Narrative Gravity explores the anti-foundationalist, anti-essentialist idea that our stories make us up, rather than we make up our stories. The cognitive scientist Daniel C. Dennett has suggested that human beings tell stories as compulsively as beavers build dams or birds nests. Our basic identities are conferred on us by the myriad takes we hear and narrate throughout our lifetimes. All selves are centres of narrative gravity. But even if it is true that we are born to weave stories, why is it that we are so programmed? This title attempts to answer this question by carrying the important...

This work is concerned with the interconnected areas of linguistic pragmatics, cultural studies and the philosophy of language that reveal ways in which recent theories of communication have eliminated the role of the speaking human.