Catachresis

Use in philosophy and criticism

In Jacques Derrida's ideas of deconstruction, catachresis refers to the original incompleteness that is a part of all systems of meaning. He proposes that metaphor and catachresis are tropes that ground philosophical discourse.

Postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak applies this word to "master words" that claim to represent a group, e.g., women or the proletariat, when there are no "true" examples of "woman" or "proletarian". In a similar way, words that are imposed upon people and are deemed improper thus denote a catachresis, a word with an arbitrary connection to its meaning.

Reading

References

References

1. Anshuman Sharma. (16 April 2014). "The Impact – The Art of Communicating Eloquently". Anshuman Sharma.
2. Lanham, Richard A.. (1991). "A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms". University of California Press.
3. [[Max Black]] discusses this phenomenon at some length, designating them catachrestic substitution metaphors: Black, M., ''Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy'' (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962).
4. Pierre Fontanier, ''Les Figures du discours'' (Paris: Flammarion, 1977 [orig. 1821–1830]), p. 214.
5. "Henry Peachum., The Garden of Eloquence (1593): Tropes, part Tropes, Catachresis". Perseus.tufts.edu.
6. John Van Sickle. (29 December 2010). "Virgil's Book of Bucolics, the Ten Eclogues Translated into English Verse: Framed by Cues for Reading Aloud and Clues for Threading Texts and Themes". JHU Press.
7. Paul Maurice Clogan. (1 January 1997). "Historical Inquiries". Rowman & Littlefield.
8. Jonathan Arac. (2011). "Impure Worlds: The Institution of Literature in the Age of the Novel". Fordham Univ Press.
9. Pope, ''Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry'', x