Second Language Learning and Identity: Cracking Metaphors in Ideological and Poetic Discourse in the Third Space
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Second Language Learning and Identity: Cracking Metaphors in Ideo ...

Chapter 1:  Autobiographical Self
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So whenever I use these words, I feel that I am actually killing the person that I am talking to. This metaphor shows the social expectations in Japan, which is to behave indirectly. The metaphor , enkyoku ni, is an expression that means to speak indirectly. This literally means softly curved beauty like a woman’s arm. On the contrary, in Canada when people speak indirectly they use the metaphor “beating around the bush,” which indicates that what they are saying is just wasting time. These metaphors and language structure clearly indicate the Connection between language and thought.

Cracking Metaphors

Like Alice through the mirror

In a hybrid realm

My introspection is complicated, because of the nature of “outside of the inside,” and “the part in the whole”; these are tangled double voices.

Giddens’ (1991) claim that “[t]he reflexive project of the self…consists in the sustaining of coherent, yet continuously revised, biographical narratives” is a powerful way of conceptualizing continuity and change in a person’s identity over time. It locates identity in events and experience, rather than reifying it as a quality or attribute. Further, the self consists not of a person’s life history, but of the interpretation they are currently putting on their life history. The self is in this way doubly socially constructed: both by the socially constrained nature of the life experience itself, and by the social shaping of the interpretation. (Ivanic, 1998, p. 16)

I have adopted new clothes and discarded the old over the past 14 years. Whenever I feel “unhomeliness,” the world in which I feel comfortable shrinks and then expands slightly. I am living in an in-between space of hybridity that Bhabha (1994) called the third space:

It is that Third Space, though unrepresentable in itself, which constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew. (p. 37)