We usually consider literary thinking to be peripheral and
dispensable, an activity for specialists: poets, prophets,
lunatics, and babysitters. Certainly we do not think it is the
basis of the mind. We think of stories and parables from Aesop's
Fables or The Thousand and One Nights, for example, as exotic tales
set in strange lands, with spectacular images, talking animals, and
fantastic plots--wonderful entertainments, often insightful, but
well removed from logic and science, and entirely foreign to the
world of everyday thought. But Mark Turner argues that this common
wisdom is wrong. The literary mind--the mind of stories and
parables--is not peripheral but basic to thought. Story is the
central principle of our experience and knowledge. Parable--the
projection of story to give meaning to new encounters--is the
indispensable tool of everyday reason. Literary thought makes
everyday thought possible. This book makes the revolutionary claim
that the basic issue for cognitive science is the nature of
literary thinking.
In The Literary Mind, Turner ranges from the tools of modern
linguistics, to the recent work of neuroscientists such as Antonio
Damasio and Gerald Edelman, to literary masterpieces by Homer,
Dante, Shakespeare, and Proust, as he explains how story and
projection--and their powerful combination in parable--are
fundamental to everyday thought. In simple and traditional English,
he reveals how we use parable to understand space and time, to
grasp what it means to be located in space and time, and to
conceive of ourselves, other selves, other lives, and other
viewpoints. He explains the role of parable in reasoning, in
categorizing, and in solving problems. He develops a powerful model
of conceptual construction and, in a far-reaching final chapter,
extends it to a new conception of the origin of language that
contradicts proposals by such thinkers as Noam Chomsky and Steven
Pinker. Turner argues that story, projection, and parable precede
grammar, that language follows from these mental capacities as a
consequence. Language, he concludes, is the child of the literary
mind.
Offering major revisions to our understanding of thought,
conceptual activity, and the origin and nature of language, The
Literary Mind presents a unified theory of central problems in
cognitive science, linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, and
philosophy. It gives new and unexpected answers to classic
questions about knowledge, creativity, understanding, reason, and
invention.
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