This projection of one story onto another may seem exotic and literary, and it is – but it is also, like story, a fundamental instrument of the mind. Rational capacities depend upon it. It is a literary capacity indispensable to human cognition generally. This is the second way in which human mind is essentially literary. One special kind of literature, parable, conveniently combines story and projection. Parable serves as a laboratory where great things are condensed in a small space. To understand parable is to understand root capacities of the everyday mind, and conversely. - Mark Turner Explanation of the Quotation by Mark Turner Mark Turner, a cognitive scientist and literary theorist, known for books like The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language , argues that the human mind is fundamentally "literary." This quotation comes from his exploration of how basic mental operations mirror the core tools of literature. He is pushing back against the idea tha...
Literary parables are only one artifact of the mental process of parable. Proverbs frequently present a condensed, implicit story to be interpreted through projection: […]. In cases like this, the target story – the story we are to understand – is not even mentioned overtly, but through our agile capacity to use both story and projection, we project the overt source story onto a covert target story. –Mark Turner The quotation from Mark Turner explains a core idea from cognitive rhetoric and conceptual blending theory. Turner argues that "parable" is not just a literary genre (like Jesus's stories in the Bible), but a fundamental mental process —our natural way of understanding the world by projecting one story onto another. Key point: Proverbs often work as highly compressed source stories . They don't spell out the real-life situation they're about (the target story ). Instead: - The proverb gives you an overt source (e.g., "A rolling stone gathers no moss...