Category Archives: Storytelling

From a paper comparing chaos to catastrophe theory. One being an invention of science journalism and the other a branch of mathematics. In my peroration I get quite polemical. Reconciliation with nature, chaotic or otherwise, is the avatar of a … Continue reading →

Jerome Bruner Actual Minds, Possible Worlds Egocentric perspective Michael Scaife and I [Bruner] discovered, as I mentioned in passing, that by the end of the first year of life, normal children habitually follow another’s line of regard to see what … Continue reading →

Paul Ricoeur Temps et récit I Ce qui fait énigme, c’est la structure même d’une image qui vaut tantôt comme empreinte du passé, tantôt comme signe du future Trace and sign take on some ample wings in the context of … Continue reading →

The influence of McLuhan is pervasive in the approach Sven Birkerts takes to writing via electronic means. (“Hypertext: Of Mouse and Man” The Gutenberg Elegies) Yet now it is computers, in one sense the very apotheosis of applied rationality, that … Continue reading →

Sven Birkerts “Paging the Self” in The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age depicts a theory of reading that reminds one of Ricoeur’s enlargement of the self through appropriation. We don’t entirely become Holden [protagonist of … Continue reading →

Jonathan Z. Smith in Chapter One (“In Search of Place”) in To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual quotes Nancy Munn on the notion of ancestral transformations in Walbiri and Pitjantjatjara tribes. She “has provided a precise typology of such … Continue reading →

Matthew Johnson, cosmologist. A good story tells you something you can go look for. Liam Durcan, fiction writer. What is your favourite word to use in a sentence? No contest: “Unless.” “Unless” is the passkey into the conditional tense, away … Continue reading →

Paulo Freire’s remarks in the fourth chapter of Pedagogy of the Oppressed (translated by Myra Bergman Ramos) about theories of cultural action are interesting starting points to think about “memes” [discursive carriers] and the processes of ideological adhesion. The remarks … Continue reading →