tropology
/trəˈpɒlədʒi
/noun [mass noun]
1The figurative use of language.The neologism tropicopolitan is ‘a name for the colonized subject who exists both as fictive construct of colonial tropology and actual resident of tropical space, object of representation and agent of resistance’....
- The substitutability principle is none other than a generalization of the very notion of tropology.
- It suggested the radical subordination of referential ambitions to the exigencies of material and technique, to the historical sedimentation of convention, and to the internal logics of format and tropology.
1.1 Christian Theology The figurative interpretation of the scriptures as a source of moral guidance.Traditionally expressed, one could perhaps say that typological tropology or tropological typology was the chief interpretative strategy for making the Bible contemporary, for absorbing one's own world into the world of the text....
- As soon as exegesis of the Old Testament becomes an issue necessary to daily reading of Scripture, typology becomes of far greater importance than tropology.
Derivatives
tropological
- She travels by a kind of metaphorical or at least tropological - since it is as much metonymic as metaphorical - displacement, while still remaining the same.
- The text itself begins to manifest the lifeworld of gay Harlem or Greenwich Village, the narrative taking on tropological elements of ‘cruising’: taking abrupt turns, pausing, circling, and coyly showing off.
- Traditionally expressed, one could perhaps say that typological tropology or tropological typology was the chief interpretative strategy for making the Bible contemporary, for absorbing one's own world into the world of the text.
Origin
Late Middle English: via late Latin from Greek tropologia, from tropos (see trope).