Abstract

Turner argues that our most original and impressive literary achievements depend on the same conceptual and linguistic capacities that underlie our most mundane and unoriginal uses of language. He therefore proposes a "cognitive rhetoric" that would ground all studies of language and literature on what the cognitive sciences have revealed about how the mind works. Turner's guiding thesis is that human cognition is fundamentally embodied and imaginative, because "a human being has a human brain in a human body in a physical environment that it must make intelligible if it is to survive".