William Stobb

Young, Kay and Jeffrey L. Saver.  "The Neurology of Narrative."  SubStance 30 (2001), 72-84. Almost anyone will tell you that humans are "naturally" storytelling creatures, and I know what they mean: we talk, we compare stories about our lives, and even interpret our moment-to-moment experience according to our sense of the ongoing plot(s) we're living in.  Recently, I encountered an article that provides some interesting neurological evidence for this claim--"The Neurology of Narrative," by Kay Young and Jeffrey Saver, published in the journal SubStance.   The full text is worth checking out, but for the purposes of this discussion, the abstract will serve: " Narrative is the inescapable frame of human existence. Thinkers as diverse as Aristotle, Barthes, and Bruner have recognized the centrality of narrative in human cognition, but have scanted its neurobiologic underpinning. Recent advances in cognitive neuroscience suggest that a region...

Incomplete Thinking about Coincidental Readings: Noftle, Kelli Anne.  I Was There for your Somniloquy (Omnidawn 2012). Tayler, Christopher.  "A Great Consolation: The Postwar Unmaking of Samuel Beckett."  Harper's May, 2012.          I recently read Kelli Anne Noftle's debut collection, I Was There for your Somniloquy , and found it challenging, beautiful, substantial--excellent reading.  It deserves a full review, and I have made some notes toward one.  Here, though, I want to sort out an individual, idiosyncratic moment of reading that connected me to an idea of absence or negation in art: what this blog is mainly about.         While reading the book's final poem, “Hypnagogic is a Sound,” I had an experience of recognition.   An image sequence near the end of the poem—a sequence related to a childhood narrative that grounds the poem’s lyric explorations—str...