Event date / timing: 8 December, 2021 | Event venue HSS, IIT Ropar
ABSTRACT
This talk begins by noting an unusual twinning that has occurred in the last decade or so within the social semantics of global space. The words ‘narrative’ and ‘toolkit’ have both firmly established their presence in public consciousness over the past few years. Why is this so? My talk suggests that there may in fact be hidden connections between the two apparently unrelated concepts of technology (emblematized by the ‘toolkit’) and language (displayed in one of its most powerful and flamboyant aspects as ‘narrative’ rather than simply as story). By way of sharpening a couple of conceptual differences between ‘story’ and ‘narrative’, I argue for certain fundamental linkages between tool-use and language-use that date back to prehistory and the way our mind/brains have evolved to conceptually process, thematically organise and emotionally absorb the world around us. These whispers from our ‘deep history’ could help explain our present addiction both to technology and to ‘post-truth’ narratives. In this sense, the talk returns us to a basic cognitive conundrum. Narratives are not, prima facie, the most efficient ways of transmitting information. Indeed, they often flaunt their fictive ‘lying’ nature. Yet narratives are discourse universals found in every known culture; they are persistently displayed in material art forms extending from Madhubani paintings to Louis Malle films to Internet memes. Again, why is this so? I postulate in this talk that the ‘toolbox’ of language in the early 21st century now contains a sophisticated range of tools (including syntactic embedding and repetition, auditory rhyming, metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole, irony and sarcasm etc. all the way up to pragmatic units of conversation such as speech acts) that are, for the most part, narratively embedded. These language devices have all been dizzyingly amplified by the technological revolution of which we are currently in the midst. In short, narrative, an ancient species-tool for cooperative communication and displays of efficacious causal reasoning has evolved into a powerful
interdisciplinary tool for virtually every sort of contemporary inquiry into ‘what makes us human’ from anthropology to zoology.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Rukmini Bhaya Nair is Professor of Linguistics and English, Emerita, at IIT Delhi. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and has since taught at universities ranging from Singapore to Stanford. Awarded another honorary doctorate by the University of Antwerp for her contributions to narrative theory, Nair has authored 10 books and more than 150 articles. Her academic books include Lying on the Postcolonial Couch: The Idea of Indifference; Narrative Gravity: Conversation, Cognition, Culture; Poetry in a Time of Terror (Oxford University Press, 2002, 2003, 2009) and Technobrat: Culture in a Cybernetic Classroom (Harper Collins, 1997). Her most recent book is the reference volume (co-edited with Peter de Souza) entitled Keywords for India: A Conceptual Lexicon for the 21st Century (Bloomsbury Academic, UK, 2020). Nair was Head of Department, Humanities and Social Sciences, IITD, from 2006 to 2009, CRASSH Fellow at Cambridge, Senior Professorial Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library 2010-12, followed by a Professorial Fellowship at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in 2016. In 2019, she was Distinguished Visiting Professor, Hunan University. Currently on the Fellowships Committee of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS), Nair serves on the boards of international journals such as
Language and Dialogue, Literary Semantics, Text Matters as well as on the Consultative Boards of the International Pragmatics Association (IPRA) and Biblio.