A Hermeneutic Interpretation of Metaphor and Meaning Making in Read Alif Only.

This paper questions the classical concept of metaphor as a mere rhetorical flourish, decorative and individual linguistic unit that can be studied in isolation, separate from the text, context and world of literary works. It also argues against the extreme postmodern reductive view of language that looks at metaphor as an instrument of evasion, suppression and distortion of truth, and contends that metaphor as linguistic configuration can alter, extend, twist and elaborate language to serve ontological, heuristic and cognitive functions. My contention is that metaphors in serious literature address the relationship between language and life. This paper generates an optimistic view of metaphor by interpreting the way metaphors embody and generate new knowledge in the mystical poetry of Bulleh Shah Sahib. This paper will focus on the significance of the metaphor of Alif in Sufi discourse, and then argue for the meaning it generates in one poem by Bulleh Shah Sahib, a Punjabi Sufi poet. Alif as a metaphor acquires additional symbolic meanings and extralinguistic reality by contradicting and violating the referential meaning of Alifas a letter in Perso-Arabic alphabet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]