The Literary Mind (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Mark Turner
- First Published: 1996
- Type of Work: Literary criticism
- Genres: Criticism, Nonfiction
- Subjects: Language or languages, Literature, Communication, Linguistics or linguists, Storytelling, Parables, Speech, Grammar
In Molière’s comedy Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (pr. 1670; The Would-Be Gentleman, 1675), the bourgeois protagonist Monsieur Jourdain is flattered to discover that he has been speaking prose all of his life. In The Literary Mind, Mark Turner assures readers that their earliest thoughts and expressions are literary and that primitive man in a preliterate age formed grammar by means of a literary mind. A professor of English affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, Turner has written widely on linguistics and cognitive theory. Although...
[The entire page is 2143 words long]
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