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The Body in the Mind

The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason

Mark Johnson

1996

233 pages

Complementary Texts

Rudolph Arnheim

David Burrows

 

Mark Johnson is a cognitive metaphorist who works in the same theoretical area as George Lakoff, Michael Reddy, Mark Turner, and Eve Sweetser, amongst others. They seek to overturn the linguistic view of metaphor and they believe that metaphor emerges from everyday thought and action.

The Body in the Mind is an excellent resource. Mark Johnson explains that “in order for us to have meaningful, connected experiences that we can comprehend and reason about, there must be pattern and order to our actions, perceptions, and conceptions” (Johnson 29).  He calls these patterns image schema . The book is a valuable contribution to metaphor scholarship.