This chapter explores the wounded foot in Sophocles’ Philoctetes in connection with the theme of displacement. Starting from questions about metaphorical language and illness raised by Susan Sontag, the chapter analyzes the beginning of Sophocles’ play. A careful reading of key words in Sophocles’ Greek shows how the fallen hero’s foot stands out as a challenge to the equivalence that we moderns ordinarily make between material, concrete objects and literal meaning. And by observing that Philoctetes, Oedipus, and Odysseus are wanderers with comparable foot-related problems, this study interprets Philoctetes’ illness as an identity crisis in which his wounded foot functions as both a symptom and an underlying cause.

Linguistic metaphors in criticism

Citations

The Dread Wayfarer: Philoctetes’ Foot

Related Papers (5)

Cross-linguistic research on metaphor

Metaphors as Discourse Strategies in Osundare’s Poetry

A Linguistic Analogy in Literary Criticism

Understanding Metaphor in Literature: An Empirical Approach

The dialogics of metaphor and simile in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September