Metaphors open up our minds – but can also shut them down
Because I recently wrote a post extolling the beauty of metaphors as novel titles, this article caught my eye. There are always at least two sides to every story, and here’s another side to the story of metaphors.
In this article neuroscientist Claire O’Callaghan from the University of Sydney in Australia concentrates on scientific metaphors:
Beginning life as an indispensable tool to promote understanding and unite scientists (and the public) in a common language, when scientific metaphors catch on, they’re hard to shake. They tend to stick, even when they’ve outlived their usefulness. Scientific metaphors reduce a complicated process to something more concrete. More knowable. Often recasting the natural as man-made (the genome as a blueprint; the cell as a factory; the brain as a computer) or bestowing nature with humanlike intent (a selfish gene; species as enemies or invaders). The more complex the phenomenon, the more likely we’ll defer to metaphorical language to make sense of it. So, by their nature, scientific metaphors sweep important details under the rug.
She warns us that “We need to know when to call time on a metaphor, and rally against those that have outlived their usefulness.”
Inside the Big Bet on Consciousness
“The real winner in the battle between two leading theories of consciousness was science itself”
Last week’s Literary Links included an admonition from a neuroscientist that we stop giving AI bots human traits because such AI creations lack human consciousness.
But what exactly is human consciousness? Where does it come from?
This article teaches not only about the nebulous concept of consciousness but also about the scientific method.
Reinventing the “Madwoman in the Attic” Trope in Thriller Fiction
Novelist Rachel Paris explains:
If you want to insult a woman, it’s hard to beat calling her “crazy”. For millennia, that lazy slur has been used to shame women into doing what we’re told. In my debut thriller, See How They Fall, I set out to subvert the “mad woman” literary trope.
Paris observes that the mad woman trope usually involves gaslighting, the process by powerful men of making the woman doubt her own sanity and the validity of her observations and experiences. For Paris, the key to subverting the mad woman in the attic trope lies in maintaining the woman’s agency: “let’s just say that in 2025, it’s only right that the madwoman in the attic doesn’t just get mad – she gets even.”
“Poetry City”: Iowa City, Iowa
Is there a more literary town than Iowa City, Iowa? Iowa City is the place where contemporary English literature matters more than anywhere else on earth. The home of arguably the world’s most famous MFA program, Iowa City has authors’ plaques embedded in the sidewalk (yes, our streets are paved in literary gold), over 100 literary readings per year, and roughly 1,000 writers—young and old, town and gown—in a community of 75,000. No surprise, then, that in 2008 Iowa City was named a UNESCO City of Literature.
But, Harry Stecopoulos argues, “there also exists another Iowa City alongside this broadly accepted and well marketed literary identity,” “a countercultural aesthetic that doesn’t always completely jibe with the more mainstream literary identity.”
Reading Behind Bars, and Beyond Barriers
“Jackie Snow reflects on what working for a books-to-prisons nonprofit has taught her about reading.”
Eager, I threw myself in, quickly learning that sending books to prisons required enthusiasm as well as substantial knowledge about prisons, censorship, the postal service, and a wide range of literature. The latter became apparent when I realized that regularly requested genres such as thrillers, westerns, and romances were blank spots in my reading history. To better answer these letters, I began reading popular genres, a self-assigned homework project that eventually upended my own beliefs about literary merit and changed who I was as a reader, writer, and person.
Tolkien Against the Grain
“The Lord of the Rings is a book obsessed with ruins, bloodlines, and the divine right of aristocrats. Why are so many on the left able to love it?”
Gerry Canavan, chair of the English department at Marquette University, is the author or editor of several books about science fiction and fantasy. Here he explains why Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings continues to appeal to people on both sides of the left/right political divide:
the key is the books’ frame narrative. Both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings present themselves not as novels but as historical documents, uncovered by some anonymous scholar and presented to the twentieth century as an unknown story of the very deep past. The story of The Lord of the Rings comes from a copy of a copy of a many-thousands-of-years-old volume called The Red Book of Westmarch, ostensibly written by the saga’s main characters after the fact and annotated, corrected, and expanded by various parties later on. These origins can be seen in the book’s strange and ponderous foreword, along with its more than 100 pages of pseudo-scholarly appendices.
He adds, “While the movies and video games based on the book erase this frame, and many first-time readers ignore it entirely, it was integral to the work Tolkien understood himself to be doing, and it invites a reading strategy that is not about established and unimpeachable facts but rather a deeply contested historical narrative based on extremely incomplete records and a long and polarized debate.”
Do we really need more male novelists?
The recent announcement of the launch of a new press, Conduit Books, “which plans to focus, at least initially, on publishing male authors,” prompted this question from Ella Creamer in The Guardian. (If you want to read more about the launch of Conduit books, there’s a link to an article about it on this page.)
“Writers and publishing insiders disagree over the extent of the gender imbalance in fiction, and the extent to which that imbalance is a concern,” Creamer writes. She also addresses the differences in both reading and publishing by men and women in nonfiction.
The Latest on the Issue of Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence is garnering so much media attention that it deserves its own section of discussion.
A.I. Can Trick You, Warns Book That Hid A.I.’s Help Writing It
Andrea Colamedici invented a philosopher, presented him as an author and produced a book, secretly generated with the help of artificial intelligence, about manipulating reality in the digital age.
People were deceived. Accusations of dishonesty, bad ethics and even illegality flew.
But the man behind it, Mr. Colamedici, insists it was not a hoax; rather, he described it as a “philosophical experiment,” saying that it helps to show how A.I. will “slowly but inevitably destroy our capacity to think.”
The Great Language Flattening
Chatbots learned from human writing. Now the influence may run in the other direction. Some people have hypothesized that the proliferation of generative-AI tools such as ChatGPT will seep into human communication, that the terse language we use when prompting a chatbot may lead us to dispose of any niceties or writerly flourishes when corresponding with friends and colleagues.
Seattle Worldcon 2025 ChatGPT Controversy Roundup
The fallout from Seattle Worldcon 2025 Chair Kathy Bond’s public statement attempting to defend the use of ChatGPT as part of the screening process for program participants now includes Yoon Ha Lee’s rejection of his status as a Lodestar Award finalist
This piece consists mostly of copies of posts and comments and replies from various social media platforms and participants rather than authorial information or opinion. If you want to get a feel for the real Wild West nature of online discussion, dive in here.
AI isn’t replacing student writing – but it is reshaping it
Jeanne Beatrix Law, professor of English at Kennesaw State University, calls herself “a writing professor who sees artificial intelligence as more of an opportunity for students, rather than a threat.” She says that recent research suggests that students “are leveraging AI to free up more time to engage in deeper processes and metacognitive behaviors – deliberately organizing ideas, honing arguments and refining style,” rather than using AI to straight-up cheat by having it write their papers.
In this case, she argues, it seems better to teach students how to use AI tools for such purposes rather than to restrict students from using AI at all.
© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown
