The renowned naturalist, Loren Eisely, observed that we humans have given up the “certainty of the animal that what it senses is exactly there in the shape the eye beholds.” The big question is, what did we get in return? This book provides a convincing answer to this question, arguing that, instead of recording reality, your brain uses your experience to create a story, a narrative, about how what happened to you in the past led to what is happening to you now. This narrative is your private reality. The book continues by showing how replacing recorded reality with private narrative enabled humans to anticipate the fundamentally unknowable immediate and remote future and expose potential threats. It then shows how private narrative enabled complex thought and communication with others. Drawing upon a wide range of research, the book provides a stimulating new way of viewing human experience, thinking, communicating, and action.

This book presents a unique and intuitively compelling way of understanding how humans think. It argues that narratives are the natural mode of thinking, that the “urge” to think narratively reflects known neurological processes, and that, although narrative thinking is a product of evolution, it enables us to transcend our evolutionary limits and actively shape our own futures. In remarkably engaging language, the authors describe how the currency of neural activity in the brain is transformed into the qualitatively different currency of conscious experience—the everyday, purposeful, story-like experience with which we all are familiar. The book then examines the nature of thought and how it leads to purposeful action, discussing, among other concerns, how memories about the past, perceptions about the present, and expectations about the future are structured as plausible, coherent narratives by causation, purpose, and time, and how errors are introduced into one’s narratives, both naturally and by other people (often intentionally), and how those errors bias one’s expectations about the future and the actions taken (or not taken) as a consequence. Each of these discussions is followed by a commentary that ties them to interesting facts and questions from throughout the physical and social sciences. The book is concluded with the argument that narrative thought is what is meant when one uses the word “mind.”

Since before the dawn of history, people have been telling stories to each other and to themselves. Thus stories are at the root of human experience. This volume describes empirical investigations by Jerome Bruner, Wallace Chafe, David Olson, and others on the relationship between stories and cognition. Using philosophical, linguistic, anthropological, and psychological perspectives on narrative, the contributors provide a definitive, highly diversified portrait of human cognition.

"Of Literature and Knowledge looks ... like an important advance in this new and very important subject... literature is about to become even more interesting." – Edward O. Wilson, Pellegrino University Professor, Harvard University. Framed by the theory of evolution, this colourful and engaging volume presents a new understanding of the mechanisms by which we transfer information from narrative make-believe to real life. Ranging across game theory and philosophy of science, as well as poetics and aesthetics, Peter Swirski explains how literary fictions perform as a systematic tool of enquiry, driven by thought experiments. Crucially, he argues for a continuum between the cognitive tools employed by scientists, philosophers and scholars or writers of fiction. The result is a provocative study of our talent and propensity for creating imaginary worlds, different from the world we know yet invaluable to our understanding of it. Of Literature and Knowledge is a noteworthy challenge to contemporary critical theory, arguing that by bridging the gap between literature and science we might not only reinvigorate literary studies but, above all, further our understanding of literature.

This “stimulating contribution to literary theory” reveals the deeply philosophical concerns and developments behind popular time travel sci-fi (London Review of Books). In Time Travel, literary theorist David Wittenberg argues that time travel fiction is not mere escapism, but a narrative “laboratory” where theoretical questions about storytelling—and, by extension, about the philosophy of temporality, history, and subjectivity—are presented in story form. Drawing on physics, philosophy, narrative theory, psychoanalysis, and film theory, Wittenberg links innovations in time travel fiction to specific shifts in the popularization of science, from nineteenth-century evolutionary biology to twentieth-century quantum physics and more recent “multiverse” cosmologies. Wittenberg shows how popular awareness of new science led to surprising innovations in the literary “time machine,” which evolved from a vehicle used for sociopolitical commentary into a psychological device capable of exploring the temporal structure and significance of subjects, viewpoints, and historical events. Time Travel draws on classic works of science fiction by H. G. Wells, Edward Bellamy, Robert Heinlein, Samuel Delany, and Harlan Ellison, television shows such as “The Twilight Zone” and “Star Trek,” and other popular entertainments. These are read alongside theoretical work ranging from Einstein, Schrödinger, Stephen Hawking to Gérard Genette, David Lewis, and Gilles Deleuze. Wittenberg argues that even the most mainstream audiences of popular time travel fiction and cinema are vigorously engaged with many of the same questions about temporality, identity, and history that concern literary theorists, media and film scholars, and philosophers.

Examining the constitutive role of language and narration in key areas of human experience, Narrative and the Self articulates a view of the self as the implied subject of narrative utterances. Anthony Paul Kerby draws on the diverse insights of recent work in philosophy, literary theory, and psychology to synthesize a coherent and provocative view of narrative identity and selfhood. Invoking the writings of Benveniste, Ricoeur, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Taylor, and other theorists, he argues that language and narration play a central role in key aspects of human experience such as emotion, values, recollection, and sense of history. Fundamental to Kerby's exposition is a defense of the quasi-narrative nature of our everyday experience. Kerby delineates a convincing narrative model of the self and offers a valuable overview of contemporary philosophical issues surrounding the place and role of narrative in human experience.

Narrative Theory offers an introduction to the field's critical and philosophical approaches towards narrative throughout history.