Metaphorical conceptualization of cancer in English medical creative nonfiction

Вестник Волгоградского государственного университета. Серия 2: Языкознание. 2025. Vol. 24. No. 2. P. 59–72.

Alexandra V. Nagornaya, James Chike Nwankwo

The paper discusses the phenomenon of medical creative nonfiction, delineating the factors that engender demand for this type of literature, listing its types and identifying its main features. It highlights the importance of language choices in the presentation of medical facts, as creative nonfiction aims to be comprehensible, engaging and aesthetically pleasing. The paper further narrows down the topic to nonfiction about cancer and considers the use of metaphors as a means of conceptualizing this disease. It provides an analysis of metaphors in two bestsellers written by medical professionals: S. Mukherjee’s “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer” and J. Fung’s “The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery”.  The methodological foundation for the analysis is the refined version of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, supplemented by the Discourse Metaphor Theory (J. Zinken) and the Metaphoric Creativity Theory (Z. Kövecses). The authors reveal the main patterns of metaphor use in each book. The most common source domains utilized in both books are WAR, LIVING BEING, PLANT and SPACE, while JOURNEY, which is a highly recommended source domain for the conceptualization of cancer in contemporary discourses, is barely noticeable. The authors further identify creative metaphors, analyze their conceptual structure, and compare the use of metaphors in the two books to demonstrate the possibility of conceptual experimentation with the topic despite the pressure of discursive conventions.

 

Keywords: концептуальная метафора, рак, cancer, metaphorical creativity, метафорическая креативность, conceptual metaphor, онкодискурс, Cancer Discourse, medical nonfiction, creative medical nonfiction, медицинский нон-фикшн, художественный медицинский нон-фикшн