Image schemas across modes and across cultures: Communicating horror in Philip Roth’s Nemesis and Ridley Scott’s Alien

Abstract

This paper examines two cultural texts, Philip Roth’s Nemesis and Ridley Scott’s Alien, based on cognitive linguistic approaches to figurative language in communication, cognitive metaphor theory and its pragmalinguistic applications. It explores how far very similar image schemas are functionally employed across modes and genres to communicate a certain affect, in this case horror, to a global, culturally diverse audience. The results are put into the perspective of ongoing debates about the universality and variation of metaphors and image schemas across types of texts and, in extrapolation, across cultures. The paper aims to contribute to discussions about the functions and modalities of intercultural transfers of literature and popular culture, combining the cognitive, the linguistic and the cultural dimension of literary texts communicating across cultures.