What does the word “refract"mean in the following context. I have looked up definitiosn for 'refract” but haven’t found any definition in a figurative sense. I look forward to your feedback
davidmich
“Stauffer gives a poignant example. A woman named Ellen received a book by the sentimental poet Felicia Hemans. Years later, her seven-year-old daughter died, and she adapted lines from Hemans to create a memorialinside the book.Mary, Mary, Mary.
Moved by this, Stauffer looked at another edition of Hemans in the UVA library and found asimilar tribute to a lost child. “This really tells us something about how people were using Hemans and this book to refract their own grief,” he said.”
IMHO this is a unique literary hijacking of the word, not normally used figuratively. Refract with respect to light means to change the direction of light when it crosses the boundary from one medium to another (the reason the spoon in your glass of iced tea looks bent). It appears that in the passage you quote it is being used as a synonym for “redirect” as in channeling the grief into a direction where it can be dealt with.
Here’s the thing about metaphors: they don’t have fixed, definite meanings, the reader (or hearer) has to be able to figure out what is meant from a combination of knowing the literal meaning and understanding the context in which it is being used figuratively. If readers can’t do that, it is a bad metaphor. One thing that can cause this problem is if the writer/speaker does not really properly understand the literal meaning of the word. I am much inclined to think that that is what is going on here. From the context, I suspect that the intended meaning is something like “transform”, which does not really fit the literal meaning of “refract”. However, if you do not actually have a very clear idea of its literal meaning, “refract” makes it all sound more portentous. (Not that Stauffer, whoever that is, is the first person to use the word in this obtuse sort of way. I am pretty sure I have seen it before in Lit. Crit. type stuff. It has become a bit of jargon that, I suspect, nobody who uses it really understands, but that is used to sound modish and deep and smart, and a bit sciencey.)
It doesn’t though, really. “Refract” does not mean focus, let alone refocus. Sure, you can focus light via refraction, but you can focus light without refraction too, via reflection, and you can refract light without focusing it at all.
You maybe right that “Stauffer” thinks that “refract” means focus (or refocus), but if he does he is wrong, and would have done much better to use the word “refocus” (itself already a metaphor, in this context)than to try and sound clever by using a fancier and more ‘original’ word that he doesn’t really understand.
“Refract” means to break or to break open, and the earliest recorded use of the word in English (from 1563) describes how the beams of the sun are “refracted or broken”, and this is what produces the appearance of the rainbow.
Pretty soon the meaning was extended to cover any deflection or altering of the course of a ray of light, even if it didn’t produce a rainbow-like effect (and so didn’t involve “breaking open” the ray of light). And, in due course (from the early seventeenth century ) the word was used figuratively to mean any kind of mediation, alteration or distortion of anything.
In the instance cited in the OP, grieving parents are using the poetry of Hemans as a medium for expressing their own grief for their children. I think that’s in line with the established (if not necessarily common) figurative use of the word.
That is an ugly sentence, and I hope the poetry of Felicia Hemans is better than the prose attributed to Stauffer.
I’d go with something like illuminating, projecting, breaking into fractions. “This really tells us something about how people were using Hemans and this book as a prism for viewing or projecting aspects of their own life”
“Lens” works too, but I like “prism” because it also includes the possibilities of de-focusing, or turning your grief into tiny points of light that illuminate everything else, or splitting your grief up into different colors of grief.
Or you could just say – every person reads a different book –
Is there any chance that Stauffer’s native language is German (what with the German name and all)?
If so then that would make sense as a literal translation of “gebrochen” (here “refracted” but more generally “broken”). That is not a very common usage but definitely an established one in the context of the the arts. Something like “filtered” might be a better choice in English.
A lens refracts light. It takes an incoming beam and bends its trajectory. The book acts in a similar way on the parents’ grief. It bends their grief to a new direction.
It doesn’t *focus *their grief. That would imply concentration. It doesn’t *reflect *their grief. That would imply distribution. It alters the trajectory of their grief without concentrating, diminishing, or spreading it.
Yes, light really does change direction when it enters glass, or water, or anything. And before anyone understood that, they just gave it a name and didn’t understand it.
The last bit “when it enters at an angle” is just being pedantic. When light enters straight into something, at right angle to the surface (which is an angle anyway), it doesn’t change direction. The change, (the angle of refraction) changes with the direction (the angle of incidence).