Turner, Mark : University of Maryland / Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study
Mark Turner is Professor of English and a member of the doctoral faculty in neuroscience and cognitive science
at the University of Maryland. He is also external research professor in cognitive science at the Krasnow Institute
for Advanced Study.
Review
"By blending neuroscience and literary history in The Literary Mind, Turner has created a story of his
own, certain to set billions of neurons firing....[An] audacious and remarkable book. "
--Toronto Globe and Mail
"Turner argues his case with brilliance and tenacity. I for one am convinced."
--Philosophy and Literature
Oxford University Press Web Site, May, 2000
Summary
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.
Ranges from the tools of modern linguistics, to recent work in neuroscience, to classic works of literature
to explain how story and parable are fundamental to everyday thought
Offers a new theory of the origin of language that overthrows theories proposed by Noam Chomsky and Steven
Pinker
Makes the revolutionary claim that the basic issue for cognitive science is the nature of literary thinking