The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language - Softcover

An incredibly rich overview of Turner's newest ideas, offering scholars in both the humanities and cognitive sciences an excellent tutorial on the literary mind. (Raymond Gibbs, Jr., Professor of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz)

Outstanding. This book will be a marvellous way for people to get into cognitive science. (Suzanne E. Kemmer, Professor of Linguistics, Rice University)

Turner's forceful book starts by showing how we use storying and metaphor to understand everything from pouring a cup of coffee to Proust. It ends with the splendidly bold claim that this storying, literary mind comes first, before all other kinds of thought, even language itself. Adventurous and convincing, Turner's work launches a new understanding, not only of literature, but of what it is to have a human brain. To read it is to think about thinking in a way you never have. (Norman N. Holland, Marston-Milbauer Professor of English, University of Florida)

A garden of many delights to be enjoyed by literary and scientific minds? An elegant bridge between two worlds? Other mixed (blended) metaphors apply to this book provided they tell the reader that this is an intelligent text, equally valuable to literary scholars and cognitive scientists. (Antonio R. Damasio, Professor of Neurology, University of Iowa, and author of "Descartes' Error")

Mark Turner makes the revolutionary claim that the basic issue for cognitive science is the nature of literary thinking. Using tools of modern linguistics, the recent work of neuroscientists, and literary masterpieces from Shakespeare, Homer, and Dante, Turner explains how story and projection are fundamental to everyday thought.