The Science of Fiction

摘要

In the aftermath of the hugely publicized hoax article planted last year by physicist Alan Sokal in the hapless cultural studies journal Social Text, you might be forgiven for thinking scientists and humanities scholars had nothing to exchange but brickbats. The Literary Mind (Oxford University Press, 1996, $25.00) triumphantly proves otherwise. Mark Turner, its author, is a professor of English at the University of Maryland who has also served a careful apprenticeship in cognitive and neural science, and his double competence empowers him to step confidently in both fields. "The everyday mind," Turner argues, "is essentially literary." Literary modes, he believes- specifically story and parable- are the basic structures of all human knowledge. They may even be physically detectable, in the neural wiring of our brains.