Profile: Dave Ritchie

How does a kid from the rural reaches of southern Idaho land an academic career? Only Dave Ritchie can answer that question.

Ritchie, a professor in the Communication Department, is the author of the recently released book Context and Connection in Metaphor (Palgrave-Macmillan) which is a culmination of his uniquely personal and individual journey.

To understand the path he has taken, you have to step back to a time when GIs returned home from World War II. Soldiers were offered a list of choices, and Ritchie's father snapped up 110 acres off the "bad" country road near the tiny farming community of Eden, Idaho. At the time, the land was nothing more than sagebrush.

For three years the family worked feverishly to clear the land and plant the first crop. As a youngster, Ritchie remembers going without luxuries. "I grew up with dust in everything I ate," he said. And the family didn't have electricity for six months. "We had indoor plumbing when I was about seven or eight, got a telephone when I was nine, television when I was eleven."

What the family did have was books, and folks in the valley shared books with one another. "We read whatever we could get our hands on…crappy novels, it didn't matter. Nobody had many books, but all that books in that irrigation project circulated from house to house. Whatever books there were everybody devoured. And I loved stories. But I was also very interested in science."

Following graduation from Valley High School, a school that was built next to a bean field between two small rural communities, Ritchie was accepted at top-ranked Reed College in Portland. He chose it because it wasn't in Idaho.

"The other reason is that, at a public college, I would have to pay out of state tuition," he said. "Private colleges all had a lot of emphasis on school activities--what they called leadership activities. And Reed put their emphasis almost entirely on SAT scores and writing ability." Reed was a perfect match.

Ritchie thought he would emerge from Reed a scientist. But that all changed when he discovered the humanities. "There was a mandatory humanities sequence, all the stuff I never heard of before…Greek philosophers and various literature, the Greek plays, medieval philosophy, the whole thing…all of these fantastic, very interesting, completely new ideas," he said. "So I ended up abandoning science for the humanities, and only came back to an interest in science later." That change literally set him on a course he never imagined.

After graduating from Reed, Ritchie took a temporary job as a social worker, and decided to apply for graduate school. His life quickly changed with the arrival of a letter asking him to report for a military draft physical. During his three-year stint in the Navy, Ritchie embarked on a self-imposed reading program that prepared him for eventual graduate study at Stanford University. He started graduate school with an interest in artificial intelligence, studied communication, and stumbled across a book on metaphor that intrigued him. Like a seed that took time to germinate, Ritchie's interest in metaphor theory remained dormant until several years ago. He began thinking about metaphor again and wrote a series of journal articles, beginning with "Argument is War - Or is it a Game of Chess? Multiple Meanings in the Analysis of Implicit Metaphors" which appeared in Metaphor and Symbol in 2003. From there he produced four additional articles, all of which appeared in Metaphor and Symbol, before writing his book. All told, since arriving at Portland State University Dr. Ritchie has had 18 articles published as well two books.

His current book, Content and Connection in Metaphor, is a pinnacle of sorts. "This book represents a theoretical critique and synthesis…and that marks the beginning of developing my own theoretical position. This book represents a creative production for me. And it's not the last. As soon as I have a little bit of time I will start working on the next."

--Tom Stevenson