In a series of inspiring posts, Cécile Alduy has been putting forward an argument against narrativity.

A recent talk by my colleague Joshua Landy on "Still Life in a Narrative Age: Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation," and the comments on my most recent blog "Against Narrative" made me cruelly aware of a divide between on the one hand the perception of what Josh and myself see as the creeping dominance of narrative models to think about life, but also, by extension, to experience it.

Babies are usually the stuff of private life, clichés, and endearing memories that we check out as we set foot on campus grounds. Yet babies are the greatest--and arguably the cutest--hermeneutic subjects.

I should put my cards on the table and confess that I am not a cervantista, a specialist in Cervantes.  To some extent, this has to do with my own suspicion that critical commentary on certain texts, like Don Quixote, has become saturated.

What is it about the human (Western?) mind that compels us to think in narratives?

Pornographic literature is dismissed as an oxymoron by many scholars because we expect ‘literature’ to imply form, while the endless repetition of unproblematic sex acts denies us the comforting format of beginning, middle, and end.