But the poet calls her a fioraia or ‘flower-girl’ as he introduces Mimì to his appreciative friends-to his ‘company’, as he calls them. With this background in place, I turn to the words of a song sung in Act 2 by Rodolfo, a poet, who has fallen in love with a woman called Mimì, who is a fabric worker-or, for the moment, let us call her a ‘seamstress’.
Metonymy is an expression of meaning by way of connecting something that seems at first familiar to something that is already familiar. Metaphor is an expression of meaning by way of substituting something that seems at first unfamiliar in place of something that is already familiar.
As for the terms, I epitomize the working definitions I developed in Chapter 1 of Masterpieces of Metonymy: The dramatic date of the story hovers around 1830. The première took place in Torino, 1896, and the conductor was a youthful Arturo Toscanini. The music for La Bohème was composed by Giacomo Puccini, with libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. First, I offer some minimal background about the opera and then about the terms metonymy and metaphor. Costume design for la rappezzatrice ‘the seamstress’ in the poster for the world premiere performance of La Bohème, Teatro Regio di Torino, 1 February 1896. This picturing, I further think, is expressed by way of metonymy and metaphor combined. Here a woman named Mimì, a fabric worker, is pictured as the incarnation of poetry. Such a representation comes to life, I think, in the story of Puccini’s opera La Bohème. Taking a broader point of view here, I will argue that the art of fabric work in general can be represented as an interaction of metonymy and metaphor. There I argued that metonymy and metaphor, as they are known in verbal art, are analogous respectively to horizontal and vertical threading in the art of weaving. This essay is linked with a lengthy book I published in 2015, Masterpieces of Metonymy.
0 kommentar(er)
