The great adventure of modern cognitive science, the discovery of the human mind, will fundamentally revise our concept of what it means to be human. Drawing together the classical conception of the language arts, the Renaissance sense of scientific discovery, and the modern study of the mind, Mark Turner offers a vision of the central role that language and the arts of language can play in that adventure. "Works such as [this] form the vanguard of our understanding; from the research front, they signal the presence of new and more fruitful relationships between the sciences and rhetorical and literary studies." ---Alan G. Gross, College English "The author demonstrates how a new revolution in critical thought demands an understanding of how humans think; this is more than knowing about neurons and synapses, however. A thoughtful book for those of us tired of trying to find the humanity in postmodern criticism." ― The Bloomsbury Review "A philosophically sophisticated work that goes a long way toward an empirically responsible account of the bodily and imaginative bases of concepts, meaning, reasoning, and language." ---Mark L. Johnson, Review of Metaphysics A fuller presentation of the book and its relationship to current research in cognitive science, linguistics, and literary theory is available at http://www.wam.umd.edu/~mturn Mark Turner is Professor of English at the University of Maryland. His books include Death Is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism (Chicago). From the Preface: The coming age will be known and remembered, I believe, as the age in which the human mind was discovered. I can think of no equal intellectual achievement. The purpose of this book is to propose a reframing of the study of English so that it comes to be seen as inseparable from the discovery of mind, participating and even leading the way in that discovery, gaining new analytic instruments for its traditional work and developing new concepts of its role. I speak from a known frame about a new frame, or more accurately about a new activity of framing. I offer a provisional version of that new frame. I conduct illustrative case studies within it. Of course, I am invested in the intricacies of these particular case studies, having lived with them. But my final investment is not in the details of these particular studies or even in their chosen themes and problems; it is rather in the activity of reconsidering and reframing the study of language, literature, and mind. This book is offered as a means to that activity. I present a series of incitements. I do not map the borders and divisions of future inquiry but ask the reader to begin a revision that will affect the path of our research in ways we cannot know. The crucial result of this book is to be found not within this book but rather within the reader who has been persuaded to begin that reconsideration. The human mind is linguistic and literary; language and literature are products of the everyday human mind. The future for which this book is written is one in which traditional humanistic studies will be centered once again upon the study of the human mind, and the study of the human mind will be centered upon human acts that are the subject matter of the humanities. To give an adequate suggestion of this future, I am forced to work in greater detail than the current state of research permits. This book is something like a detailed report about a future that cannot be known in such detail. I begin with a Pretext -- "Professing English in the Age of Cognitive Science" -- offered primarily to future members of the profession of English. I survey the fragmented, isolated, and inconsequential state of literary studies and explore the causes of their decline to peripheral status. I argue that while contemporary critical theory is unanchored, its objects -- the acts of language and literature -- are permanently anchored in the full human world by being anchored in how the human mind works. I propose a new common ground for the profession of English: the analysis of acts of language, including literature, as acts of a human brain in a human body in a human environment which that brain must make intelligible if it is to survive. The constructive project of the book -- to shape an inquiry into language, literature, and mind as inseparable objects of analysis -- begins in chapter 1, the "User's Manual." Readers who feel by temperament or prior interest attracted to this project but who see nothing at stake in a discussion of the profession of English can begin without loss at chapter 1. It is a guide to the use of this book as an instrument for revisiting and revising basic concepts so automatic and powerful in our thought as to constitute a kind of floor plan of our thinking. I discuss the entrenched nature of these concepts, their ubiquitous unconscious use, and the sources of our resistance to their loss. In "Floor Plan," I examine particular basic concepts