The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language

by Mark Turner

We usually consider literary thinking to be peripheral and dispensable, an activity for 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Linguistics, Psychology, Philosophy, Writing, Language, Theory

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Reviews

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Starts off slow if you are already familiar with the idea of conceptual metaphor (called story and parable here), but develops the notion of blending spaces to explain how source and target interact selectively. Turner then runs with the idea that story, projection and parable are the rudiments of language and not the other way around. A compelling if under-footnoted argument.

[Christina “6 word reviewer” Lake]

Story = the basis of thought. Intriguing.

[Ella · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The linguistic mind is a consequence and subcategory of the literary mind."

There has previously been theories that abstract and literary thinking is a minor part of, and a more specialised part of the "ordinar mind" and thinking. Turner pivots everything by claiming that this literary way of thinking actually precedes language, and that our way of projecting stories constitutes our way of thinking.
For me this theory is revolutionary! It has fundamentally changed my way of thinking of the world, language, stories, my cat, and thinking itself. I always felt that the idea of universal grammar makes no sense, and now I know why. But I am more interested in the overall filosophy of this theory than in its application. And Turner's way of writing and, the repetitiveness of it, drags the rating down a star.
I am overly excited about the idea, but not as much about the presentation of it.

[Bob Graham · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can’t decide if this book is simply a potentially-useful fever-dream, or if it is a genuine insight into how language works, but either way I’m glad I read it. This book was my first “formal” introduction to literary studies, I have no idea whether I genuinely understand it, and I want to learn more about parables. It certainly wasn’t an easy read. The concepts are dense and I had to reread nearly every paragraph, but overall I had a good time ☺️🤗 !!

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Turner presents an argument that story and parable, are fundamental to our everyday thought. As a result, what many consider to be complex and profound are not qualities unique to our most "brilliant" but something that every human possesses. Turner slowly builds his argument, quite dense at times, it's definitely a work I will revisit and have new takeaways.

[Ade Bailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Turner, Lakoff and Johnson provide not only a corrective to the positivism of Age 3 capitalism with its handmaidens of neuroscience (as ideology) and eternalism, but do so in such a beautiful and stimulating and human way.

[Juan Fernando · Rating 3 out of 5]

Es un libro que tenía en pendientes hace muchos años que empecé a trabajar en un método de Storytelling con @cmontal. De hecho, cuando llegó a mis manos, ya era un libro con casi 20 años de su primera publicación. Lo que significa que sus planteamientos deben tener ya varias revisiones por autores de neurociencias y neurolinguística. 

Es un ensayo denso, que construye argumentos racionales con poca evidencia científica que lo respalde y con citas ocasionales de expertos de la época. El argumento central consiste en probar que el lenguaje es producto de nuestra capacidad de contar historias, y no al revés. Plantea un debate relevante para las neurociencias y es si la parábola precede a la gramática. 

En el proceso de demostrar su hipótesis ofrece elementos muy relevantes para el trabajo en Storytelling:

El cerebro no sólo recrea objetos, sino que tiene una capacidad tremenda de simular acciones y secuencias, que son las que tejen las historias. 

El lenguaje espacial y de acción para describir aspectos de la vida que no necesariamente lo tienen y que permite crear "esquemas de imagen" 

La "proyección parabólica" nos permite construir historias de acción espacial que no están ocurriendo literalmente en el mundo de lo abstracto. 

El lenguaje de acción es tan poderoso que es posible sentir que vivimos en un mundo lleno de acción, cuando realmente estamos rodeados de abstracción. 

El libro es un viaje a argumentos tempranos de George Lakoff y de quien originalmente aprendí el peso de las metáforas en la comunicación política efectiva. Este libro es previo a los trabajos más reconocidos de Lakoff y claramente usa un lenguaje más complejo, pero que ayuda a comprender el origen de algunas reflexiones sobre el poder del lenguaje y las metáforas que usa Lakoff. 

Desarrolla con detalles agobiantes conceptos sobre estructuras literarias que habilitan estructuras mentales para el entendimiento del lenguaje y por lo tanto del entorno, pero evita o le cuesta trabajo llegar a definiciones claras. 

No es un libro "insightful", hay que extraerle el valor y la relevancia, que la tiene, con cierta determinación; páginas y páginas de distinciones conceptuales que no parecen tener justificación práctica. 

