beneath the more normal forms of speech that the rules enable.
What makes the value of such moments beyond the pleasure they
deliver? Cohen answers: a kind of intimacy that gets established
between the maker and the audience. In that intimacy is food for
thought about language and about what it is to know another human
being. And these are the topics we will be exploring.
The conference will be conducted primarily as a series of
workshops, introduced by brief remarks. (There is no need to submit a
full-scale paper.) It will be held from June 6th through June 8th in
the SpringHills Suites (run by Marriot on the campus of the
Metropolitan State University of Denver.
For more information email Tim Gould at [email protected]. Sponsored
in part by a grant from the American Society for Aesthetics, with
assistance from the Department of Philosophy and the Philosophy Club.
Breaking Rules: Metaphors, Jokes and
Understanding Others
A Conference on the Work of Ted Cohen
Friday
June 6th to June 8, 2014
at the Metropolitan State
University of Denver
[Draft]
This long-planned conference is in honor of Ted Cohenbs work and has
now, sadly, become a memorial to the man. Increasingly he had centered
his investigations on jokes, metaphors and the related issues of
intimacy and understanding others. In both these forms of linguistic
action, the speaker/writer does not aim directly to contravene the
dimension of the words as making a statement The goal of jokes and
metaphor rather entails subverting this dimension or expanding it
beyond normal limits. In short: the speaker breaks the rules. To break
them is not to annihilate them but to show us what can occur beyond or
beneath the more normal forms of speech that the rules enable.
What makes the value of such moments beyond the pleasure they
deliver? Cohen answers: a kind of intimacy that gets established
between the maker and the audience. In that intimacy is food for
thought about language and about what it is to know another human
being. And these are the topics we will be exploring.
The conference will be conducted primarily as a series of
workshops, introduced by brief remarks. (There is no need to submit a
full-scale paper.) It will be held from June 6th through June 8th in
the SpringHills Suites (run by Marriot on the campus of the
Metropolitan State University of Denver.
For more information email Tim Gould at [email protected]. Sponsored
in part by a grant from the American Society for Aesthetics, with
assistance from the Department of Philosophy and the Philosophy Club.
