Metaphor

Another more traditional term, metaphors in postmodern print literature (and also magical realism where they often take on a literal quality) are highlighted, also serve to take the reader momentarily out of the narrative, a reprieve, like the time issue with materiality, and creating a secondary meaning, or frame, while emphasizing something within the text, adding a layer of understanding. In Postmodernist Fiction, Brian McHale writes:

Metaphorical expressions, according to Benjamin Hrushovski, belong simultaneously to two frames of reference. Within one of these frames, the expression has its literal meaning; within the other it functions figuratively. Only the second of these frames of reference actually exists in the fictional world of the text (what Hrushovski calls its field of reference). (133).

Because the reader cannot inhabit both of these frames at once, they are temporarily removed from the text. This is achieved by Jeanette Winterson in The Passion, where she concretizes metaphor to stun the reader, challenge perceptions of reality, and add layers of meaning to the text.
Additionally, the materiality or medium of the text, the interactivity it requires, also creates its own metaphor. Examples of this are found in two new media poems: “dear e.e.” by Ingrid Ankerson and Lori Janis and “Cruising” by Ingrid Ankerson and Megan Sapnar. In “dear e.e.,” a commentary on the discombobulating effect of e.e. cummings’ unique writing style, the (w)reader must navigate the poem by scrolling, attempting to catch the text, as they would pieces of a dream upon waking. In “Cruising” coming of age is the metaphor, supplied again by the navigation, where learning to drive through the Flash interface is much like learning to drive a car, a metaphor for becoming an adult found in the poem.