Los relatos tradicionales como vehículos de valores éticos

Abstract

This paper starts from Marta Nussbaum´s reflection regarding literary imagination and moral reasoning in relation with how some novels are adequate vehicles for ethical values, and moves to the point of how traditional narratives can also be conveyors of the same values. The question asked from the viewpoint of cognitive linguistics is: Which mechanisms make possible the operation of traditional narratives as vehicles of ethical values? Narrative as a mental activity responsible for organizing daily experience and emotions as a correlate of cognitive systems, meet in the modes of interpretation of tales, while we ascribe values to the facts which make them up, integrating, on their part, value systems from which we again interpret other narrations. These systems, besides, also become models for behavior. We illustrate these premises through the interpretation of a traditional Sufi tale.