Facets and limits of metaphorical creativity: madness metaphors in Stephen King's prose

The paper deals with the phenomenon of metaphorical creativity understood as an ability to create metaphors possessing novelty at the conceptual and/or verbal level. Metaphorical creativity involves the breaking, restructuring and transformation of well-established patterns of thought and wording. All these changes, however, are restricted by the social nature of human communication as the potential receiver of the novel metaphor is supposed to be able to decode it and adequately react to it. Thus, metaphorical creativity is seen as a social practice and as a guided and controlled activity. It is based on shared knowledge and makes sense only when its products are related to the already established modes of interpretation. One of the most promising fields of research in this sphere is the analysis of individual creativity patterns and the modeling of individual metaphorical landscapes. The paper focuses on Stephen King's prose (16 novels, two collections of novelettes and one collection of short stories) dealing specifically with creative madness metaphors coined by the author. Following M. De Young, the author uses 'madness' as an umbrella term covering a variety of states ranging from mild mental deficiency to severe mental disorders. The paper presents a detailed analysis of 24 metaphors that are most representative of the author's individual metaphorical style. It reveals the conventional metaphors most commonly exploited by King (such as MADNESS IS SPACE, MADNESS IS A BROKEN OBJECT, MADNESS IS AN INCOMPLETE SET OF OBJECTS, etc.) and describes concrete conceptual and verbal techniques employed by the author to convey the different aspects of madness. The paper further looks into the possibility of creating principally new madness metaphors and provides a unique example from King's prose (Alzheimer's is AIDS for old people), demonstrating its 'recog-nizability' that stems from the fact that it follows the well-entrenched metaphorical pattern of conceptualizing diseases (AIDS is the 20th-century plague). The author of the paper supposes that King's creative metaphorical prolificacy is partly accounted for by his extensive knowledge of existing verbal resources and metalinguistic competence evident in his explicit use of the word 'metaphor' in special metalinguistic commentaries. The author points out the need for a systematic analysis of other thematic groups of metaphors in order to model the general metaphorical landscape of the author and reveal changes in the creativity patterns through time.

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