Es posible que en su momento fueran argumentos sin los cuales la claridad que hoy tenemos del poder de las metáforas desarrollado por Lakoff de una manera clara y sencilla no haya sido posible, pero su lectura hoy se siente una carga excesiva para el resultado.

Al final del libro empieza una reflexión neurobiologica sobre la recepción y almacenamiento de significado muy interesante. Desconozco su vigencia. 

[Frobisher Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting premise and this book has a lot to say, especially at the beginning and at the end. The middle is overly-ponderous, repetitive, and overly-verbose. I hate to say this could have been shorter, because if it were shorter, it would only reach "lengthy essay" in size, and not "short book." But really, I am not sure it needs to be any longer than a long essay, or a couple of chapters in a larger more expansive book.

That said, I really enjoyed the premise and the arguments made. Turner here states that parable is the mental function which underpins all of language, and he makes a solid argument for why understanding stories came first, before grammar or even full sentences. Mapping mental images onto reality and vis-versa appears to be the basic organizing capacity of the human mind, and conceptual blending is where both the arts and sciences emerge from. Interesting, compelling, and worth reading — but it is definitely a longer book than it needs to be.

[Lisete · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Linguistics is arguably the most hotly contested property in the academic realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets, theologians, philosophers, philologists, psychologists, biologists, and neurologists, along with whatever blood can be got out of grammarians."— Russ Rymer, The New Yorker

[Debs Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this as a follow on from Metaphors We Live By. Turner argues that we use parables as a basic building block of language and unpacks how he understands the use of metaphors within this. Really helpful.

[Marie]

Mark Turner is not a page turner. This could've been a paper.

[Matt McCormick · Rating 3 out of 5]

For me, much too academic

[Elaine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mark Turner belongs to a cadre of linguistics scholars who examine in depth the way ordinary people - indeed, all speakers of a language -- utilize metaphor, metonymy and various modes of mental mapping in all their speech. Unlike his colleagues, writers like George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Turner focuses on the interface between syntax and semantics, and shows, for instance, how an utterance like "people banded together to force him into defeat" takes our perceptions of space, such as pushing someone into a room, and projects it onto a theory of conspiracy. That is but one tiny example. The point is we can't speak at all unless we utilize our sensory and physical perceptions and blend them or map them on to actions, observations, and behaviors, both non-concrete and concrete. I loved this book as I loved George Lakoff's and Mark Johnson's simpler "Metaphors we Live By" and "More than Cool Reason."

[David Teachout · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having read Lakoff and Johnson's work "Philosophy in the Flesh", among others, the notion of language as fundamentally metaphoric or parable wasn't new to get through. What Turner does here though is a great job of introducing such thinking through the lens of story/narrative/parable with enough examples to drive home how we as human beings construct our communication. Such thinking is completely against the Chomsky notion of a spontaneously arising cognitive module ready-made with a full grammar system. Turner, after explaining what his notion of parable is all about, ends with a rather well-done refutation of the module theory, then turning to Pinker and Bloom to show how they address the clear problem of Chomsky's hypothesis only to then hop over the means of a module's development. The result is not a declaration of contradiction so much as a slight difference of what question is being asked.

[meg fitzwater · Rating 3 out of 5]

can’t really rate books based on how useful they are to the essay i’m writing lol so most lit crit i’m reading just gets a 3 because 2 seems mean and 4 is too generous

anyway this was interesting. incredibly dense + often repetitive though and ngl i feel like it could’ve been articulated in less than 187 pages

[Tatjana · Rating 4 out of 5]

a background study on conceptual blending. Not an easy read, but worth the effort. closely linking literature and linguistics, it is one of the seminal books for 'the cognitive turn' in literary studies.

[Public Words · Rating 4 out of 5]

Turner surveys neurological research to construct a theory of how the mind works that is surprisingly simple and powerful. A must-read for anyone who wants to know how everyone else thinks.

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

very good, very useful. very dry.

Turner says that we relate basic actions to basic story formats, therefore, in our brains, that's why we internalise stories.

[Cass · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great book. Turner has some very interesting ideas about the mind and the origin of thought and language. Not a beach read, but worth while.

[Sarah]

The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language by Mark Turner (1998)