Narrative Gravity: Conversation, Cognition, Culture

The core of Narrative Gravity is the idea that we do not make stories up; our stories make us up. Rukmini Bhaya Nair's remarkable book builds on Noam Chomsky's key insight that grammar functions as the inbuilt key to our identity as a symbol-using species. To this role of grammar as a cognitive tool in enabling us to construct 'selves', she adds a second tool: narrative. Her book analyzes the way in which narrative explains the world that is constructed by the sentences which our grammar enables us to construct.