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.
