Rest in space, Starman! Creative reframing of death metaphors on David Bowie’s mural in London
Publicated to:Discourse Studies. 24 (5): 566-589 - 2022-10-01 24(5), DOI: 10.1177/14614456221108586
Authors: Hidalgo-Downing L; Pérez-Sobrino P
Affiliations
Abstract
This article explores the way in which death metaphors written in the urban mural for David Bowie in London contribute to creatively reframing the artist’s death. While research on death metaphors has focussed on traditional written genres such as obituaries and epitaphs, studies of urban memorials and shrines have focussed on the creation of fandom identities, downplaying the role played by figurativity, creativity and emotional connotation. The present article aims to bridge the gap between these two areas of study by presenting a corpus-based study of 585 items written on the mural for David Bowie. The research questions are: (1) How is Bowie’s death (metaphorically) conceptualised? (2) To what extent are death metaphors in Bowie’s mural creative? and (3) What is the relationship between the metaphorical framing of Bowie’s death and the projection of emotional connotations? The findings of our study reveal that Bowie’s songs emerge as a highly productive metaphorical source domain to understand the artist’s death, in which fans recontextualise lines from Bowie’s lyrics in creative and positive ways.
Keywords
Quality index
Bibliometric impact. Analysis of the contribution and dissemination channel
The work has been published in the journal Discourse Studies due to its progression and the good impact it has achieved in recent years, according to the agency Scopus (SJR), it has become a reference in its field. In the year of publication of the work, 2022, it was in position , thus managing to position itself as a Q1 (Primer Cuartil), in the category Anthropology. Notably, the journal is positioned above the 90th percentile.
Impact and social visibility
Leadership analysis of institutional authors
There is a significant leadership presence as some of the institution’s authors appear as the first or last signer, detailed as follows: Last Author (PEREZ SOBRINO, PAULA).